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.

Comments

Meh

[Virtucon]

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...

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

What Musk needs to do

He had delegated this work. He's back in the middle now because they failed. I don't know why, and you don't either; Tesla doesn't share enough information to know and the stuff appearing in the media about all this isn't credible for a whole bunch of reasons.

Re:Meh

[linuxguy]

"There's plenty of those folks available in Detroit"

Do it old school then?

I don't think you understand what Tesla is all about. Sure they are only making 2,000 cars/week at the moment, but give them time. They can keep doing things their way and still get to 6,000 cars/week. Their cars are expensive but nobody else has higher customer satisfaction rates.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Their cars are expensive but nobody else has higher customer satisfaction rates.

The same can be said for Scientologists and Mormons.

And your point in mentioning a very subjective metric?

Here's MY point: Tesla has a cult following - like 1990's Apple. It's purely psychological.

It's also the reason why the Tesla board approved Elon's obscene compensation package: share price is based upon his cult of personality.

Those of us who have actual accounting training see the fact that Tesla has LOST money in all of its 15 years. Cite: Its financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The problem with Tesla is Elon Musk.

Re: Meh

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Mass production (making all parts within exacting tolerances so they can be swapped, as opposed to being custom fit together in the end product) and the assembly line are the twin juggernauts of modern manufacturing, working hand in hand.

However, his statement for needless 10x improvement on the formet smacks more of justification FUD for delays than any real need.

Re: Meh

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Both ebay and amazon predate paypal, his first venture into e commerce

Viaweb predated at least e-Bay, doesn't it?

I see you're unfamiliar with NASAs space shuttle, a far more practical design than anything he's created

Oh come on, that's just dumb, isn't it? What's "far more practical" about throwing 60% of your hardware mass away each time?

For starters, it doesn't lose several tons of lift capacity by having to reserve fuel for landing.

Reserve fuel that is cheaper than throwaway hardware. When will you people finally learn to use a calculator? And how about the Shuttle losing forty tonnes of payload by having wings and a heat shield, that doesn't bother you? How's that for your hypocrisy? :-p

Re:Meh

[angel'o'sphere]

Many Apple customers in the 90's were self identified 'apple people' and continued to use what was - at that time - a far inferior and far more expensive product.
Inferiour to modern Macs? Yes.
Inferiour to a unix workstation? Arguable, depending on what you wanted to do.
Inferiour to an Amiga? Probably, again depending on what you wanted to do, much more expensive, yes.
Inferiour to a Windows PC, most definitely not.

Macs at those times had Mac OS and Apple/UX (Apples Unix) as operation systems. The development environment was a kind of Cygwin for Macs running a tc-shell and most unix tools (under Mac OS), the environment was called MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Inferiour my ass.

I've been driving BMW's for decades, they are excellent vehicles. Then you are very lucky, BMW had a quality crisis in the 1990s. But it might be it mostly hit the bikes, don't remember, never had an BMW.

Re: Meh

[Areyoukiddingme]

However, his statement for needless 10x improvement on the formet smacks more of justification FUD for delays than any real need.

It's not entirely justification FUD on his part. It's counter-FUD to one of the most frequently repeated slurs against Tesla: that their fit and finish is poor. We see it here on Slashdot constantly, so constantly and consistently that it's obviously a concerted smear campaign. Personally I think it's an overreaction on Elon's part. An order of magnitude improvement in tolerances in wholly unnecessary to achieving their goals, and mostly tangential to ending the smear campaign.

All Tesla has to do to make the FUD stop is to make Model 3s, fast and well. When enough of the short sellers go bankrupt, the FUD campaigns will run out of funding too and stop.

This one...

[sacrilicious]

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...

... unless they go to 11.

Unnecessary precision?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This email is not targeted to the employees...

[DrTJ]

... but rather to customers, investors and suppliers, I think.

Re:Musk must be kicking himself

[hipp5]

Why would he kick himself? This email is clearly intended to be leaked. "We're doing great and we're going to do better!" Why wouldn't he want the press to repeat that message?

So, about this "staff" email

[93 Escort Wagon]

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?

Re:I need my bullshit 99% precise

[squiggleslash]

He has no tolerance for sane engineering. This quote:

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.

is not a boast despite how its worded (and what Musk obviously thinks.) It's an admission they fucked up. Designing something so it has poor tolerances is a bug, not a feature. It means the design is shitty. It means you've multiplied the possibilities of failure.

He might as well boast about a computer that requires "only the most advanced cooling system known to man", or a book "with binding so advanced that merely turning the pages too quickly will cause the papers to fall out."