>All three execs that left this week seem to be significant losses for Tesla, but it might be for the best if Tesla’s fast-paced, startup-like business environment wasn’t for them.
But is a fast-paced, startup-like business environment the best environment for producing thousands of expensive, multi-ton, high speed vehicles that can seriously maim or kill their occupants or bystanders if something goes wrong?
The underlying cause of both companies' issues is the same, and it's not organizational size and style. It's complexity. Bugs and edge cases grow exponentially, not linearly, with complexity, and both Tesla's cars and the 737 MAX are far more complex than previous products.
It's similar to the "featureitis" that causes complex software products and platforms to crumble and die over time. Part of why we keep rewriting the universe in software is the need to repeatedly start over to escape a mountain of accreted complexity in some old system. At some point the cost of rewriting the parts we need is lower than the cost of just maintaining the bloat.
Tesla's cars are a heck of a lot less complex than normal ICE vehicles considering that they lack a transmission and emissions system.
Edit: Fanboys, this isn't an insult, it's a statement of fact. An EV simply doesn't have all the additional mechanical, electrical and software complexity that comes with those systems.
But they don't have to add all that electronic hoohah and then construct it in a way that fails!
Come on, a car that stops when syslog has exhausted available storage! A car with continuous touchscreen failures in 2019! My GPS was bought in 2008, it has a touchscreen and it spent all its life inside a car, and it is still working, despite GPS rollover!
It's troubling that Tesla repeats mistakes that everyone else knows to avoid.
They’re mechanically less complex, but all of the complexity in a modern automobile is in the sensors and control systems. It’s the same with modern airplanes; they’re not mechanically much more complex than they were 40 years ago, but they have sophisticated fly by wire systems that didn’t exist back then.
To the higher parent comment's point, the trade-off may not have been an equal one.
Yes, they have two less major mechanical systems. But they likely have more electronic and software systems, which tend to have more failure modes (and be more difficult to test) than their mechanical counterparts.
Back when I worked in automotive assembly, we'd did some work replacing mechanical systems with electronic controls. To a large extent, the mechanical systems, once tuned, would run indefinitely until they developed some mechanical wear. The electronic counterparts had to be re-tuned on a regular basis. The electronic ones had less moving parts, but increased complexity.
The problem is the automatic trim control system that was hacked on to make up for the design being fundamentally flawed (having engines too large for the obsolete airframe).
Indeed! In some ways it's a giant smartphone with a big battery and some motors added on. Considering the amount of controls, sensors, and continuous optimization for efficiency and emissions on ICE vehicles, especially when do many of them are from different vendors on pretty old standards/busses, I'd take a modern EV any day. Way simpler.
You may be right in that regard, but I would argue that Tesla is bringing a new variable into the equation which is autopilot software.
I'm no expert at mechanical engineering but knowing how every major car manufacturer has mastered their transmission and emission systems, and how none of them have a reasonably full-featured autopilot solution, it does look like that variable is (far?) more complex.
Boeing's problems had little to do with being a fast-paced startup-like culture. They were outsourcing a lot of their work to India in an attempt to save money. They cared more about the short-term financial savings and cared less about the quality of work.
FWIW, in another article thread a poster explained that Boeing wasn't strategically outsourcing work to India:
> You have got it the other way around. TCS etc don't have that much power over Indian military contracts. Instead Boeing had to comply and open an Indian development center to win those contracts.
> I talked to couple of people at the Indian center and they tell me because the center was created due a compulsion and not strategy the quality of work is terrible. Most of them are paid well but have no work to do.
…because Boeing stopped being the measured and conservative company it was and began to chase profits and cut corners in a bid to undercut competition.
^I think that addition is a more complete and fair sentence.
If you're talking about the 737MAX, there's no evidence to show that plane is unreliable at all.
It will very reliably crash shortly after takeoff if there's a problem with the single sensor that controls the MCAS.
The problem isn't reliability, it's a fundamental design flaw (the engines being too big for the obsolete airframe design) that was bandaged with a fundamentally flawed software hack that was specifically designed to not have any redundancy and to fail easily.
It seems to be going pretty well so far. Despite some serious missteps in body design, they've managed to build one of the world's safest passenger sedans. If they were good at their jobs too, it would have been even better.
They've also managed to build out an entire supply chain for building more electric cars yearly than any of their competitors. That doesn't appear to be a feat that will be matched for at least a couple of years, even if Tesla were relatively stagnant. Instead Tesla is aiming to continue 50+% average annual growth for another couple of years at least.
Continue? Yep, their growth story is faster than that of any American car company in the world's history. I'm not sure if there are any worldwide that would compare, but it seems doubtful.
Of course, there are plenty of things wrong too, just as there were when the automotive industry was born and the Durant types ran the industry. But what they've done is absolutely remarkable.
I agree in a big way here, I have no particular speciality with autonomous driving but I have seen enough media coverage of Musk both snubbing Lidar based systems and then Tesla auto-pilot hitting overhanging rear loads, which a lidar would seem to help with if not completely fix.
His aversion to Lidar seems to have more to do with the cost implications on a vehicle that doesn't have a lot of room to raise the price or cut into the margins.
Even parallax based systems are good at avoiding stationary objects, and are inexpensive since they use two overlapping visible light cameras (see EyeSight for one example). Essentially they work like the human eye to determine depth/distance.
Tesla put two visible light cameras in their cars, but didn't configure them to parallax and instead rely on radar that has noise problems and ultrasound which only works at close range. It was a mistake that has had consequences.
> Even parallax based systems are good at avoiding stationary objects, and are inexpensive since they use two overlapping visible light cameras (see EyeSight for one example). Essentially they work like the human eye to determine depth/distance.
While I agree that it would be better to be using a multi-camera system for depth estimation, and there's no reason not to (because cameras are cheap and easy to build into bodywork of a vehicle), it shouldn't necessarily be needed.
Otherwise, you'd have one-eye sighted people, who drive, running into the same obstacles, right? But they don't - so how do they do it?
Probably motion cues, depth-from-motion, etc - something the brain does. From a cost-savings perspective, eliminating that extra camera will likely be looked at being done at some point, because over millions of cars manufactured, not installing that extra camera and wiring will save a ton of money and increase profitability.
But Tesla isn't quite there yet, and probably shouldn't eliminate it...
Furthermore, I'm not sure even LIDAR should be eliminated; the more sensors and sensor types, the better, ultimately. The problem is finding a LIDAR unit that has enough resolution and can be fitted to a vehicle (and doesn't look like a giant spinning top). Flash LIDAR units will probably be the solution, but they are still fairly expensive, and I don't know if they have the resolution needed yet, either.
Some people do end up having trouble judging distance. Also a head can move around side to side, giving parallax over time even with one input (something you especially see birds of prey taking advantage of, to compensate for their narrower heads), whereas most cameras are on fixed mounts. Also, millions of years of evolution plus typically decades of training (in recognizing objects and distances) for the typical driver has a bit of an advantage over current neural nets, currently, for image recognition. It wouldn't suprise me if we crack that problem within my lifetime, but it also wouldn't suprise me if it takes awhile.
People with one eye do struggle with depth perception relative to people with two good eyes. It’s not completely gone but for example fast moving objects coming at you can be tricky (like catching a ball) as are point light sources at night (like figuring out exactly how far stop lights are). Speaking from experience that is, not sure how this generalizes across the population.
Yes, you'd think adding more sensors would be better. However, even systems with lidar have run into vehicles and people. Google's system in cali ran into the bus, and then the uber system in Phoenix hit a person.
Tesla's system has massively more users than all the other systems. They should get some benefit out of that data. I do worry that telsa will fail to make the software work well enough and get sued by all their existing customers (I'm a customer, but I want it to work :-)).
Two things: 1) humans do it by vision alone, hence, it is possible in principle, and 2) lidars are expensive and introduce one more failure point.
Most of the self-driving cars you see in bay area with lidars on top actually use those lidars to produce labeled data for vision-based distance estimator networks
I agree with that. To me, the most worrying thing about Tesla this year has been their overemphasis on full self driving features. They do not appear to be close and I do not like the way they are using puffery around that to sell vehicles.
Self driving is to Tesla as StarLink is to SpaceX. Go where the margins are fat. The market for cars (which sit idle 90% of the time) is much smaller than that for total passenger transportation miles. The market for launches is much smaller than satellite broadband services.
Putting capital into something that can only be extracted years later is a poor investment.
The sooner you can get the benefits of an investment, the sooner you can invest in the next thing, and the less return the investment has to give to be competitive.
Exactly. Southwest Airlines doesn’t think “these darn planes are in the air too much!”. Every minute you’re not flying is lost revenue on a depreciating asset. Keep the metal moving. Unproductive assets is no different than lighting money on fire.
I believe they are far ahead. Not quite ready to believe city self driving will be ready this year. I drive a Tesla and recently rode in a self driving Lyft. They are similar. The human driver frequently disengaged self driving and drove manually for probably half the trip. This was with cameras, lidar, pre-mapped roads, etc. I can drive mine the same way (on and off) in the city and it’s more reliable.
I agree. But also wonder why it’s taken google so long to do anything commercialized at scale in this space. Assuming Elon is collecting data from every mile one of his cars drives, it’s not too hard to believe that he could be making significant progress and have the means to commercialize it
Other drivers were able to reproduce the same behavior, in which the car appears to think that the space between the exit and the highway is a traffic lane that it should follow. This will dump you straight into a wall at highway speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY&feature=youtu.be...
How do you trust a system like this when any software update could turn the car suicidal with you in it? Yeah, it's also incidents where it saved drivers from a collision with faster than human reflexes, which is great. But you still need hands on the wheel and constant attentiveness or it might kill you in a situation that would be obvious to a human driver. The full self driving dream is further off than Musk will admit.
Yes, those are terrible losses. Uber killed that woman crossing the road at night in Phoenix. I'm sure Tesla has way more miles driven on auto than Uber, yet these accidents keep happening.
Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, and every other auto manufacturer have all "killed" many more than three people by way of shortcomings/bugs/flaws. Medical devices, manufacturing equipment, and even space shuttles have "killed" people. It's tragic and people are writing better code every year, but mistakes still happen. We are hyper-aware of Tesla's because they are in the limelight right now.
And Ford was vilified for the Pinto. Volkswagen executives are going to jail for the emissions scandal. None of these actions are acceptable.
We are hyper-aware of Tesla because the CEO speaks out boisterously and (in my opinion intentionally) misleads people about autopilot's capabilities. Tesla deserves their place on the list of bad actors along with the rest.
Did you actually check the growth numbers? If so, how are you defining it? Because Ford was producing a million cars per year when it was 17 years old.
Excellent point, and you are right that I did not realize Ford's early growth curve was that steep. Oops. I also did not realize how much Ford dominated the automotive sector in those early years or how widely variable sales were in that era. The numbers here were really interesting to look at in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Automobile_Production_Fig...
So maybe I should move my statement around a bit. Ford is the fastest growing automaker over its first 20 years of existence (clearly). But Ford also built cars in its first year.
Who was the fastest from the first car off the line to the 11 year mark (Tesla's current state)? Hmm, its really close, with both at ~300k for the trailing twelve months, if I'm not mistaken (Ford in 1914). And the following year, Ford did about 500k, which is remarkably close to Tesla's goal for the next year.
I've been thinking for a while now that history was repeating itself in more ways than people realize and this kind of confirms it for me. This is all really interesting stuff. Thanks for pointing out my error! :)
I'll play devil's advocate and say that every other Auto OEM has produced billions of "expensive, multi-ton, high speed vehicles that can seriously maim or kill their occupants or bystanders if something goes wrong"
The grandparent comment doesn't claim Tesla is unique for making "expensive, multi-ton, high speed vehicles that can seriously maim or kill their occupants." It claims Tesla is unique for approaching that age old problem with a "fast-paced, startup-like business environment."
Put another way, is it appropriate to "move fast and break things" when human life is on the line?
I won't weigh in on whether it's appropriate or not, but the Europeans didn't reach America in the 1500s by waiting until they had a perfectly safe ship.
Perfect example. The Europeans moved on the Americas before they understood disease pathology, resulting in the deaths of up to 90% of the indigenous population.
I’m stunned at the spin the article is trying to give to this news. Like a child who refuses to admit when something is wrong and prefers to keep hoping for some magic hypothesis.
While they’re at it, why not go « maybe they left after 4 years because they realized how amazingly good tesla is and they didn’t want to hold the company on its way to guaranteed success ».
The level of absurdity in this post is just outstanding.
As much as I love my Model 3, it has quite a few quirks that a car from a traditional automaker wouldn't have: (nonstandard charging connector, snow falls off the rear windshield into the trunk, no power shades over the sunroof, no place to store sunglasses, ect.)
And, as much as I want Tesla to succeed, they really need to figure out how to get some know-how from standard automakers. I never had a pile of snow fall into the back of my Leaf when I opened its trunk! It also had a sunglasses holder, and I didn't need to use a dongle to plug it into a standard charger.
2005 Honda Civic: Water drains from the trunk lid into the trunk when you open it in the rain. If you open the trunk when there's snow on the rear window, it gets jammed up between the trunk lid and the window.
The traditional automakers aren't immune from this sort of thing.
Yeah, I'm not asking for a perfect car; it isn't made by any automaker, traditional or not.
Personally, I'm a great believer in the theory that character is the great redeemer in cars. I once owned an '86 Subaru BRAT. It had all manner of quirks, but character in spades. Loved it, wish I'd never sold it.
I will say, the water pouring into the trunk bug is singularly annoying, all the more so since the Civic doesn't have a lot of character to make up for it. Or maybe that's the Civic's manifestation of character, and I haven't yet found the flaw it's there to make up for.
Turns out even cars that are over 6 figures are still totally full of trade offs and compromises. This is a particularly insane example, but luxury cars are still in no way perfect.
Exotic cars usually have a lot more quirks and compromises than normal cars. They're also not known for being terribly reliable; the ones that are are made by divisions of much larger automakers, so they can raid the parts bin of their cheaper siblings. Jaguar used to be infamous for how unreliable their cars were, until Ford took them over.
That's a 14, approaching 15 year old car. The weather seals and such are probably past their lifespan, and I'd expect Honda has improved the Civic in a number of ways in the last 15 years.
That's also comparing a ~$19,000 car to a base model $35,000+ Model 3 (that costs $45,000+ in some cases). They're not supposed to play in the same league. You'd expect the Model 3 (or any Tesla for the price-point) to be a lot better than a generic Honda.
You've missed the point. I believe the parent is talking about a 7th generation platform with a fundamental design flaw, not weather seal degradation. Price of the vehicle is completely irrelevant, but to be sure, these types of problems exist in just about every exotic on the market.
> snow falls off the rear windshield into the trunk
That's happened in literally every car I've ever had, when you open the trunk the bit closes to the windshield that becomes the 'bottom' always has an inch or more gap between it and rubber gasket/weather strip. Any snow on the rear window or trunk deck slides down and if there is enough dumps into the trunk, unless it is very wet and can hold itself in a clump.
Others have responded to the trunk thing, but I will comment about the "non-standard" charging connector. There was no standard available at the time that Tesla started deploying thousands of high-KW chargers. It is hard to blame them for choosing their own.
Even now, there are only certain regions where the other networks have advantages over Tesla's (coincidentally, the part of the US I'm in is one of those regions). Tesla is currently promising to support other viable networks in the future, presumably by adapters. At the very least, Chademo is expected for the model 3 in the near future, but hopefully CCS as well. Obviously they already support CCS in Europe.
Also, keep in mind that GM is a pretty traditional manufacturer and doesn't even give you a CCS charger without paying for an additional DC fast charging option.
Tesla isn't perfect, cars aren't perfect, but Tesla's are as good as they get in EVs right now.
I'm looking forward to a unified standard, but the charger landscape is a confusing mess.
There's type 1 and 2 AC charging, US vs Europe. Each of those has a DC charger version with DC charge pins added below the connector. At least these are mostly a form factor issue.
Japan's manufactures have been pushing chademo, which has 2 versions itself and uses a completely different signalling protocol.
China has yet another standard, with different signalling, but they're working with chademo to try to unify it in a new version.
Then Tesla has theirs. At least Tesla is starting to unify around having adapters for the competing standards, though the adapters aren't cheap.
I admit, I do like the CCS system if I were a car manufacturer. You make a larger socket and you can support both AC and DC sources in one connector. Alas, it has the two different connector type standards. But it is still all a mess if you're a car maker.
Yeah, its a horrible mess, and I think that is a big part of why Tesla's choice was the right one for them, at least at the time.
At least Europe has started to standardize on a reasonable variant of CCS (type 2?) and Tesla is starting to just put these on the car with an adapter for the other types (including Tesla's own proprietary one). That makes a lot of sense to me and that standard seems pretty good.
I still don't know why the US hasn't done the same thing. Instead the CCS adapters here are huge and clunky, and there are no adapters for Teslas at all. The stations here get an occasional Bolt charging at well below the capability of the charger and that is about it.
Most cars me and my family had - had no such thing (though I agree it's very convenient).
I agree that Tesla is mass manufacturing newbie (slow to scale up, compared to the industry veterans), shoddy manufacturing practices/decisions, but they have things sorted where it matters though. Extremely well built batteries with superb longevity (Nissan Leaf's AFAIK are the worst, due to being air-cooled, etc.). Tesla has powerful and more efficient motors/batteries/drivetrain than competitors. Using adapters between power/data connectors is daily occurrence to me. I am not amazed we have this problem with relatively new tech of EVs.
I am not sure about charging. Was there any standards when Tesla started developing their Superchargers and Model S, especially for Tesla's demands for very fast charges? Maybe they did not have any other option?
P.S. all in all if not Tesla breathing into the car giants' backs (and probably if not diesel-gate), most manufacturers will not be aggressively expanding their EV line-ups now. They would do it in 5-15 years time, when more aggressive regulations would kick-in.
> Most cars me and my family had - had no such thing (though I agree it's very convenient).
OK, but we're not discussing budget cars - a Model 3 will run you $35,000 to $45,000+. That's premium car territory - and you should expect premium build quality and features.
Skimping on a sunglasses holder is ridiculous for this price level, and while may be trivial by itself, it's indicative of the tier of design that went into the vehicle - budget.
~35k is currently more or less entry level for an electric car due to battery cost.
The leaf for example is 31k, has a 150 mile range and many sacrifices. The bolt on the other hand is running $36,620 for the base model with a more reasonable range.
Click the asterisk. “All prices listed herein are Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Prices (MSRP), which exclude installation, taxes and other costs, and are subject to change without prior notice.”
The 2019 Nissan Leaf S is priced at “$29,990,” plus a destination charge of $895. Though last I checked Tesla has a "destination fee" of $1,125 even if you pick it up at the factory.
I believe Tesla has a "no negotiation" policy too - encouraging people to purchase online at sticker price.
At a traditional car dealership, practically nobody pays sticker price... the price you see advertised is the anchor point to start negotiations, ie. "worst case price".
Dealerships often get more than MSRP, but they are often making money through hidden fees like a high interest rate on a car loan etc. Prices may also increase when inventories are low, but generally it’s through a wide range of up selling.
Put another way, dealerships can afford a large sales staff because it’s making them money. One highly profitable sale can be worth more to a dealership than several average sales.
That's not true. Each trim package has it's own MSRP, and while a dealership may inflate the asking price for a particular model with a particular trim package or features, few people walk into the dealership having no idea what the standard asking prices are - and willing to pay full asking price too.
Of course dealerships make money from financing terms and leasing - and yes things like "window etching" and more are pure profit for the dealership. That doesn't change the vehicle's out the door price.
I am not talking trim, I mean net cost to the consumer.
Supply and demand can impact the customer in a positive or negative fashion. Many people really end up paying under MSRP, but not everyone. It’s not uncommon for "market adjustment" on an in demand car to push people over MSRP. Similarly many buyers don’t negotiate well and simply get taken advantage of.
However, the most common way people pay over MSRP is with leases or alternate fees. Dealerships simply have a multitude of levers to work with and can insert many meaningless fees.
Destination charge is the most common but hardly the only BS fee. The price is what they charge you, not just another line item on your bill.
That's effectively the top model with all options ticked.
The Sport model: $26,180
Your choice of paints, included. HondaSense, included.
Want to add Chrome Alloy wheels, sure, $2,000.
But you can then get -every- exterior option for about $1,000 (trim, door edges, puddle lights, splash guards, vanity grill).
And -every- interior accessory for about another $1,000 (HomeLink, cargo, doorwell illumination, etc.).
And -every- electronic accessory for well, just another $1,000 ($1,020 to be precise) - Engine block heater, parking sensors, additional USB charging ports, wireless charging for the dash.
I'm not sure how turning on every single option, plus chrome alloy wheels for $30k becomes "moderate spec for high 30s".
Most of those options are included when buying a car on a lot from a dealership (who of course make most money with the high margin options). Bare bones options are extremely rare to come by.
I consider volvo a premium brand, costing more than the typical cars. My volvo does not have a sunglasses holder.
It's such a ridiculously 1st world problem to rant about - it's crazy. If it's top 3 problem with Teslas, then I think they are doing very well with their design and manufacturing.
> P.S. all in all if not Tesla breathing into the car giants' backs (and probably if not diesel-gate), most manufacturers will not be aggressively expanding their EV line-ups now.
This doesn't seem to really be true. Most cars sold in the US are still not EV, and Tesla's ~245k[1] cars delivered in 2018 is really, really small compared to ~5.3 million cars sold in the US in 2018 in total[2].
Looks like of the 5.3 million sold in the US in 2018, about 361k[3] were EV's. So, ya, Tesla has the lion share of EV's delivered in 2018 (not necessarily sold in 2018, mind you), but EV's is still a very small market and no sign that it's being aggressively expanded beyond a few select customer bases.
> I would assume that Tesla’s pace clashes with what people are used to in the auto industry, and it might be hard for them to adapt.
Or that Tesla is playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave.
It's sort of hard to make either assumption from the outside. But it definitely says something about Tesla.
Edit: My point here is that three VP departures implies nothing in particular, only that something is changing, and it's quite a logical leap the author is making assuming it is their "fast paced environment".
Do you have sources to back up the claim that these people left because of safety or ethical concerns?
From what I've heard, it's a grueling job working long hours and that people get burned out pretty quickly, which is a different issue from saying there are legal, safety, or ethical concerns.
> Do you have sources to back up the claim that these people left because of safety or ethical concerns?
No, none at all, that was my point. The departure of three execs in a week does not imply that it is a fast paced work environment nor does it imply safety issues.
Except that we don’t need innuendo to imply Tesla is a fast-paced work environment. You can take Elon and every employees’ word for it. It’s an extremely fast paced work environment, and if auto executives from elsewhere in the industry were lasting for longer than the average tenure, you could argue it would be a cause for concern.
If you’re going to make a claim like Tesla is “playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave,” its beholden upon you to provide evidence.
If your claim is you have no idea, then you can certainly make that claim which requires no evidence at all.
I never said they were playing fast and loose. I specifically said it’s a specious claim with as much backing as “they left because it was too fast paced”. We literally have no evidence for either claim as to the reason they left.
And we literally do have evidence of one of those things actually existing in the culture. Which tends to increase the plausibility of it being a cause.
The logical process of inductive reasoning uses specific examples of a behavior or event, to formulate more general hypothesis about wider phenomenon. To see specific examples of workplace culture and theorize that it could be resulting in greater executive turnover is a good example of inductive reasoning.
Making up a bad thing that you have zero evidence of happening and arguing it’s theoretically possible it could have been a cause of high executive turnover, therefore this other hypothesis should be dismissed... is simply not a reasoned argument.
One of the VPs had left after 4-5 years like clockwork after every position with 5 different automakers. Guess how long he'd been at Tesla? 4+ years. Sometimes, it's not about Tesla magic/curse, sometimes it's just a regular company experiencing regular phenomena.
One good thing about Tesla is they always said their goal is to kickstart the ev transition, and Musk even specifically said it's okay if tesla loses out as long as society moves that way. So that's a noble thing. They actually have a goal. In the mean time they've made a fantastic vehicle that should improve the world.
Separately from that, by all apparent news Tesla is a gosh dang hard working place, and people can't take it forever.
I will believe that Tesla has society's interests in mind when they sell vehicles with standard J1772 connectors, and deploy CCS connectors at their supercharger sites.
Until then, they're just emulating Apple's vendor lock-in.
Only if the non-Tesla car manufacture accepts Tesla's offer to enable it, which means just making their cars capable by following Tesla's specs, and paying a fair share of supporting the supercharger network, proportional to usage. So far no manufacturer has accepted this offer.
Superchargers are DC and match the car battery voltage.
Pretty much all other chargers are AC. Even if they were DC, they would need to match the battery voltage or you're going to get wierd things like "this charger can charge your car up to 70 percent, but no higher because the charger can't go to a high enough voltage"
It's easy to make claims about them now, but the the CCS chargers were just a vaporware proposal back when the Supercharger network was started. I find the Supercharger connector to be pretty nice compared to the CCS connector fwiw, but whatever works for you is fine.
Tesla has offered to work with any automakers who want their vehicles to work at the charging stations. No one has taken the offer, because they are too far behind to even consider it since the majority of them have no EVs to sell yet.
No. Tesla's adapter standard is available to all other vendors, as are their patents, if they merely agree not to sue tesla over the standards. Tesla also includes the adapter for free for j1772. Technically tesla's adapter is far superior to the adapters that came later and before technically - one small adapter for ac and dc, they forced the j1772 adapter to be higher power (100/80 amps max), they built their cars with enough internal charging onboard ac adapters.
The rest of the industry, the us sae hated the threat of tesla and refused to adapt teslas. Then they have iterated over a set of horrible kludges often called the frankenplug.
Who is freaking out about their burn rate? Do you know their burn rate for Q2? Q1 had logistical problems which reduced deliveries made, Q2 is going to look good in comparison.
> Q1 had logistical problems which reduced deliveries made, Q2 is going to look good in comparison.
You make it sounds like Q1 was a one time exception when "problem on the manufacturing lines, deliveries far below planned number" has been the norm for years now.
I'll gladly do whatever their job was for half the salary. Unless there is some kind of illegal activity involved that I could be implicated for later.
Watch out with statements like this; a lot of corporate executives don't make as much salary as you're thinking. You might be better off with whatever you're doing now than getting half of some executive job that only pays $200-250k.
I've seen structures where they pay ~$50k in cash and then you get ~$150k in stock. But the stock is restricted such that you only can sell it in ~3 years time. Good incentive to keep the stock price up, as you 'bought' it at ~150k but could sell it in 3 years for much more than 150k.
I'm trying to remain relatively unbiased in my assessment of Telsa, but can anyone come up with a reason for all these executives leaving other than poor business prospects?
Maybe Elon's management style? Maybe I answered my own question.
There are a lot more EV companies cropping up now. So, a bigger paycheck might be a major draw for many. Probably compounded by other issues as well, but still. If you're a new EV startup and you know you can't buy out Elon, who else will you try and poach? High level leadership.
I think Tesla's finances combined with the scaling problems are the reason.
All these VP's had traditional auto industry background. What traditional auto-industry does well is manufacturing profitably in large scale. Tesla is just learning to do that. Startup mentality works for luxury cars. It does not work when you have to design for maintainability and big recalls or errors can break the company.
The few folks I knew who worked at Tesla told me it's basically 60 hours a week at a minimum. It's not uncommon to find someone sleeping in the office or folks going out to dinner and coming right back to work.
The last person I talked to was looking for a new job. He loved what he was working on and felt proud of his work but was also feeling extremely burned out and wanted to stop working every weekend and evening. He also told me they use _literally every_ technical stack. He had worked on a Ruby app, a Python app, a .Net app, a .Net Core app, and many of them are supposed to work together they were just written that way because whoever started it was more familiar with a specific language.
It doesn't sound like a great place to work for to me. I talked to someone at SpaceX who told me similar things but it sounded like their usage of random tech stacks was at least lower than Tesla's.
For a young person 60 hours should not be a big deal. If it is don't work for a hard charging company. Go do something easier. Or don't work for a company 'like that'. Believe it or not some people are not impacted by that kind of lifestyle (of working so much)
I disagree, no one should be expected to, week in week out, work for more than 40 hours a week. Of course there is regrettable crunch from time to time.
Anything over that, is just unproductive in the long run. People will burn themselves out, which isn't good for a company, and certainly isn't good for the employee.
Nobody is 'expected to' it's what you sign up for. It's like saying you decide to be a policeman or firefighter (not something I would do) and then that they shouldn't be 'expected' to do what the job requires.
Nobody is required to take a job at a company that thinks people should work long hours. And actually new college graduates in some professions (law, medicine, finance) work longer than 60 hours. And if they don't want to work those hours there is someone who would in many cases be glad to take their place.
Simply saying that 'nobody should be required' implies that everyone thinks it's bad.
When I was out of school I was involved in a situation where I worked much longer than 60 hours and did so for at least 5 or 6 years. No vacation nothing. And guess what? It didn't bother me to do that. At all. Just like it doesn't bother some people to be hanging off a rock cliff (not me that is not something I would do).
Bottom line: You are free to choose whatever job you want. If you don't want to work what is required then pick another job. And if enough people don't want to work long hours the company can decide then to change their practices.
The law does not even prevent long hours for most salary workers either by the way (there are labor practices that cover some situations of course.)
Firefighters and policemen get paid very generous overtime for working more than 40 hours a week. And their are caps to how much overtime they can work.
Attorneys get paid lots of money to sacrifice their social lives. Especially at the "biglaw" firms, they get paid well into the six figures and generally 2 years in will make more than a programmer with the same experience. Doctors eventually make far more than programmers after their residency. Finance guys (and gals) nearly 7 figures a year or two into the job...
The law does not even prevent long hours for most salary workers either by the way (there are labor practices that cover some situations of course.)
Again, why should a salaried worker work long hours so that their company can make money if the company isn't going to pay them for the extra work?
> Firefighters and policemen get paid very generous overtime for working more than 40 hours a week. And their are caps to how much overtime they can work.
I do not know any firefighters or policemen who make even what a mid level developer makes.
I used to think this way. Worked at 3 different start-ups, actually.
I lost a lot of my good years and what's worse when you're working so much is you can't even take care of yourself very well. Plus any type of "payout" from equity or similar is incredibly rare and even when it happens it's even more rare for it to be structured in your favor (you likely could be making more elsewhere for less time).
If you actually enjoy it then go ahead. But personally I think it's a mistake for the vast majority of folks and I don't think it's something that should be ever expected. In my experience it has always pointed to poor management. Calling companies better run "easier" is just a cheap shot at putting them down.
A Tesla recruiter recently contacted me, twice, trying to interest me in a job there (embedded software development). I just ignored the emails; I've heard similar stuff about that place, in regards to the excess working hours. No thanks.
This is par for the course in automotive manufacturing. I don't know about the design side of the house, but 60-70 hour weeks in manufacturing were the norm. I'm not sure it should be viewed as unique to Tesla
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadBut is a fast-paced, startup-like business environment the best environment for producing thousands of expensive, multi-ton, high speed vehicles that can seriously maim or kill their occupants or bystanders if something goes wrong?
It's similar to the "featureitis" that causes complex software products and platforms to crumble and die over time. Part of why we keep rewriting the universe in software is the need to repeatedly start over to escape a mountain of accreted complexity in some old system. At some point the cost of rewriting the parts we need is lower than the cost of just maintaining the bloat.
Edit: Fanboys, this isn't an insult, it's a statement of fact. An EV simply doesn't have all the additional mechanical, electrical and software complexity that comes with those systems.
Come on, a car that stops when syslog has exhausted available storage! A car with continuous touchscreen failures in 2019! My GPS was bought in 2008, it has a touchscreen and it spent all its life inside a car, and it is still working, despite GPS rollover!
It's troubling that Tesla repeats mistakes that everyone else knows to avoid.
Edit: Why is this being down-voted? Is it factually incorrect or does it make people uncomfortable?
Yes, they have two less major mechanical systems. But they likely have more electronic and software systems, which tend to have more failure modes (and be more difficult to test) than their mechanical counterparts.
Back when I worked in automotive assembly, we'd did some work replacing mechanical systems with electronic controls. To a large extent, the mechanical systems, once tuned, would run indefinitely until they developed some mechanical wear. The electronic counterparts had to be re-tuned on a regular basis. The electronic ones had less moving parts, but increased complexity.
The problem is the automatic trim control system that was hacked on to make up for the design being fundamentally flawed (having engines too large for the obsolete airframe).
That Bloomberg article was highly misleading. The Indian team they cite did NOT work on MCAS and had no role to play in the accidents.
> You have got it the other way around. TCS etc don't have that much power over Indian military contracts. Instead Boeing had to comply and open an Indian development center to win those contracts.
> I talked to couple of people at the Indian center and they tell me because the center was created due a compulsion and not strategy the quality of work is terrible. Most of them are paid well but have no work to do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310924
^I think that addition is a more complete and fair sentence.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-air-canada-jet-fuel-... https://phys.org/news/2019-04-pentagon-boeing-tanker-deliver...
It will very reliably crash shortly after takeoff if there's a problem with the single sensor that controls the MCAS.
The problem isn't reliability, it's a fundamental design flaw (the engines being too big for the obsolete airframe design) that was bandaged with a fundamentally flawed software hack that was specifically designed to not have any redundancy and to fail easily.
They've also managed to build out an entire supply chain for building more electric cars yearly than any of their competitors. That doesn't appear to be a feat that will be matched for at least a couple of years, even if Tesla were relatively stagnant. Instead Tesla is aiming to continue 50+% average annual growth for another couple of years at least.
Continue? Yep, their growth story is faster than that of any American car company in the world's history. I'm not sure if there are any worldwide that would compare, but it seems doubtful.
Of course, there are plenty of things wrong too, just as there were when the automotive industry was born and the Durant types ran the industry. But what they've done is absolutely remarkable.
His aversion to Lidar seems to have more to do with the cost implications on a vehicle that doesn't have a lot of room to raise the price or cut into the margins.
Tesla put two visible light cameras in their cars, but didn't configure them to parallax and instead rely on radar that has noise problems and ultrasound which only works at close range. It was a mistake that has had consequences.
While I agree that it would be better to be using a multi-camera system for depth estimation, and there's no reason not to (because cameras are cheap and easy to build into bodywork of a vehicle), it shouldn't necessarily be needed.
Otherwise, you'd have one-eye sighted people, who drive, running into the same obstacles, right? But they don't - so how do they do it?
Probably motion cues, depth-from-motion, etc - something the brain does. From a cost-savings perspective, eliminating that extra camera will likely be looked at being done at some point, because over millions of cars manufactured, not installing that extra camera and wiring will save a ton of money and increase profitability.
But Tesla isn't quite there yet, and probably shouldn't eliminate it...
Furthermore, I'm not sure even LIDAR should be eliminated; the more sensors and sensor types, the better, ultimately. The problem is finding a LIDAR unit that has enough resolution and can be fitted to a vehicle (and doesn't look like a giant spinning top). Flash LIDAR units will probably be the solution, but they are still fairly expensive, and I don't know if they have the resolution needed yet, either.
Tesla's system has massively more users than all the other systems. They should get some benefit out of that data. I do worry that telsa will fail to make the software work well enough and get sued by all their existing customers (I'm a customer, but I want it to work :-)).
Most of the self-driving cars you see in bay area with lidars on top actually use those lidars to produce labeled data for vision-based distance estimator networks
Putting capital into something that can only be extracted years later is a poor investment.
The sooner you can get the benefits of an investment, the sooner you can invest in the next thing, and the less return the investment has to give to be competitive.
(no that's not a typo)
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
IMO's autopilot'ss scariest incident is where it drove into a barrier between the exit lane and the highway. https://gizmodo.com/tesla-autopilot-malfunction-caused-crash...
Other drivers were able to reproduce the same behavior, in which the car appears to think that the space between the exit and the highway is a traffic lane that it should follow. This will dump you straight into a wall at highway speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY&feature=youtu.be...
Tesla fixed it. Then six months later the same behavior is back: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_bac...
How do you trust a system like this when any software update could turn the car suicidal with you in it? Yeah, it's also incidents where it saved drivers from a collision with faster than human reflexes, which is great. But you still need hands on the wheel and constant attentiveness or it might kill you in a situation that would be obvious to a human driver. The full self driving dream is further off than Musk will admit.
Weren't the 3, X, and S ranked 1, 2, and 3 in the United States? I can only find a 2013 Model S ranking in the European site.
We are hyper-aware of Tesla because the CEO speaks out boisterously and (in my opinion intentionally) misleads people about autopilot's capabilities. Tesla deserves their place on the list of bad actors along with the rest.
So maybe I should move my statement around a bit. Ford is the fastest growing automaker over its first 20 years of existence (clearly). But Ford also built cars in its first year.
Who was the fastest from the first car off the line to the 11 year mark (Tesla's current state)? Hmm, its really close, with both at ~300k for the trailing twelve months, if I'm not mistaken (Ford in 1914). And the following year, Ford did about 500k, which is remarkably close to Tesla's goal for the next year.
I've been thinking for a while now that history was repeating itself in more ways than people realize and this kind of confirms it for me. This is all really interesting stuff. Thanks for pointing out my error! :)
Put another way, is it appropriate to "move fast and break things" when human life is on the line?
While they’re at it, why not go « maybe they left after 4 years because they realized how amazingly good tesla is and they didn’t want to hold the company on its way to guaranteed success ».
The level of absurdity in this post is just outstanding.
And, as much as I want Tesla to succeed, they really need to figure out how to get some know-how from standard automakers. I never had a pile of snow fall into the back of my Leaf when I opened its trunk! It also had a sunglasses holder, and I didn't need to use a dongle to plug it into a standard charger.
The traditional automakers aren't immune from this sort of thing.
Personally, I'm a great believer in the theory that character is the great redeemer in cars. I once owned an '86 Subaru BRAT. It had all manner of quirks, but character in spades. Loved it, wish I'd never sold it.
I will say, the water pouring into the trunk bug is singularly annoying, all the more so since the Civic doesn't have a lot of character to make up for it. Or maybe that's the Civic's manifestation of character, and I haven't yet found the flaw it's there to make up for.
Doug DeMuro Reviewing a $200000 hummer: https://youtu.be/UqKUExgryXo
That's a 14, approaching 15 year old car. The weather seals and such are probably past their lifespan, and I'd expect Honda has improved the Civic in a number of ways in the last 15 years.
That's also comparing a ~$19,000 car to a base model $35,000+ Model 3 (that costs $45,000+ in some cases). They're not supposed to play in the same league. You'd expect the Model 3 (or any Tesla for the price-point) to be a lot better than a generic Honda.
I think you're being blinkered in your views.
That's happened in literally every car I've ever had, when you open the trunk the bit closes to the windshield that becomes the 'bottom' always has an inch or more gap between it and rubber gasket/weather strip. Any snow on the rear window or trunk deck slides down and if there is enough dumps into the trunk, unless it is very wet and can hold itself in a clump.
Even now, there are only certain regions where the other networks have advantages over Tesla's (coincidentally, the part of the US I'm in is one of those regions). Tesla is currently promising to support other viable networks in the future, presumably by adapters. At the very least, Chademo is expected for the model 3 in the near future, but hopefully CCS as well. Obviously they already support CCS in Europe.
Also, keep in mind that GM is a pretty traditional manufacturer and doesn't even give you a CCS charger without paying for an additional DC fast charging option.
Tesla isn't perfect, cars aren't perfect, but Tesla's are as good as they get in EVs right now.
There's type 1 and 2 AC charging, US vs Europe. Each of those has a DC charger version with DC charge pins added below the connector. At least these are mostly a form factor issue.
Japan's manufactures have been pushing chademo, which has 2 versions itself and uses a completely different signalling protocol.
China has yet another standard, with different signalling, but they're working with chademo to try to unify it in a new version.
Then Tesla has theirs. At least Tesla is starting to unify around having adapters for the competing standards, though the adapters aren't cheap.
I admit, I do like the CCS system if I were a car manufacturer. You make a larger socket and you can support both AC and DC sources in one connector. Alas, it has the two different connector type standards. But it is still all a mess if you're a car maker.
At least Europe has started to standardize on a reasonable variant of CCS (type 2?) and Tesla is starting to just put these on the car with an adapter for the other types (including Tesla's own proprietary one). That makes a lot of sense to me and that standard seems pretty good.
I still don't know why the US hasn't done the same thing. Instead the CCS adapters here are huge and clunky, and there are no adapters for Teslas at all. The stations here get an occasional Bolt charging at well below the capability of the charger and that is about it.
> snow falls off the rear windshield into the trunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSuyXnCSO4
> no place to store sunglasses
Most cars me and my family had - had no such thing (though I agree it's very convenient).
I agree that Tesla is mass manufacturing newbie (slow to scale up, compared to the industry veterans), shoddy manufacturing practices/decisions, but they have things sorted where it matters though. Extremely well built batteries with superb longevity (Nissan Leaf's AFAIK are the worst, due to being air-cooled, etc.). Tesla has powerful and more efficient motors/batteries/drivetrain than competitors. Using adapters between power/data connectors is daily occurrence to me. I am not amazed we have this problem with relatively new tech of EVs.
I am not sure about charging. Was there any standards when Tesla started developing their Superchargers and Model S, especially for Tesla's demands for very fast charges? Maybe they did not have any other option?
P.S. all in all if not Tesla breathing into the car giants' backs (and probably if not diesel-gate), most manufacturers will not be aggressively expanding their EV line-ups now. They would do it in 5-15 years time, when more aggressive regulations would kick-in.
> Most cars me and my family had - had no such thing (though I agree it's very convenient).
OK, but we're not discussing budget cars - a Model 3 will run you $35,000 to $45,000+. That's premium car territory - and you should expect premium build quality and features.
Skimping on a sunglasses holder is ridiculous for this price level, and while may be trivial by itself, it's indicative of the tier of design that went into the vehicle - budget.
The leaf for example is 31k, has a 150 mile range and many sacrifices. The bolt on the other hand is running $36,620 for the base model with a more reasonable range.
Without the rebate, it's a $29k car - still cheaper than the base $35k Model 3. They both get about the same range.
That's, of course, before any negotiations. MSRP would naturally be above invoice price, which is of course above manufacturing cost.
Where are your numbers coming from?
[1] https://www.nissanusa.com/electric-cars/leaf-2019/
The 2019 Nissan Leaf S is priced at “$29,990,” plus a destination charge of $895. Though last I checked Tesla has a "destination fee" of $1,125 even if you pick it up at the factory.
At a traditional car dealership, practically nobody pays sticker price... the price you see advertised is the anchor point to start negotiations, ie. "worst case price".
Dealerships often get more than MSRP, but they are often making money through hidden fees like a high interest rate on a car loan etc. Prices may also increase when inventories are low, but generally it’s through a wide range of up selling.
Put another way, dealerships can afford a large sales staff because it’s making them money. One highly profitable sale can be worth more to a dealership than several average sales.
That's not true. Each trim package has it's own MSRP, and while a dealership may inflate the asking price for a particular model with a particular trim package or features, few people walk into the dealership having no idea what the standard asking prices are - and willing to pay full asking price too.
Of course dealerships make money from financing terms and leasing - and yes things like "window etching" and more are pure profit for the dealership. That doesn't change the vehicle's out the door price.
Supply and demand can impact the customer in a positive or negative fashion. Many people really end up paying under MSRP, but not everyone. It’s not uncommon for "market adjustment" on an in demand car to push people over MSRP. Similarly many buyers don’t negotiate well and simply get taken advantage of.
However, the most common way people pay over MSRP is with leases or alternate fees. Dealerships simply have a multitude of levers to work with and can insert many meaningless fees.
Destination charge is the most common but hardly the only BS fee. The price is what they charge you, not just another line item on your bill.
That's effectively the top model with all options ticked.
The Sport model: $26,180
Your choice of paints, included. HondaSense, included.
Want to add Chrome Alloy wheels, sure, $2,000.
But you can then get -every- exterior option for about $1,000 (trim, door edges, puddle lights, splash guards, vanity grill).
And -every- interior accessory for about another $1,000 (HomeLink, cargo, doorwell illumination, etc.).
And -every- electronic accessory for well, just another $1,000 ($1,020 to be precise) - Engine block heater, parking sensors, additional USB charging ports, wireless charging for the dash.
I'm not sure how turning on every single option, plus chrome alloy wheels for $30k becomes "moderate spec for high 30s".
Germans only added reasonable cup holders a decade ago.
It's such a ridiculously 1st world problem to rant about - it's crazy. If it's top 3 problem with Teslas, then I think they are doing very well with their design and manufacturing.
This doesn't seem to really be true. Most cars sold in the US are still not EV, and Tesla's ~245k[1] cars delivered in 2018 is really, really small compared to ~5.3 million cars sold in the US in 2018 in total[2].
Looks like of the 5.3 million sold in the US in 2018, about 361k[3] were EV's. So, ya, Tesla has the lion share of EV's delivered in 2018 (not necessarily sold in 2018, mind you), but EV's is still a very small market and no sign that it's being aggressively expanded beyond a few select customer bases.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/199974/us-car-sales-sinc...
[3] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/us-electric-veh...
Unfortunately this seems to be a common issue with a lot of car designs.
Or that Tesla is playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave.
It's sort of hard to make either assumption from the outside. But it definitely says something about Tesla.
Edit: My point here is that three VP departures implies nothing in particular, only that something is changing, and it's quite a logical leap the author is making assuming it is their "fast paced environment".
From what I've heard, it's a grueling job working long hours and that people get burned out pretty quickly, which is a different issue from saying there are legal, safety, or ethical concerns.
No, none at all, that was my point. The departure of three execs in a week does not imply that it is a fast paced work environment nor does it imply safety issues.
If you’re going to make a claim like Tesla is “playing fast and loose with the rules and compromising safety, and they felt ethically compelled to leave,” its beholden upon you to provide evidence.
If your claim is you have no idea, then you can certainly make that claim which requires no evidence at all.
And we literally do have evidence of one of those things actually existing in the culture. Which tends to increase the plausibility of it being a cause.
The logical process of inductive reasoning uses specific examples of a behavior or event, to formulate more general hypothesis about wider phenomenon. To see specific examples of workplace culture and theorize that it could be resulting in greater executive turnover is a good example of inductive reasoning.
Making up a bad thing that you have zero evidence of happening and arguing it’s theoretically possible it could have been a cause of high executive turnover, therefore this other hypothesis should be dismissed... is simply not a reasoned argument.
"We don't keep in in touch anymore, he's always at work."
I'm routing for Mr. Elon Musk. There's plenty for everyone. It's not a zero sum game.
Separately from that, by all apparent news Tesla is a gosh dang hard working place, and people can't take it forever.
Until then, they're just emulating Apple's vendor lock-in.
This does not get you into the supercharger network but I think that is part of the whole trying to sell cars thing they are doing.
Can that supercharger myth finally die?
Pretty much all other chargers are AC. Even if they were DC, they would need to match the battery voltage or you're going to get wierd things like "this charger can charge your car up to 70 percent, but no higher because the charger can't go to a high enough voltage"
The rest of the industry, the us sae hated the threat of tesla and refused to adapt teslas. Then they have iterated over a set of horrible kludges often called the frankenplug.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-tesla/tesla-st...
You make it sounds like Q1 was a one time exception when "problem on the manufacturing lines, deliveries far below planned number" has been the norm for years now.
They were insiders at a public company, so perhaps their pay was filed with the SEC.
Maybe Elon's management style? Maybe I answered my own question.
All these VP's had traditional auto industry background. What traditional auto-industry does well is manufacturing profitably in large scale. Tesla is just learning to do that. Startup mentality works for luxury cars. It does not work when you have to design for maintainability and big recalls or errors can break the company.
The last person I talked to was looking for a new job. He loved what he was working on and felt proud of his work but was also feeling extremely burned out and wanted to stop working every weekend and evening. He also told me they use _literally every_ technical stack. He had worked on a Ruby app, a Python app, a .Net app, a .Net Core app, and many of them are supposed to work together they were just written that way because whoever started it was more familiar with a specific language.
It doesn't sound like a great place to work for to me. I talked to someone at SpaceX who told me similar things but it sounded like their usage of random tech stacks was at least lower than Tesla's.
Anything over that, is just unproductive in the long run. People will burn themselves out, which isn't good for a company, and certainly isn't good for the employee.
Nobody is required to take a job at a company that thinks people should work long hours. And actually new college graduates in some professions (law, medicine, finance) work longer than 60 hours. And if they don't want to work those hours there is someone who would in many cases be glad to take their place.
Simply saying that 'nobody should be required' implies that everyone thinks it's bad.
When I was out of school I was involved in a situation where I worked much longer than 60 hours and did so for at least 5 or 6 years. No vacation nothing. And guess what? It didn't bother me to do that. At all. Just like it doesn't bother some people to be hanging off a rock cliff (not me that is not something I would do).
Bottom line: You are free to choose whatever job you want. If you don't want to work what is required then pick another job. And if enough people don't want to work long hours the company can decide then to change their practices.
The law does not even prevent long hours for most salary workers either by the way (there are labor practices that cover some situations of course.)
Attorneys get paid lots of money to sacrifice their social lives. Especially at the "biglaw" firms, they get paid well into the six figures and generally 2 years in will make more than a programmer with the same experience. Doctors eventually make far more than programmers after their residency. Finance guys (and gals) nearly 7 figures a year or two into the job...
The law does not even prevent long hours for most salary workers either by the way (there are labor practices that cover some situations of course.)
Again, why should a salaried worker work long hours so that their company can make money if the company isn't going to pay them for the extra work?
I do not know any firefighters or policemen who make even what a mid level developer makes.
I lost a lot of my good years and what's worse when you're working so much is you can't even take care of yourself very well. Plus any type of "payout" from equity or similar is incredibly rare and even when it happens it's even more rare for it to be structured in your favor (you likely could be making more elsewhere for less time).
If you actually enjoy it then go ahead. But personally I think it's a mistake for the vast majority of folks and I don't think it's something that should be ever expected. In my experience it has always pointed to poor management. Calling companies better run "easier" is just a cheap shot at putting them down.
Time is your most important asset.