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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"
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.
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.
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?
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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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?
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
The cancellation is around 7%, some 450K pre orders are still on the books, they seem to show no sign of deserting in droves
Fan base is maintaining a detailed google spreadsheet of preorder date, invite date, VIN date and delivery date, configuration and destination. They are reporting all preorders before 3/31/2016 got invite, all line standees got preference and die cast model 3 as a gift. 19 inch wheels are getting delivered within 10 days of config. 18 inch wheels are taking more time. The 19inch wheels cost 1500$ more.
They are churning out tables showing invite to vin, vin to delivery time, by state, by color, by configuration, in the last week, last reported vin, all kinds of crazy statistics. They are selling only the premium versions, 50K models now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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'
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.
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."
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.