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Tesla Model 3 Teardown Reveals a 'Symphony of Engineering,' 30 Percent Profit Margin (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Munro & Associates, a small Detroit-area firm that disassembles new cars and analyzes them down to the nuts and bolts, came out in April with damning findings that the Model 3 was poorly built and -- even worse for Tesla's long-term outlook -- costly to build. On that second point, at least, founder Sandy Munro has reversed course. Upon further analysis, his firm has found that the sedan can be profitable. It may even have the potential to make a 30 percent margin, which would be unmatched by any other other battery-powered vehicle. Munro said the systems that impressed him most were the tight integration of circuit board components, which he calls "a symphony of engineering," and the efficiency of the battery developed by Tesla and Panasonic Corp. Munro also pointed to a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of the parts and materials used by the Model 3, General Motors Co.'s Chevrolet Bolt, and BMW AG's i3, in which the Model 3 comes out favorably. The report echoes a teardown published in June by German magazine WirtschaftsWoche, which found that the Model 3 costs about $28,000 to build -- $18,000 for materials and $10,000 for production.
Then why isn't Tesla profitable?
Well, roughly, they have spent the last two years building up manufacturing capability, and only the last month has their manufacturing been putting out a reasonable number of cars, so the upfront costs are spent, but the income stream produced by the investment has only started. The key question is to look at Tesla's balance sheet in six months.
In more nerd terms, the "income" part of "income-outgo = profit" is a time integral, while a large portion of the outgo is fixed, so the profitability rises with time.
Will Tesla be profitable? Stay tuned.
Not to mention Musk's very public nervous breakdown that he's inexplicably broadcasting live to the world.
Trolling bots all over the web and it is hard to tell anymore which is satire, parody, comedy and what is serious. People have gone off the rails more than Germany in the 1930s... if only we could put a rank on irrationality; not that it would help any as the lemmings will continue running for the cliff regardless (apt metaphor if you think about the irony.)
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For the benefit of the mods who think the above is a troll, I'm referring to an incident on Sunday in which Musk accused the diver who saved the kids trapped in caves in Thailand a pedophile because he said Musk's submarine wouldn't have helped. It was a bizarre baseless attack on a legit hero.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The big three could learn from lessons from Musk. Having production problems with your line? Just move workers from other plants to the affected plant, set up some tents and do a big chunk of the automated work by hand.
The big three are living in the past, where you work out production problems before going into production. This tent based production methodology is the future!
That's not what he said at all.
My favourite part (although other teardowns had already discovered this) was the battery pack. The more capable you want to make your BMS, the more individual cell connections and wires you need, the more the per-cell circuitry, etc. Every connection, every wire, every circuit, etc adds expense, so there's a strong incentive to have as few connections as possible. Tesla gets around this by having the battery pack be basically two gigantic, two meter long PCBs. The cells are like capacitors on a huge motherboard. They can route power wherever they want, whenever they want, and do whatever they want to it. Cell balancing is essentially always perfect, to within the degree of measurement error.
Summing up all of his videos: Munro had some issues with the build quality of the first car he tore down (one of the first off the line), and tore into Tesla over that (making him popular among shorts... making his statement now about eating crow all the more amusing). He tore down more Model 3s later, and noted that the build quality improved over time. Even early on, though, even before he started getting into the electronics, he said the performance and handling was incredible. He stated in particular that whoever designed the suspension could be a Formula 1 prince.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
You've inadvertently illustrated one of the problems with the Model 3. How many different revisions of this thing are there and how much more difficult does that make them to repair? What differentiates Rev A, Rev B, etc? That's going to make long-term maintenance, repair and restoration a nightmare. That's why every other car manufacturer settles on a design and sticks with it for a full model year before releasing a new revision.
You don't understand. Tesla uses an agile process and keeps improving. If you got an early one it might be bad but just go buy another. The ones they make in the tent are really good ones
Tesla were designed and built more like a software development project, then a traditional automobile project, initially, later on they started to bring in _some_ of the traditional methods.
However being that we have an All Electric Car being built using a different project method, scares the Traditional Automotive industry and their biases would probably have them hunting down problems in the design vs good points.
Detroit was the Silicon Valley 2 generations ago, having its thunder taken away from them in terms of economy then in business practice will make them feel nervous.
Tesla is currently making all electric cars that people actually wan't vs. the Tiny road legal golf carts like the Leaf that people would only want it because it is electric and affordable. The Chevy Bolt is a good contender too. But it still lacks some coolness.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's not okay, he's done this repeatedly as CEO of Tesla too. His mouth is a liability.
“Water level was actually very low & still (not flowing) — you could literally have swum to Cave 5 with no gear [1], which is obv how the kids got in [2]. If not true, then I challenge this dude to show final rescue video [3]. Huge credit to pump & generator team. Unsung heroes here[4],”
[1] a Seal diver died from lack of oxygen, he gave the kids too much of his tank when he was in the end cave. Clearly not swimable then. The kids were running out of oxygen so clearly air tight, and they brought them out 4 at a time during the day, with Seals restocking the oxygen tanks along the way at night. His claim is garbage, it belittles the risks involved.
[2]The kids climbed in before the floods and went deep into the cave as the water rose. They did not swim in.
[3] They made a rescue, not a video for PR purposes. His demand for a video shows his priorities not theirs.
[4] Same cave teams did the rescue as laid the pipes and power lines.
“You know what, don’t bother showing the video, We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.”
Fuck off Musk. They didn't use your tube, you got pissy in your disappointment, one of the cavers got angry with you for the PR stunt and pissyness part and you escallated into calling him a pedo because he's in Thailand. Which is a slur on Thailand and libel against him.
If you want to help, help, don't do a PR circus when they're trying to do a rescue.
One more thing, when autopilot kills people, its not their fault they didn't turn off the autopilot to rescue the car from its bad driving. It's your bugs to blame. Don't attack customers just because they're dead and can't answer back. When the Luxembourg safety regulator complaims the brakes are awful, its because they're awful. It's not a conspiracy against your company, they just want you to fix the damn brakes. Grow up.
Exactly. This is different from the Nissan Leaf which uses wires strung everywhere instead of a PCB. As a result they can't balance the cells and the range is limited as an end result. The best thing about using a PCB is you can simply make the PCB bigger in the next iteration and add more cells. This is similar to adding more cores to a microprocessor.
If he acknowledges that the build quality has improved between first and current models, I wouldn't call that "eating crow". Except perhaps if you mean on Tesla's part.
Customer satisfaction has nothing to do with recalls and you know that.
In March Tesla was forced to recall half the cars it had ever produced: https://www.nbcnews.com/busine...
That was just ONE issue. When the tent models start being delivered you can expect far more quality problems.
because he said Musk's submarine wouldn't have helped. It was a bizarre baseless attack on a legit hero.
Well... actually, he told Musk to shove it up his arse- which is a little more harsh than just saying "it wouldn't help".
It doesn't justify Musk's response which is libelous, and orders of magnitude worse; but it's only fair to point out that he WAS goading Musk- this wasn't just constructive criticism. Stocks in Musk's companies fell as a result; I think that's a fair punishment for his crime of being a barsteward.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If I posted it, you'd see my name up there.
New flash: I'm not the only person who likes Tesla here.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
If you drill through to the breakdown video, he shows the PCB called a "symphony of engineering"
It's a very ordinary design and would have been considered dense 25 years ago. Today, those components are medium-sized or even large. The PCB layout is designed to basic industry standards and no more. However, needlessly-small components reduce manufacturing yield and reliability. Unusual PCB designs increase costs and shrink your supplier base.
The design is simply competent so I can't imagine what he's used to seeing that makes this one worth gushing over.
You jest but that's what a lot of people did with the Model X. Demanded a buy-back on the early one, and bought another.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
overexaggerating
Not trying to be disagreeable but it's possible that he was merely exaggerating...
One side makes a throwaway rude comment about the desirability of a certain "solution", the other makes a serious accusation against the first of one of the worst crimes in existence. Both sides!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sandy Munro is a hacker in the truest sense of the word. Unfortunately I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when his actions might be made illegal under some sort of intellectual property law run a muck.
Yeah, I know when I've sat in one of the same kind of buildings at small airports, the thing practically fell down while I was just enjoying a bloody mary!
No wait, it was just like being in any other building ever. And this was a small airport at 6500 feet above sea level in the Rockies, where they get a bit of weather the Bay Area never sees.
This isn't a god damn Boy Scout tent we're talking about. And it was a couple hundred feet from where they operate jet aircraft, which tend to make a bit of wind on their own.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
A lot of Vern Unsworth's criticisms of Elon Musk are contradicted by many of Elon Musk's tweets (most of which pre-date the criticisms).
During a video interview, Vern Unsworth was asked for his opinion on Musk's submarine, and he responded, "He can stick his submarine where it hurts. It just had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like. The submarine, I believe, was about 5 foot 5 inches long, rigid, so it wouldn't have gone round corners, or around any obstacles. It wouldn't have made the first 50 metres into the cave from the dive start point. Just a PR stunt." The interviewer then asked, "But he went into the cave, Tuesday?" Vern Unsworth responded, "And was asked to leave very quickly. And so he should have been."
From what I read on Elon Musk's twitter feed: (1) Musk had exchanged emails with at least one of the cave divers (Musk posted a copy of the emails on his twitter feed) showing that the diver(s) wanted Musk to develop the submarine as a back-up rescue option; (2) Musk got confirmation from the diver(s) that the planned submarine was small/slim enough to be navigated around tight bends in the tunnels; (3) Musk not only made the initial submarine, but also made (or at least planned to make) a second submarine that was 30cm shorter (thus making it more nimble), plus an inflatable dummy which could be used on a dry run to test that the real submarines could successfully make the journey without risk of causing a blockage (if the inflatable dummy gets jammed in a tight corner, then just puncture it to remove it); (4) a team of SpaceX engineers worked for about 48 hours almost non-stop to develop the submarine; (5) Musk used a swimming pool near the SpaceX factory to carry out a test of the submarine's manoeuvrability before flying it to Thailand; (6) contrary to what Vern Unsworth claimed about Musk being asked to leave the cave, Musk tweeted, "Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Their navy seals escorted us in - total opposite of wanting us to leave".
I also read somewhere (either on Elon Musk's twitter feed or in a newspaper article) that another company had also been asked to see if it would be possible to make a small enough submarine, but the other company was unable to do so.
One newspaper article stated that Vern Unsworth is a caver with detailed knowledge of the cave system but is not a diver. This might go some way towards explaining the disconnect between Musk's and Unsworth's viewpoints: Musk had been in contact with divers who believed the submarine could work, and that its dimensions made it nimble enough for the tight corners and passages, and encouraged Musk (and a second company) to develop it as a backup rescue option; but perhaps those divers had not discussed this submarine backup plan with Unsworth, so Unsworth had assumed incorrectly that Musk didn't know enough to be able to help with the rescue". If this is true, then it could be argued that Vern Unsworth's comments were gratuitously insulting, untrue, and even defamatory. After all, despite Musk agreeing specifications with the divers, apparently he managed to develop something that was not fit for purpose. To me, that sounds like Unsworth was claiming Musk is an incompetent engineer. It is unsurprising that Elon Musk lost his temper and chose to respond with (presumably) untrue and defamatory insults. Unfortunate, but unsurprising.