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Elon Musk's Alleged Email To Employees on Tesla's Big Picture (jalopnik.com)
An email allegedly sent by Elon Musk to Tesla staff has announced that the Model 3, which has faced a number of production issues, will go into "24/7" production by June, resulting in 6,000 Model 3 units made per week. But apart from this update, in the email, Elon Musk sheds light on how much he values precision in his cars. An excerpt: Most of the design tolerances of the Model 3 are already better than any other car in the world. Soon, they will all be better. This is not enough. We will keep going until the Model 3 build precision is a factor of ten better than any other car in the world. I am not kidding.
Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don't match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.
Some parts suppliers will be unwilling or unable to achieve this level of precision. I understand that this will be considered an unreasonable request by some. That's ok, there are lots of other car companies with much lower standards. They just can't work with Tesla.
Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don't match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.
Some parts suppliers will be unwilling or unable to achieve this level of precision. I understand that this will be considered an unreasonable request by some. That's ok, there are lots of other car companies with much lower standards. They just can't work with Tesla.
The only reason of the "X per week" argument is to appease Wall Street analysts, so called "experts" who have never built anything in their lives.
What Musk needs to do is maintain the vision but turn over operations to those more qualified to eek out every optimization in logistics and the assembly line.
There's plenty of those folks available in Detroit but I guess he wants to DIY...
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
He forgot the confidentiality clause at the end of that email.
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
Tesla has no tolerance for lesser bullshit
We will keep going until the Model 3 build precision is a factor of ten better than any other car in the world.
That's so ordinary. When you're 10x better than everyone else, you're fully cranked up, you want to go further, where can you go? Nowhere...
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
This thread is going to be entertaining!
Other cars with the cost of Tesla are also built to those standards. Modern car assembly is incredibly precise - if you see any panel fit that is visibly misaligned it is either damaged or has been repaired or replaced. Over the length of (say) the gap at the side of the bonnet where it meets the wing you can detect a couple of millimeters mis-alignment with a glance, and less than 1mm if you look carefully. Body panels are also either very rigid, or elastic enough to retain their shape.
Cheaply produced vehicles, or large truck type vehicles, may not be this well built, but the people selling passenger cars at Tesla's prices are this good already. Maybe the domestic US manufacture is not that good, but any of the premium German or Japanese manufacturers will be that precise. If I get a new car from any of them and the measurement is not as specified, indeed my measuring tape should be replaced.
It is good to see that Musk realises he has to have consistent and precise manufacturing quality, but he's not as superior as he claims.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don't match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.
If this is genuine, it seems a bit dumb. Tighter tolerances cost money to achieve, so in general, you do not use higher tolerances than you actually need. Now I haven't read the article, so maybe he goes on to give perfectly valid reasons as to why he wants such precise tolerances, but otherwise it just sounds like a way to pointlessly push up production costs. Since I don't believe Elon is that dumb, I'm questioning whether this email actually is genuine.
... but rather to customers, investors and suppliers, I think.
He wants to get production up and running and THEN tighten down tolerances? Oh boy, where have I heard that before, oh yeah, from every marketing wanker anywhere. Reality is that equipment does the best job it can, once it's in mass production the bills are payed and the equipment vendors wont lift a finger to make the machines any better without getting payed for it. Meanwhile machinery starts experiencing wear and tear... Machines are not like fine wine, they don't get better with age, they make their most precise pieces when they are brand new and it's only downhill from there.
I won't pay one cent for an amount of 'precision' on those parts of a car which would be in perfect order with ten or twenty times less 'precision'. If Musk doesn't want me to sell a sensible car with high investments in engineering and manufacturing only where it counts, making it unnecessarily expensive, there are still other manufacturers (even if Tesla does have a certain lead right now).
the leaky sunroof saga tells us Tesla values precision, but not accuracy :)
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If this is a real e-mail (big if):
I wonder if this reflects on underlying production problems with assembly line delays due to parts not being interchangeable? E.g., not all body panels fitting right on all cars, etc.
I wonder if Tesla has failed to use variation simulation tools?
There is no need for precision 10 times greater than other car companies. That is just wasteful! They need to find out WHERE the precision is needed, and HOW MUCH precision is needed. Blindly improving precision "10 times" is ridiculous.
I worked on variation simulation technology in the 1980s. This is the current version of the product I worked on:
https://www.plm.automation.sie...
Hopefully, Tesla is using this or something similar.
I originally ported this code from code written by a university professor at Wayne Statue University in Detroit, and then designed a domain-specific language and implemented a compiler for it, to make models easier to write. (Probably the most important thing I did, though, was to strong-arm my boss into hiring a mathematician to help clean up what was some pretty awful and buggy statistical and geometric-transform code...) The product has changed hands a couple of times since then, before landing at it's current home at Siemens.
The original company that developed this (where I worked) both created the product, and worked with the Detroit automakers on several breakthrough projects that address just where Tesla should be applying this.
For example, the 1984 Corvette C4 was the first car out of Detroit to use BOLT HOLES instead of slots in hood hinges. This was made practical with VSA analysis.
There was a big push for lowered emissions at the time - VSA allowed auto companies to model variability between engines, and predict what percentage would be rejected with a given design.
An important re-design of the FA-18 used VSA modeling extensively, and solved many manufacturing problems with the airframe.
I recall MANY door clearance and other similar fit-and-finish projects.
You could not build today's disk drives at a practical cost without VSA. Every drive manufacturer uses it.
Before VSA, it was largely guesswork. Once you get past a liner stack, it is nearly impossible to work-out by hand. There was some prior use, during WWII. One of the first - if not the first - uses of VSA was in WWII when the technique was developed at Willow Run Labs to solve manufacturability problems with planes being built for WWII. It was done crudely, with a room full of workers on manual calculators...
Professor Greg Gruska at Wayne State dusted off the mothballs in the early 1980s, and wrote some Fortran code to implement it on their mainframe (the code I had to port to IBM PC...) and taught a class in variation simulation analysis. I was the first technical employee at the company that commercialized it.
I believe there was some parallel work in Japan at the time, and there are a couple of competing products.
Did Tesla somehow miss this important analysis technique?
How about you get those panel gaps withing 1 sigma first, then worry about my tape measure. This sounds like an intentionally leaked email.
In the 90's I did some tool and die work and the tolerances on the tools used to cut engines into shape were +- 2 / 10000ths of an inch, manufacturers noticed and made emergency phone calls to your tool and die shop if you sent them a carbide cutting edge that was off by 3 / 10000ths of an inch.
So nothing you are saying makes any sense to me. Its as if you are talking straight out your ass. You do not have the visual fidelity to even grok the tolerances, let alone "see" them.
"His name was James Damore."
Did Elon include various journalists' email addresses right there in the "To:" field, or did he at least go to the trouble of putting them on the "Bcc:" line?
#DeleteChrome
just another day on the internet : people with no experience in a field droning on sharing their useless opinions.
Despite my hatred for this blowhard dbag, this reads as if written by some trolling fanboy from his mom's basement. Either he went way off the cuff here and his handlers did not proof or it's bullshit. Who would measure panel gaps with a tape?
I'm sure that everyone will be talking about the tolerances and the production targets, but the one bone I'd like to pick is the "chain of command" comment. Elon seems very hostile to the very idea, which is to be expected given his origins in tech. However, in a production environment a well-working CoC is an important part of effective communications. I agree that it's important for workers to feel comfortable talking to any level supervisor if needed, and if you need to report a problem to another department you should, but you also need to talk to your supervisor. If a worker is consistently fails to communicate with his supervisor, bypassing them to talk directly to someone further up the chain or someone in another discipline, then not only is he giving others a jumbled picture of what his department is thinking (Is this opinion just his or widespread?), but he's also leaving his supervisor in the dark. Nobody wants to get called on the carpet to explain a problem nobody told them about.
Not working at Tesla I can't say what the culture is, and maybe the chain of command has become too absolute and is stifling communication, but his comment seems a little cavalier for someone who is trying to build a stable production environment.
As much as I admire Elon Musk, his ability to look far into the future, define goals for that far future, and, apparently, his being capable of making these things happen, the man is batshit insane. Don't get me wrong; for the most part, it's the good kind of batshit insane. But batshit insane nevertheless.
I just hope he doesn't end up a hermit hiding inside a hotel room for years and years, and marrying a duck.
If I were a potential Tesla customer I'd be much more interested in knowing that much touted the "self-driving" capabilities were actually working to save my life than I would be in whether there was a slight gap in some decorative panel.
I'd think that Tesla investors would also.
You're talking about mechanical tolerances for engines and so forth, and the guy you responded to was talking about panel gaps. There's a difference.
I don't know what the norm is on companies that size. If it is going up from half mill, it is good news I guess. If it is coming down from 5 mill, it is bad news and the stories of impending cash crunch has more credibility.
Disclaimer: Booked a 3 on 1 april 2016, got the invite, configured the car, got the wall charger, working on getting it installed. Expecting vin in three weeks, delivery two weeks after.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In the past, panel gap differences up to 3mm are deemed 'acceptable' by Tesla. Especially in Europe it is considered very strange. People working frequently with body shops here consider that the limit for crashed car repairs. It's good Elon Musk considers this an issue and addresses this. The 'general public's might be less understanding about this minor flaw than us 'believers', who bought the cars to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy useage (and because it runs Linux ;)
Those tight tolerances get rid of necessary flex room. Pay more attention to the people that make the parts for a living and know this shit first-hand, Elon, and get the fuck out of your bubble.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
He's talking about panel gaps. Which have long been a point of pride in high end cars.
I presume you're talking about grinding carbide mills in some custom profile.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
These could all but be direct from Henry Leland from the early days of Cadillac.
He basically tacked on an entire digit and then some to tolerances, and was able, for example, to build rings and pistons that all fit one another, rather than a crafter sitting down to adjust them in pairs.
The precision meant, for example, that it was possible to stock spare engine parts for Cadillacs rather than needing to custom build or repair in machine shops.
So, yes, this strategy has been used before, and worked.
Cadillacs had truly interchangeable parts before Ford's famous assembly line.
Today, if you want to take a real cross-country road trip in a 20's vehicle, your choices are basically a Ford, because so many were built and survive that there are enough clubs and parts to fix them when needed, and a Cadillac, due to the original engineering.
hawk
Maybe the domestic US manufacture is not that good, but any of the premium German or Japanese manufacturers will be that precise.
I worked in a Detroit factory. We made parts for Ford, GM, Toyota, BMW, and Lotus. Same machines. Same processes. A dirty secret of Japanese and German precision that Musk needs to learn is they both outsourced the finer details to suppliers with a century of experience in Michigan.
Precision manufacturing only coming from Germany or Japan is marketing copy. Today, parts are like programmers. They can come from anywhere.
He could easily make more than a janitor by working the street corner
Was thinking the same thing. Who cares about ultra-precise gaps when the car might drive itself into a wall. Until cars have some semblance of common sense, I'm going to stay away from self-drive tech.
Precision is only really important in the internal combustion block design, where bearing tolerances and bore tolerances matter. For everything else, precision only matters up to a point. Precision also does not mean reliability or that car will be free of defects.
Why? Just don't use the autopilot if you're worried about it not being safe. Nobody's forcing you to turn it on.
The Honda Accord welcomes you to suck its fat, quality, made in Ohio diiiiiick.
I'm a software guy, and away from the auto industry for many, many years, so can only relate a famous "oops" that I'm aware of from consumer experience. (Actually, consumer near-miss, as I didn't own the specific BMW models with this "oops", just aware because I bought one used, and educated myself...)
BMW had a big problem with aluminum engine parts and the high sulfur levels in American gasoline. They don't have those high levels of sulfur in European gas, and didn't anticipate the problem. One little thing they failed to research cost them big bucks!
The fix, of course, was not a localization, though. They just changed the parts across the board to deal with the problem. (I believe it's some treatment to piston surfaces.)
Of course, there are obvious issues with regulations, particular on emissions, but I get the sense that those are well-researched and not many surprises there.
I suppose it's the "oops, we didn't know about what Lutefisk does to pleather" moments that trip them up!
It was a problem with the nickle plated cylinder walls and the specific formula used by BMW at the time.
My wife's company provides parts to just about every OEM producing in the US, including Tesla. Honda and Toyota still have the tightest tolerances. Tesla is not far behind. Chevy and Ford are the worst for tolerance and for material quality.
Musks cars are worse than Hyundais from the 90's. Every time I see one in the parking lot next to a modern Hyuandai it's gap fest of fun showing how a $25k car is so amazing and the Tesla has 4 different gaps in view without even moving around to look.
Some hack on their AI team probably told Musk that the car couldn't drive itself because the production and test environments weren't the same.
I don't know about the other guy, but I'm worried about sometimes not being safe myself, and it would be nice if the safety features could be relied upon to do the job they claim to.
Not turning on autopilot doesn't help if I fuck up while driving, does it?
I wouldn't trust Autopilot to be safer than I am, currently, but that doesn't mean I don't want it to be.
Reread his post. You are discussing engines, he was discussing panels.
But don't let that get in the way of you showing off how big your dick is.
You are a condescending asshole. Learn to read before you unzip your pants.
you know, the company with a $900B market cap?
He says he wants to start turning a profit yet he is going to increase costs by demanding tighter tolerances in the components from suppliers. He can try and fire all the suppliers he wants but in the end he cannot avoid the golden rule: price, quality and speed pick 2 because only crooks will sell you all three. If he wants the price to stay low and the quality to stay high he is not going to get the through put he wants as it will keep suppliers from investing in their lines to deliver the quality he wants at the speed he wants.
It is this kind of confusion which is the root causes of his delays, fire all the suppliers you want but it will cost time and money to find new ones as well as he will have to deal with suppliers leaving him because no one likes being strong armed into a position they dont want to be in.
Personally i think that Elon is just spread to thin and trying to do way too many things at the same time and cannot keep all of the plates spinning. Between Space-X, the boring company, Hyperloop, Tesla and the Giga factory he needs to really let one or more of them go and find some focus. If he wants Tesla to succeed he should completely drop the boring company and hyperloop at the minimum and stop trying to be some kind of media wonderboy.
So, pay a premium for a feature you don't trust or intend to use? Yes, I guess that's one option.
Musk long since has noticed that the Japanese and the Germans have this car thing pretty much squared away and that tolerances and quality with US cars are shit. His bar isn't other US cars, his bar are the Nipponese and the Germans. That's why US once again is building one of the best cars in the world with Tesla. A first in a long time.
I personally would like to see BMW and Volkswagen and their ilk get a massive kick in the bollocks for dragging their heels on the electric front.
What I don't like is Tesla completely ignoring the need for an electric microcar like the Smart and building yet another crap SUV. The Y should be a microcar IMHO. This might be a long-term mistake.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He didn't invent any of these.
He also didn't invent going out of business---but he will soon discover it.
how much more a model 3 will be once the precision is up by a factor of 10 :) lolol
His going Mars project will require a lot of equipment built with very low tolerances. Probably he wants hardware contractors be prepared for work that will be needed soon.
I have never hard anyone complain abut the tolerances in their car in the last few years.
The likes of Ford and Toyota have it pretty off pat now.
Going for 10x tighter tolerances sounds like marketing grandstanding rather than fixing production.
Especially as this was leaked to the world.
Or treat it as driver assist. I assume that's possible.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What the fuck are you smoking? That's more than the total car sales in the whole of the USA. https://www.statista.com/statistics/199974/us-car-sales-since-1951/