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Elon Musk's Alleged Email To Employees on Tesla's Big Picture (jalopnik.com)

Posted by msmash on from the inside-Musk's-mind dept.

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.

23 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Meh by Virtucon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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"
    1. Re:Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re: Meh by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    4. Re: Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      As for reusable rockets, I see you're unfamiliar with NASAs space shuttle, a far more practical design than anything he's created. For starters, it doesn't lose several tons of lift capacity by having to reserve fuel for landing.

      No, the shuttle lost several tons of lift capacity by having to lug up a giant, heavy orbiter. The shuttle was an impressive technical feat, and it provided unmatched capabilities (e.g. the Hubble repair mission), but i was an economic disaster. Especially since the orbiter essentially had to be rebuild after each mission. NASA in general suffers from too much congressional interference, which means they have to source their parts and labour from the constituencies of key congress critters. In particular, they are more-or-less forced to use and reuse old technologies, so that no existing contractor starts to whine to loud.

      The Falcons are certainly not perfect, but they are impressive achievements.

    5. Re: Meh by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    6. Re: Meh by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Does he think other manufacturers make sloppy parts on purpose?

      The process defines the margin. Tesla injection molds/presses/machines tools will _not_ be 10x more precise then others. I don't care how often Musk has them change the tooling.

      I worked for a manager that didn't understand dimensioning. She added two 0s to a dimension on a drawing before sending it to a contract manufacturer. Those would have been some insanely expensive 0s, if they hadn't been just undoable. Specing an O.D. to 0.25000 inches. How do you even do that?

      Tesla has _much_ bigger problems. If the documented test cars are a guide, Teslas will _all_ be junked within a few years of going out of warranty. Motor sets (22k$US) are being replaced, on average, every 2 years. Cars are being totalled by insurance companies after being caught in heavy rains with the windows open (flooded battery pack, about 50% probability that seal will hold). 'Fender benders' cost 30k$US to fix.

      He is distracting. The fact is that Tesla has made some incredibly bad decisions beyond electric power...The door handles jump to mind (talk about a _dumb_ unnecessary complication). 100% aluminum body. Auto Driving vapor. An electric drivetrain was a reach, adding all sorts of 'seemed like a good idea' bells and whistles doom the company.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    7. Re:Meh by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
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    8. Re: Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, the parachute way is needlessly complicated. Parachutes would add more weight than just putting some extra rocket fuel on would, you've added hardware that is ONLY used for recovery and has additional failure modes, and on top of that it has been established that the rocket wouldn't survive without an entry burn, because the engine exhaust pushes the entry shockwave away from the rocket and keeps it from melting. With propulsive the whole way, the only needed complications are the software needed for landing and the ability to relight engines - the latter of which they would need anyway for the final landing.

      I'll add to this that SpaceX *tried* the parachute way first, and the stage broke up in the upper atmosphere every time before it could even deploy the parachute.

    9. Re: Meh by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re: Meh by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 3, Informative

      This teardown doesn't look like FUD to me; the gap inconsistency is quite easy to see - and it really is pretty poor on a $50K car...

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    11. Re:Meh by Waccoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Inferiour to a Windows PC, most definitely not.

      In the Windows 3.1 era, that may have been the case. However, once Win95 became available, it completely spanked the Mac in every possible way, including reliability and window management. Apple made no headway on Copland and aggressively defied adapting a taskbar or similar mechanism for window management to avoid the stigma of copying Microsoft. By 1995, productivity was way, way higher on a PC as Apple refused to adapt to new ways of working, and continued pushing their views of apps using fixed amounts of memory and having multiple windows open per app, a la Desk Accessories. That just covered the usability, mind you -- I don't even talk about performance per dollar. It was a mess, and every student at my university saw Macs as a joke. Only the teachers were die-hard Apple fans.

      It was actually school policy that our departments were only allowed to buy Macs, no matter how much we begged the school to let us buy PCs. It was much easier and faster for me to leave class, go to my dorm, do my assignment on my $800 PC, print everything out, and walk back to class than to do the work in the lab on a brand new $5,000 Mac.

      Having recently seen Amiga die, I was certain Apple would also be out of business by the end of the century. That very nearly happened, had Apple not reached an epiphany: they finally accepted they couldn't design or maintain their own OS, and they should give up and buy someone else's. Classic Macs were a trainwreck.

  2. This one... by sacrilicious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    - First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
  3. That's only the same as other car manufacturers. by nicolaiplum · · Score: 4, Informative

    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"
  4. Unnecessary precision? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Unnecessary precision? by WhiplashII · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The reason to require 3 nines when only 2 nines are needed is so that when someone misses the spec the vehicle still works. Consider two scenarios:

      1) A car with 10,000 parts is assembled. The tolerances were exactly specified, so any tolerance miss creates a non-working car. All vendors meet tolerance 99.999% of the time. 10% of the cars coming off the line won't work. (So you will have to spend money ripping them back apart, more testing of the parts to find the 0.001% of the parts that are bad, etc. Tests with false positive rates lower than 0.001% are hard)

      2) A car with 10,000 parts is assembled. The tolerances were over specified, so only 10% of tolerance misses create a non-working car. All vendors meet tolerance 99.999% of the time. 1% of the cars coming off the line won't work.

      This appears to be an extension of the "Kanzen" technique originally used by the Japanese car manufacturers. It took them from essentially not competitive in the US to a dominant position in very few years.

      --
      while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
    2. Re:Unnecessary precision? by cmdr_klarg · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Klipstein's Law: Tolerances will accumulate unidirectionally toward maximum difficulty of assembly.

      --
      THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
  5. This email is not targeted to the employees... by DrTJ · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  6. Re:Musk must be kicking himself by hipp5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  7. all those sunroofs leaks were precise leaks by mikeabbott420 · · Score: 3, Funny

    the leaky sunroof saga tells us Tesla values precision, but not accuracy :)

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  8. Variation Simulation by jtara · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  9. So, about this "staff" email by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  10. Re:I need my bullshit 99% precise by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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."

    --
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