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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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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
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'
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.
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.
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.