this kind of stuff has been around some time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program - but in a financializing economy like the US probably every kind of building something physical is awe-inducing.
I don't think they are, although I'm happy to be corrected if mistaken. It seems to me it's just a poorly named machine. How is this different from a press?
The main difference is that in a press you have a sheet of metal that you shape in some way and in a casting machine you get molten metal in which you apply force to generate a shape.
Right, I understand the difference between casting and pressing. But the article frequently says "Giga Press" instead of "Giga Cast," I think they're actually referring to pressing machines and it's just not a very well researched article. There is nothing that mentions molten metal being used, and it regularly references previous pressing machines which did not take in molten metal.
Again, I'm happy to be wrong here, but I'm not seeing the evidence of this being a casting machine. And I'm seeing a lot of circumstantial evidence that is indeed a press.
This is just bad naming by the company (and or Tesla). This is 100% sure a molten aluminum die casting machine.
This company already makes such machines for Tesla and this is the newest one.
You can find videos of machines like that being assembled right now in Berlin and Austin. And you can find videos of it working in Fremont and Shanghai.
It's clearly performing a casting process, just watch one of the videos.
Maybe they're calling it a press because the molten metal is being rammed into the mold under pressure vs. gravity. I agree that there's poor naming at play here muddying the waters.
A press typically works with room temperature metal, or metal hot enough to be slightly soft. The blank is placed inside, and the press comes down and crushes it into the shape dictated by the mold. Excess metal is sometimes cut off by sharp edges on the mold.
A die casting process starts with molten metal, and the metal is injected under pressure to fill the die cavity. The mold is separated and the new part is removed.
Gravity casting using sand molds were, like you said, just how you did it until that time. Dad had an early 90's Saturn SL, and it's engine used the lost-foam casting process. You could see the surface texture in the metal from where the polystyrene had expanded when it was made. Sand molds weren't able to show a feature that fine.
Engine blocks are still sand cast, and there is not much need to use anything else for their production if you can nail the fluid dynamics in the mold.
Only very small scooter engines I know are mold/semisold cast, everything else I know is gravity cast.
It definitely looks wild but it's pretty capable as a truck.
15,000 lb towing capacity, 35" tires for clearance, 35 degree approach angle, and adjustable suspension.
It is absolutely jaw dropping to me watching that Model Y front-frame come out of that 6k-ton casting machine[1]. Incredible. Had not seen that before. What a potentially incredibly efficient use of materials & process, to produce a large well constructed, integrated piece.
I do have one reservation, which is that this feels a bit like the creation of a dispose-only car. Trying to bend this unibody back into shape seems like it's going to be incredibly difficult. I'm trying to imagine how if at all we're going to fix a cybertruck, after it slides into a tree or pole. I was so delighted to see the Model Y front-unibody come out of that press, but a second latter, I was shocked, mouth open aghast, trying to imagine these cars as anything other than disposable.
Like the NAND situation on Teslas, there's so much amazing high tech wonders afoot here. But vehicles, over the generations, have had to learn that maintainability, repairability, and sustainability are real factors too: there's many years of engineering that have gone into not just making cars, but making them able to be kept running. I know Tesla's not the only one doing unibody work, that this isn't entirely 100% a novel problem, but I'm still a bit jarred, a bit worried, that we're creating a truck- a vehicle format known for getting beat up a bit- that might not be repairable.
The alloys used in most modern cars work harden too much to be able to bend them back into shape trivially.
Ideally, they would sell you a new front/rear casting and recycle the bent old one. I don't see this happening though as they have more motivation to hide behind "unseen damage" to sell you a new car.
The same argument was made regarding moving from frame-on-body cars to unibody cars in the first place. It turned out that the weight and assembly savings and the increase in crash safety far outweighed the costs and risks, and that metal is pretty recyclable, so you just end up salvaging the parts you can and junking the rest.
> What a potentially incredibly efficient use of materials
Actually no, casting requires more material for equal strength, and you loose materials in voids.
But given Tesla's pricetag, and already huge weight, it might make sense. Even most poorly designed aluminium part is likely to be lighter than steel at least by a tiny bit.
It is also not that much faster, as manufacturing from steel is automated so much these days, and cast parts needs further finishing.
And, MAYBE, having a huge casting machine, and some finishing is cheaper for Tesla than going with bigger metalworking line with their current scale.
Its not that much faster but Tesla claimed it removes 100s of robots and an incredibly long error prone assembly line. Also, when you weld lots of parts together you have tolerances stack up.
Tesla developed its own aluminum that does not need to be heat-treated. It might still need some finishing, but not a very complex process.
Check out this video of Musk and Sandy Munro (former Chief Engineer at Ford) talking about it:
There are some bars in the front of the front casting. If those were damaged, you would just cut them away and weld replacements in place.
If the main part of the casting gets bent, it will have been a very severe accident that you are lucky to walk away from. Repairing the car will be the least of your concerns.
There are a lot of people who know how to work with steel. One of the things I love about the steel Starship is field serviceability. I imagine you could repair it off-world with some fairly normal tools (albeit different versions of them designed for use in a vacuum). Carbon fiber not so much.
Impressive machine. As an Italian, I am pleased to see that the casting machine for Tesla is supplied by an Italian company.
Living in Italy, sometimes it's hard to see why the country is still in the top 10 economies in the world, due to the fact we lack mega-corps and global consumer brands (luxury aside). The truth is that Italy is all-in on small businesses, with thousands on niches companies that fill a very specific spot in the world supply chain. I really hope that this model proves to be sustainable and we can find a path to growth again at some point.
EU has a total lack of vision when it comes to in-region manufacturing. Imagine if the Union decided that 50% of all goods would have to be made in the Union within 20 years...
But sadly: Imagine the fuel it will give to the Euroseptics because of any (short term) inconvenience. Then EU ceases to exist.. task failed successfully.
How do you make companies competitive? If you just shower them with money, you often get the opposite result: they can't compete because they rely on subsidies and don't need to compete on the market.
If you then force (or "heavily encourage" with tariffs etc) other companies to "buy local", you're hurting those other companies by having them buy the product that's unable to compete.
Nearly everyone also works for a living, or depends on someone who works for a living. Would you also argue on that same basis that strong labor protections, and high wages are better for nearly everyone?
If you intend to cite negative second and third order effects as a counterargument - have you considered whether or not any negative second and third order effects might be applicable to yours?
Our companies would start so suck because manufacturers would have less of an incentive to compete globally and instead start selling locally. This is why US cars went to shit after the protectionism of the 80s and it took pretty much two decades to recover.
The reason why Italian and German small businesses are so innovative is because the global market is hyper-competitive.
Protectionism of the 80s was a response to the complacency of the 60s that slowly eroded preeminence in the 70s due to demand for economy cars which Detroit was loath to produce.
Moreover, Detroit cars didn’t get worse but rather stagnated in comparison with Toyota/Deming’s continuous improvement model.
I was an auto mechanic in the 80s. American cars in that period were no worse than they ever were. But they weren’t any better, either, which is why Toyota, Honda, et. al., ran rings around them on quality. As you point out, there was no drop in quality but rather stagnation that looked quite poor in light of a Honda Civic.
To be fair, that ‘81 VW camper in our driveway doesn’t fair much better. I’d rather rely on an ‘80s Chevy Citation to get me home than that piece of parts-bin shit. Part of the problem for a lot manufacturers were 70s-era emissions controls, which is a small part of why a 4000 lb. vehicle has an engine that put out 68bhp.
Who says 90s American cars are bad? They're the majority of cars my family has had and they've been fine. I really like my 99 Grand Cherokee 4.7. Almost 200k miles and still running fine. Powerful, comfortable, practical, reliable enough and easy to work on when something needs to be done.
I'm familiar with some 90s Ford vehicles that came equipped from the factory with a disdain for problem free operation. Constant histrionics from those cars.
The well 20-something yuppies who got dragged around in their parent's well cared for 90s Japanese cars and look back fondly on those days.
The edge between manufacturers is very, very, small. 20+yr and 3+ owners later how a vehicle is treated will completely dominate who made it when it comes to how reliable it is going forward. 90s domestics definitely ignored the sedan and compact market a little, after all, minivans then SUVs were where they money was. They didn't innovate. But they gave their car platforms the same sets of tech and systems that the flagship SUVs got so they're no less reliable. The "hurr durr domestics are unreliable" tropes that HN loves comes from the fact that they're cheap (compare MSRPs of the day if you don't believe me). So people bought them with the intention of treating them as disposable. So then they don't hold their value, so then they get sold to people who can't afford to do maintenance. And the cycle continues.
Eh our Toyotas have always been bulletproof, our mid 90s Chrysler minivan was a constant string of major problems ranging from total transmission swap to AC failures to electrical issues, including my favorite, the dashboard just going intermittently dead during a long road trip, with all needles dropping to 0. Or the time that the radiator fan stopped working one summer road trip so that we couldn’t stop for any length of time without the car overheating, like a very lame version of Speed. It wasn’t even that old when most of these issues cropped up, so there wasn’t a lot of maintenance that could’ve been skipped. Anecdotal/small sample size, but it did nothing to persuade us that the stereotypes weren’t true. And back to Toyota we went.
I think a similar story happened to a lot of American families, and the stereotype grew.
That would lead to an increase in consumer prices, a decline in quality of consumer goods due to lack of competition (look at the rubbish the British car industry used to get away with due to protectionism prior to European accession...), followed by public outrage and either a swift reversal of the policy or the collapse of Europe.
And there would obviously be retaliation. Europe makes a lot of the world's things-for-making-things (like this casting system, say). The market for that sort of thing would shrink due to retaliatory protectionism, and the quality would get worse due to in-Europe protectionism.
In general, closed-off markets tend to produce poor quality consumer and industrial goods, priced too high.
We get all of our industrial machinery from Italy. We're on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, and have a strong preference for an Italian brand.
Yes there's a ton of "smaller" quality companies in Italy. I recently discovered IK Multimedia that make truly amazing audio products. They have a several sets of studio monitors that due to some engineering magic punch way above their league in terms of sound relative to speaker size.
Well, Enel has a strong presence in Italy, Spain and Latin America. It's actually the second largest power company in the world after China's state company. It was the first company to use smart meters in 2001.
The most amazing thing that I saw in Italy was when I just went to a random unknown small village there because I didn't feel good on the highway. It was so beautiful with statues and well kept gardens that people don't see by just going to the famous places.
I am Italian too and I am always surprise to see in how many niche sectors Italian companies are world leaders.
We don't have many multinational companies, but specially in machanics, we have a lot of medium size companies that make best in class products.
Italians have this long tradition of turning complex engineering into an art. Despite the fact that the Renaissance has come and gone, the roots for it run really deep in Italy still. I hope the same thing will be said about Silicon Valley one day.
As a professional engine mechanic I would also say Italians have a sterling tradition of turning complex engineering into a rolling dumpster fire of repair and maintenance issues. Beautiful? yes, but not long for this world.
Fiat seems to have outsourced their 500 abarth design to the devil himself with intercooler,turbo, and thermostat placements that seem to actively dare the customer to try to service these parts without removing the engine.
on the other hand Maserati decided engines are just too hard, and outsourced the whole problem to Ferrari without any thought at all. a Primo engine mated to garbage undersized Hydraulic mounts and cheap stamped pot-steel tie rods.
If you ever wanted a Ferrari experience well youll get one after about 40k miles as the idle will be as rough as a 458 on a cold track day due to the use of a cheap variator.
And if you've got the dosh for a modern Ferrari theyre no better. the 599 eats belts, the F12 belts are routinely known to just fall off, and the knock issue in the 488 never saw a proper fix...you were just expected to have an engine crew that would replace your spark plugs when knocking occurred. all of them.
EDIT: oh hey i forgot about the F430! the car that would eat its clutch if you ever drove it at an incline in reverse. about a six-thousand dollar part, and again your engine team was just expected to replace it as a consumable.
oh my yes. The oil that comes in the engine of a vehicle is a good proxy for how carefully it was built. It collects everything that wasn't cleaned off, and every burr and bad surface creates more gunk during the factory run-in. Even if the first oil is replaced -as it should be, if its dirty- there's still left over gunk that will end up in later oil.
FortNine had the oil of a bunch of motorcycle brands analyzed. Aprilla and Ducati are two of the most expensive motorcycle brands- they make extreme performance luxury machines. They don't even make entry or mid-level bikes. They're both intensely race-focused. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GAUo8eUXeU
Spoiler: Aprilla did 20x worse than the next-best, Ducati did 50x worse. They were an order of magnitude worse in every size of particle inclusion. Harley Davidson has possibly the worst reputation of any non-chinese motorcycle manufacturer and the best Ducati or Aprilla could do was to come within a 5x worse margin.
Like... oof. Americans make the biggest, Germans make the lightest, Italians make the prettiest. Only the Swede makes the quickest.
I suppose it depends on the definition of art and craftsmanship. Sometimes people tolerate lower reliability, and sometimes that’s ok for “art”. E.g. Harley Davidsons are not reliable, but that’s almost by design at some point. My German car mechanic was almost a social scene... owners were in and out so much we got familiar with each other and would go grab a beer while we waited for certain work to be finished. Point is, you don’t even mind that much if you really love the product. Italians and Germans just hit different with their industrial design. I fall in and out of love with each of them for different things... cars... espresso machines ... bikes. I don’t think the world would be a better place with only highly reliable products.
Can you point me towards some info about this 488 “knock issue”? I haven’t heard about it.
One issue that should not exist on the 488 and it’s shameful that Ferrari didn’t do better is the brakes. They go off and the pads and rotors get worn down very quickly after hard driving during track days. This should be unacceptable at this price point. Porsche did it right.
Maybe the answer is Lamborghini. They used to have Ferrari like unreliability till VW bought them. Now they seem to combine Italian design flair with German reliability.
That's really interesting, and heartening. When I've looked at places in Europe that could make sense to start a small business Italy is often described as having a high bureaucratic burden and generally being a challenging environment. Is that true? What do you think has caused small business to succeed?
Definitely true. I would rather identify the problem (which is a wild guess) as having very similar burden between larger and smaller industries, meaning no particular protective measures, investments or auxiliary measures (e.g. simplified tax formats - which exist only to a smaller extent) are taken to ensure a newborn company can safely "hatch".
Disclaimer: While Italian, I am no startup/industry owner, so anyone in the field could probably give a more insightful opinion.
Italy has long had a reputation of having some talented and hard working entrepreneurs and an inefficient and somewhat corrupt government so I guess the ambitious try running small businesses and avoid the government to the extent that they can.
With the reputation of the Italian auto industry, I can't share your enthusiasm. I trust the team at Tesla but I can't help "fix it again, Tony" echoing in my head.
As a concept the cybertruck looks really really cool. However, it's pretty scary if this is the final design.
> The body of the Cybertruck is a unibody shell
The profile is full of sharp edges at torso/head level for pedestrians. The shell concept sounds like it would have nothing in the way of planned deformations zones for outside pedestrians or crumple zones for inside passengers.
Again perhaps this is just marketing bad ass looks and they will sanitize the final release but pretty scary if not.
There's not a single Tesla in the safest cars tested by EuroNCAP. There were, in 2019, but even the small Toyota Yaris scores higher today. Remember a score of X in 2019 is way less than a score of X in 2021. The tests are harder to pass now.
This is a bit confusing, it doesn't seem like there are any tests of Teslas at all after 2019. (https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/safest-family-ca...) and the Teslas are the best in 3 of 8 classes in the 2019 "Best in Class" cars list on their website, which is the most recent year available.
It does seem there were changes to the tests in 2020, but not 2021, and they say "2020 assessments differ significantly from previous years and star ratings should not be directly compared with those from earlier years."
The test was changed in 2020 yes (it was made harder). The you link is the last list but lots of cars have been tested since then. I'm aware than no Tesla have been tested in 2020 but you can still compare numbers if you have an idea what to look for (just don't only do X = X). For example the Tesla doesn't have as many air bags as those scoring high in 2020-2021 (even the mentioned small Toyota Yaris have Centre Airbags between the seats to get five stars) and even if you do compare scores directly (even though the new scores are harder to get) the Tesla with the highest score in the Vulnerable Road Users test (which is what the cybertruck would fail) scores 74 while the Toyota scores 78. The Polestar 2 gets 80. Saying Tesla is the safest cars today is not true. Most 2020-2021 cars are safer, even small ones and that's not even counting the mess that is Tesla's "autopilot".
Gotta love the casual dismissal of his explanations, but you're a Musk fanboy, so it's understandable.
What he said makes sense. The tests get harder in order to ensure cars become safer. My car got the best safety rating when it came out, but that was 11 years ago. If Tesla hasn't changed its design for the 2020/21 models to improve safety, then my guess is it doesn't make sense for them to waste their resources testing it.
It's one year of change to the test, and I don't know enough about it other than the people doing the rating ask you not to compare them across years. So I'll wait to compare apples-to-apples. I'm sure there is some difference and the test becomes harder.
That's just bullshit. You can see all the tested vehicles from Euro NCAP website. They haven't tested Teslas in 2020 and 2021 because there hasn't been new models. Model Y hasn't been tested yet.
In fact, on the Euro NCAP website their latest 'safest cars' list is from 2019, and you see that Model 3 and Model X are the safest cars in their category. You really think that the safest cars in 2019 can't pass the tests in 2021?
You don't seem to understand how the ratings work as it's not about not passing but that the 2019 Tesla's won't get five stars if they were tested today while other newer cars do get five stars. So no, the Tesla's are not safer than cars with five stars in 2020. They don't even have the required safety equipment to get the 5 stars. The safest car list is from 2019. All five star rating under the new tests are safer than the cars on that list. I'm sure newer Teslas will do fine but 2019 cars in 2020? No, they won't be in the top now.
Edit:
This thread is about the cybertruck and its edges that won't get a good score in the Vulnerable Road Users test. The old Tesla's don't even score as high as new small cars do.
From what I have heard the sharp edges/straight lines are what keeps costs down. It's kind of miracle they are talking a 45k price point, and this is one of the reasons they can accomplish that.
In my last few moments, my head struck by the Cybertruck's sharp edge and its contents spilling open onto the crosswalk, I will contemplate this great miracle which saved rich people a few thousand dollars.
Not to mention, the stainless steel exterior will be easy to clean, since your pesky shattered skull bone won’t find any paint to scratch! You can rest easy knowing that your viscera won’t be an inconvenience.
Check out the average price of a new truck, and then their annual US sales volume (Ford’s F150 specifically). Average America is who soaks up pickup trucks, not “the rich.”
Tesla needs to compete with legacy automaker trucks if they’re to drive down the petroleum used by those fossil fuel vehicles (hence the need to keep per unit costs down). The fault for failure to prioritize pedestrian and bicyclist safety falls on federal policy makers, who could enforce these safety requirements by statute but don’t. Tangentially, it should also be wildly illegal to lift your pickup for on road use.
The F150 appears to start at 28k. Average price of a new truck in the US is 50k, but that's probably pushed up a lot by commercial purchasing. And realistically, if you think anything from Tesla is going to start at the price they claim it will start at in early marketing... well, that's optimistic.
This will be a car that at least _should_ be bought only by very well off people. I'm sure some people will take on silly debt and spend most of their annual take-home salary on a car, but that won't be the norm. Well, hopefully.
I'm just trying to help folks understand how it works outside the HN bubble. People buy trucks because it's what they feel they need (even if it isn't; that truck likely is going to be a garage queen and never leave pavement), for some it satisfies a part of their self image and ego, and a lot of folks buying them aren't fiscally responsible and buy them anyway (repo lots are a savvy way to find lightly used diesel pickups in good condition someone overspent on before a sophisticated broker/dealer acquires them and marks them up to the public).
> The Ford F-150 is the single most popular truck in America today and the most-popular vehicle in 44 states. It outsold the Ram pickup in 2019 by 78%.
> The average age of the new F-150 buyer is 55. It may not be too surprising that about 16% of new Ford F-150 owners are female/84% male. About three-quarters of all new Ford F-150s are purchased by white males, although Hispanic buyers account for 22% of total incremental growth of new F-150 sales from 2010 to 2017.
> Despite any TV ads you see with F-150s in a rural or country setting, the vast majority of these new trucks are in large and medium-sized cities.
> The average household income of a new Ford F-150 owner is about $82,000 per year. By comparison the median household income in the United States is $61,937.
> If that average household income sounds high, remember this! The F-150 has a base MSRP under $30,000. But, we priced a 2020 Ford F-150 Platinum Edition with all the bells & whistles and accessories for over $74,000!
All emphasis mine. This is the market environment Tesla is operating in and attempting to displace combustion pickup sales in.
So, contradicting my previous claims, it looks like, while the starting price is about 28k, the ASP is 47k(!), so if the average buyer earns 80k household income, yeah, they're _really_ overspending.
So most non-fleet truck buyers are older males. They have the money and they want a truck. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of internet commentary about the scourge of trucks is focused on them being "mall crawlers" and that few people that own trucks use them for their purpose, as if there was only one true purpose for trucks. This is, frankly, a meme that exists mostly in online auto discussion bubbles.
In terms of folks making 80k a year buying 50k trucks (the Platinum is an outlier), resale is high and interest rates are low. The larger issue on the latter point is how sustainable this is for Ford Motor Credit Company. That's a complex topic.
The biggest knock I can think of on trucks is their interior materials are not commensurate for their price. That said the F-150 Super Crew is about as comfortable an SUV as you can buy. They are very reliable. They weigh slightly more than a Toyota 4-Runner and have reasonable gas mileage. All cars are much larger than they were 15 years ago. The Super Crew is extremely safe. Trucks are much taller than previous generations, which makes them seem outlandish.
I'm not trying to refute you, just adding color as to why things are the way they are.
The automakers don’t manufacture many low end trucks for what it’s worth. Yes you can buy a fleet ready vehicle if you have a fleet, but no dealer is stocking anything in the last year except the luxury trim. Parts shortages and unprecedented demand (people buying camping trailer sand trucks due to Covid) have broken the market.
Source: myself having gone through process of buying a truck a few months ago. Looked at mid size trucks (I own acreage, making hobby farm), but only could find the 60k optioned vehicles. Ended up full-size luxury trim due to tax break possibilities plus only available stock. Pretty wild right now. Used market also hosed, almost price of new.
It’s obviously not about cost savings. Just look at the fucking thing. If they wanted costs down they would probably use lots of plastic on a smaller metal frame that didn’t require a brushed-steel finish.
It’s clearly designed the way it is for aesthetic reasons.
Here in the US, we don’t care about pedestrian deaths from trucks.
Despite absurdly disproportionate deaths from trucks [1], our lawmakers and regulators are too busy jerking off with wads of cash from automotive lobbyists [2] to care about something lame like “dying bicyclists” or “crushed pedestrians.”
In the US, you are de facto allowed to kill people with your vehicle, so long as you're sober.
If you shoot a kid you probably can't get away with "well I was duck hunting at the playground, it was an accident!", but run them down in your truck and you'll have a sympathetic judge telling you this shouldn't stop you from getting back behind the wheel, and how the kid shouldn't have been there.
This is a bad comparison. "Duck hunting at the playground" is more similar to driving your truck through a playground than it is to hitting a pedestrian who enters a roadway full of active traffic.
Why should it be the driver's fault if someone else puts them in a situation where a negative outcome is unavoidable?
1/2 tons and 3/4 tons are not what's being addressed in [1]. These are delivery trucks to restaurants, bars, and retail. Dense urban cities like NYC and Boston should limit the number of roads trucks should be allowed to operate on anyway. Smaller, more energy efficient and more numerous delivery fleets should be deployed and the last mile should be done by hand trucks. Of course this is gonna add costs.
Lobbyists don't bribe politicians, the effect more comes from politicians and staff picking up opinions from them because they're people they see a lot.
Anyway, you don't need to bribe an elite to support American car culture. Everyone is united in wanting to own an SUV or a lifted pickup and run over bicyclists.
100% here in Australia the old Defenders have become a collectors items since the change to the new shape. I recall a lack of pedestrian safety stopped the original Defender entering the US market too
I don't think they really have. If you look at the profile it's been stretched out over the front, compromising the approach angle just like the new genuine Defender had to - I don't think there was any way around that.
This isn't on topic, but I think the Grenadier has gambled and lost badly, and they're going to look like fools long-term. The new Defender is massively more rugged and capable than they thought it would be.
They have these smug videos talking about how real Defender drivers want a non-electrically-managed simple vehicle, just in time for the Government to announce that internal combustion is going to be banned, so all vehicles will require electric control for a fuel cell or a battery and motor anyway. So what was the point?
They have smug videos talking about how they've got proper rugged coil suspension. Well I work with actual military rugged vehicles and guess what they have electric air suspension like the new Defender, because it's actually better for the job.
The Grenadier people are pitching in their adverts that the Defender has turned its back on rugged users like the game keepers of the highlands. Well guess what ask a game keeper and they've already bought the new Defender.
I think the universally positive reviews of the new Defender and its off-road capability, including from reviewers looking solely at its use for example on farms and estates, makes the Grenadier look very backward. Turns out the old ways aren't always the best.
(I have a new Defender at home, and still use a fleet of old Defenders at work. I wouldn't want a Grenadier.)
Depends, for those who use them for work, which is a huge portion of the market, it can be very appealing. It will have higher torque than a diesel, so should be able to tow a lot more. I know many ranchers/farmers who are quite intrigued by the idea of them.
> those who use them for work, which is a huge portion of the market
I would disagree with this statement, which is why I don't think there's much intersection. More and more people are seeing pick up trucks as a form of self expression and a status symbol (which might seem like a baffling statement if you don't live in the American midwest or south).
There's a non-negligible segment that has a lot of identity tied up in their current way of life, to the point that they see electric vehicles as a threat to them.
In short, anyone that unironically owns a set of truck nuts is not going to by a Cybertruck.
I think that people who actually use trucks because a sedan doesn't have the capabilities will consider the cybertruck a viable option as it definitely has a ton of positives, although I would be very weary of sing them in remote locations as there's no way they're as maintainable as a regular truck and extra electricity is a lot harder to find or transport in an emergency than extra gas.
I have a feeling Musk's target market is the American police forces, they must have a hard-on for another road-tank. And if the cops want it, they'll just escalate up the chain of authorities to make it road-legal.
I am not an average american at all, immigrant, not fat, not white, not rich, stable job. But, I would perhaps buy CyberTruck because, I love Elon, Tesla, SpaceX. I also do not want to buy any of the Tesla cars, because I would love to keep the gas car for daily commuter. Truck only for the sake of owning a tesla. Maybe its just a wish, & I would never be able to afford a own (& pay installments) two vehicles at same time, but I wish I would buy CyberTruck.
I'm an offroader and camper who has a preorder for the cybertruk. I am very curious how many of my types will get one but I'm pretty pumped with the approach angle, huge tires, and potential overlanding ability I'll have with the solar panels. Seems primo for a basecamp where it slowly charges over the week while you ATV, fish, etc. The only thing I'm worried about is the craftsmanship of the suspension. I really don't want an axle to snap in Moab.
I assume this is marketing; I have difficulty believing that it could be made road-legal in its current form, at least in Europe. Maybe it's a US-only model, but even in the US I would've thought it was a bit too... pointy.
If you are hit by a 6,000 lbs truck I doubt the shape of its edges makes much of a difference in determining your fate. Better driver assist features in the Tesla (compared to other trucks) have the potential to make things safer for pedestrians overall.
Well it matters in the EU at least as most (all?) countries tax cars based on things like EuroNCAP ratings etc. Sharp edges = higher registration tax basically.
I obviously don't know the exact rules in all countries but here in Denmark there're different deductions from the standard registration tax based on things like if the car has minimum 5 stars in EuroNCAP, the price of airbags are completely excluded from the tax, etc. so yes it is voluntary but without it the cars gets taxed higher than the competition that did get a test (or a better test). Since EuroNCAP ratings are based on the car with the least amount of security in a line of cars even a very secure car will be more expensive if the manufacturer also sells a poorly rated version in the EU as it is the one the tax deduction is based on.
Pedestrian concerns aside (this really can't be much worse than the other megalithic land yachts on the market), I like the idea of cars on the market that offer driver safety trade-offs in exchange for utility, aesthetics, or price. Insurance can price that into the premium. I'd gladly give up some physical security for certain benefits. Just put a 'do not resuscitate' flag on my card if the insurance won't clear or something.
The SUV market offers numerous driver safety trade-offs in exchange for safety to everyone else on the road. Getting your compact car mangled by a F350 tank is horrible.
I’m in the Bay Area and see since F-150 every time we go on the 101. That being said I would guess some cheap Honda or Toyota is way more popular. Maybe they just have more different models.
Looking at the data is looks like gm sells most, with Toyota, Ford, and FCA battling for second.
Move to the country and they are everywhere. Full size pickups are probably 30-40% of the vehicles on the road where I am, it’s pretty wild. Granted lots of farms around here and there are tax breaks for full sized trucks, so there are a ton around (lots on used market for this reason too).
The vehicle shell is sheets of structural steel. It’s not likely to deform usefully when it strikes a wayward meat sack. Combine that with the plethora of small-radius bends that can concentrate the damage quite effectively.
I’ve no doubt that Tesla can make it score well on crash tests though. Crumple zones don’t have to involve literal crumpling of a metal body—it could be achieved with other forms of deformation.
I don't know anything about car design, but always assaumed that crumple zones mostly protected passengers rather than pedestrians. Is that not the case?
The front end of your average modern car has a ton of flimsy plastic in the top of the front bodywork that's for pedestrian protection. It's basically a crumple zone but they don't call it that.
Also the hood / bonnet has softening. In a typical collision the pedestrian's head strikes it, so adding some padding under the surface makes it more survivable. I think you get more stars in crash tests.
No responses here note the likely role of FSD actively avoiding pedestrians. If FSD can objectively & significantly decrease injuries, need for crumple zones is mitigated. “No impacts” is better than “softer impacts”.
An Antonov AN-124 just landed this week at ABIA with parts for the Tesla factory. They are apparently from Tiancheng Coating, who makes robotic coating systems for the automotive industry.
ABIA is the abbreviation/acronym of the proper name of Austin's airport, Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, but the IATA code actually is AUS. When I search for a flight, I use AUS as the search term, when I search for the airport on Google Maps I use ABIA, and when I send an informal email and abbreviate Austin is write ATX.
The previous Austin airport (Mueller, closed 1999, now a planned community) also had an IATA code of AUS. They did a single day cutover from the old to new airport, so they were never both in commercial use at the same time (Bergstrom was an Air Force base for similar years as Mueller).
It's interesting that Tesla chose to injection-cast the frame, rather than stamping it. All major automotive manufacturers have giant stamping machines (Ford has one that's 121 feet long) but injection-casting is rare.
Here's the Ford F-150 assembly line.[1] One truck every 53 seconds from this line. It's mostly aluminum, unlike the older steel models but like Tesla. Mild hybrid now, full electric in 2023.
also, doesn't injection-casting cost vastly more power? I assume for injection-casting the steel needs to be molten to be injected into the casting? Doesn't this greatly increase their production time because the frames need to cool before they can be handled.
Stamping is populair because it is very fast, has minimal waste and is a procedure with very little variables.
It is not that clear cut. Stamping requires softer steel which can be bent in those stamping machines. However, softer steel kind of goes against the purpose of of the body parts in the car. If you use softer steel you need more of it to ensure it carries the weight of the car and handles the stress the car is expected to take without deformation. Existing cars and trucks probably carry a lot of extra weight just so that they can use that soft bendable steel.
There is another benefit to softer steel in that it absorbs vibrations. But this is less relevant for electric cars, because there are no vibrations form an ICE.
Furthermore, stainless steel is too hard to be used for stamping machines, so if you use stamping you have to worry about rust.
So it is very possible that the Tesla engineers did the math and figured out that if the body did not need to absorb engine vibrations, they could save a lot of weight and ultimately energy if they used casting.
Too deep 3D shape with the wheel wells and all, so can't be made from one flat plate. So standard approach is to have multiple stamped parts welded - and that was to be avoided?
Also AFAIU, like other cars, Cybertuck skin doesn't carry all the load, but it can be more than traditional.
You can see from Munro's teardown videos the layers say in a pillar on a Model 3 or Y.
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadAgain, I'm happy to be wrong here, but I'm not seeing the evidence of this being a casting machine. And I'm seeing a lot of circumstantial evidence that is indeed a press.
This company already makes such machines for Tesla and this is the newest one.
You can find videos of machines like that being assembled right now in Berlin and Austin. And you can find videos of it working in Fremont and Shanghai.
This video Tesla battery day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQfKZ5lo9dc
That they have order an even bigger one has been part of investor calls and presentation.
Here you see it assembled in Austin: https://youtu.be/02KR9sb5P6E?t=687
You can see that it is vertical, a stamping machine stamps horizontally.
May well be semi-solid rather than just injection casting given them bragging about "alloy not needing heat treatment"
Maybe they're calling it a press because the molten metal is being rammed into the mold under pressure vs. gravity. I agree that there's poor naming at play here muddying the waters.
A die casting process starts with molten metal, and the metal is injected under pressure to fill the die cavity. The mold is separated and the new part is removed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyBsdJkQu8
After die casting and the part cools, a press may be used to trim any excess off.
Gravity casting had problem with voids, and fine features, but otherwise much more economical.
Injection, or semisolid casting is much more expensive, both because of more expensive machinery, and mold expense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I4_engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-foam_casting
Only very small scooter engines I know are mold/semisold cast, everything else I know is gravity cast.
I wonder if these modern high pressure casting produce results closer to forging.
I thought it was a joke...
Probably there's more to it and I'm out of the loop :D
I do have one reservation, which is that this feels a bit like the creation of a dispose-only car. Trying to bend this unibody back into shape seems like it's going to be incredibly difficult. I'm trying to imagine how if at all we're going to fix a cybertruck, after it slides into a tree or pole. I was so delighted to see the Model Y front-unibody come out of that press, but a second latter, I was shocked, mouth open aghast, trying to imagine these cars as anything other than disposable.
Like the NAND situation on Teslas, there's so much amazing high tech wonders afoot here. But vehicles, over the generations, have had to learn that maintainability, repairability, and sustainability are real factors too: there's many years of engineering that have gone into not just making cars, but making them able to be kept running. I know Tesla's not the only one doing unibody work, that this isn't entirely 100% a novel problem, but I'm still a bit jarred, a bit worried, that we're creating a truck- a vehicle format known for getting beat up a bit- that might not be repairable.
[1] https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1357503277722718212
Ideally, they would sell you a new front/rear casting and recycle the bent old one. I don't see this happening though as they have more motivation to hide behind "unseen damage" to sell you a new car.
Actually no, casting requires more material for equal strength, and you loose materials in voids.
But given Tesla's pricetag, and already huge weight, it might make sense. Even most poorly designed aluminium part is likely to be lighter than steel at least by a tiny bit.
It is also not that much faster, as manufacturing from steel is automated so much these days, and cast parts needs further finishing.
And, MAYBE, having a huge casting machine, and some finishing is cheaper for Tesla than going with bigger metalworking line with their current scale.
Tesla developed its own aluminum that does not need to be heat-treated. It might still need some finishing, but not a very complex process.
Check out this video of Musk and Sandy Munro (former Chief Engineer at Ford) talking about it:
https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1024
There are some bars in the front of the front casting. If those were damaged, you would just cut them away and weld replacements in place.
If the main part of the casting gets bent, it will have been a very severe accident that you are lucky to walk away from. Repairing the car will be the least of your concerns.
That is one thing I admire about how Elon thinks. Don't solve problems. Make them go away by simplifying the design.
Not easily, stainless is very finicky requiring proper shielding of the heat affected zone.
Living in Italy, sometimes it's hard to see why the country is still in the top 10 economies in the world, due to the fact we lack mega-corps and global consumer brands (luxury aside). The truth is that Italy is all-in on small businesses, with thousands on niches companies that fill a very specific spot in the world supply chain. I really hope that this model proves to be sustainable and we can find a path to growth again at some point.
If you then force (or "heavily encourage" with tariffs etc) other companies to "buy local", you're hurting those other companies by having them buy the product that's unable to compete.
If you intend to cite negative second and third order effects as a counterargument - have you considered whether or not any negative second and third order effects might be applicable to yours?
The reason why Italian and German small businesses are so innovative is because the global market is hyper-competitive.
Moreover, Detroit cars didn’t get worse but rather stagnated in comparison with Toyota/Deming’s continuous improvement model.
To be fair, that ‘81 VW camper in our driveway doesn’t fair much better. I’d rather rely on an ‘80s Chevy Citation to get me home than that piece of parts-bin shit. Part of the problem for a lot manufacturers were 70s-era emissions controls, which is a small part of why a 4000 lb. vehicle has an engine that put out 68bhp.
The well 20-something yuppies who got dragged around in their parent's well cared for 90s Japanese cars and look back fondly on those days.
The edge between manufacturers is very, very, small. 20+yr and 3+ owners later how a vehicle is treated will completely dominate who made it when it comes to how reliable it is going forward. 90s domestics definitely ignored the sedan and compact market a little, after all, minivans then SUVs were where they money was. They didn't innovate. But they gave their car platforms the same sets of tech and systems that the flagship SUVs got so they're no less reliable. The "hurr durr domestics are unreliable" tropes that HN loves comes from the fact that they're cheap (compare MSRPs of the day if you don't believe me). So people bought them with the intention of treating them as disposable. So then they don't hold their value, so then they get sold to people who can't afford to do maintenance. And the cycle continues.
I think a similar story happened to a lot of American families, and the stereotype grew.
The largest market for European companies is Europe itself.
And there would obviously be retaliation. Europe makes a lot of the world's things-for-making-things (like this casting system, say). The market for that sort of thing would shrink due to retaliatory protectionism, and the quality would get worse due to in-Europe protectionism.
In general, closed-off markets tend to produce poor quality consumer and industrial goods, priced too high.
That's what the latter stages of "Made in America" labelling consisted of.
Enel has a lot of hydro power plants installed in Latin America. Of course you won't see that living in Italy.
https://www.enel.com/media/explore/search-press-releases/pre...
But yeah, you don't see that from Italy.
Fiat seems to have outsourced their 500 abarth design to the devil himself with intercooler,turbo, and thermostat placements that seem to actively dare the customer to try to service these parts without removing the engine.
on the other hand Maserati decided engines are just too hard, and outsourced the whole problem to Ferrari without any thought at all. a Primo engine mated to garbage undersized Hydraulic mounts and cheap stamped pot-steel tie rods. If you ever wanted a Ferrari experience well youll get one after about 40k miles as the idle will be as rough as a 458 on a cold track day due to the use of a cheap variator.
And if you've got the dosh for a modern Ferrari theyre no better. the 599 eats belts, the F12 belts are routinely known to just fall off, and the knock issue in the 488 never saw a proper fix...you were just expected to have an engine crew that would replace your spark plugs when knocking occurred. all of them.
EDIT: oh hey i forgot about the F430! the car that would eat its clutch if you ever drove it at an incline in reverse. about a six-thousand dollar part, and again your engine team was just expected to replace it as a consumable.
FortNine had the oil of a bunch of motorcycle brands analyzed. Aprilla and Ducati are two of the most expensive motorcycle brands- they make extreme performance luxury machines. They don't even make entry or mid-level bikes. They're both intensely race-focused. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GAUo8eUXeU
Spoiler: Aprilla did 20x worse than the next-best, Ducati did 50x worse. They were an order of magnitude worse in every size of particle inclusion. Harley Davidson has possibly the worst reputation of any non-chinese motorcycle manufacturer and the best Ducati or Aprilla could do was to come within a 5x worse margin.
Like... oof. Americans make the biggest, Germans make the lightest, Italians make the prettiest. Only the Swede makes the quickest.
One issue that should not exist on the 488 and it’s shameful that Ferrari didn’t do better is the brakes. They go off and the pads and rotors get worn down very quickly after hard driving during track days. This should be unacceptable at this price point. Porsche did it right.
Disclaimer: While Italian, I am no startup/industry owner, so anyone in the field could probably give a more insightful opinion.
So what you get is small businesses who choose to not go past that demarcation.
> The body of the Cybertruck is a unibody shell
The profile is full of sharp edges at torso/head level for pedestrians. The shell concept sounds like it would have nothing in the way of planned deformations zones for outside pedestrians or crumple zones for inside passengers.
Again perhaps this is just marketing bad ass looks and they will sanitize the final release but pretty scary if not.
It does seem there were changes to the tests in 2020, but not 2021, and they say "2020 assessments differ significantly from previous years and star ratings should not be directly compared with those from earlier years."
So IDK, your comment seems misleading?
What he said makes sense. The tests get harder in order to ensure cars become safer. My car got the best safety rating when it came out, but that was 11 years ago. If Tesla hasn't changed its design for the 2020/21 models to improve safety, then my guess is it doesn't make sense for them to waste their resources testing it.
In fact, on the Euro NCAP website their latest 'safest cars' list is from 2019, and you see that Model 3 and Model X are the safest cars in their category. You really think that the safest cars in 2019 can't pass the tests in 2021?
https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/best-in-class-ca...
Edit: This thread is about the cybertruck and its edges that won't get a good score in the Vulnerable Road Users test. The old Tesla's don't even score as high as new small cars do.
Tesla needs to compete with legacy automaker trucks if they’re to drive down the petroleum used by those fossil fuel vehicles (hence the need to keep per unit costs down). The fault for failure to prioritize pedestrian and bicyclist safety falls on federal policy makers, who could enforce these safety requirements by statute but don’t. Tangentially, it should also be wildly illegal to lift your pickup for on road use.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
This will be a car that at least _should_ be bought only by very well off people. I'm sure some people will take on silly debt and spend most of their annual take-home salary on a car, but that won't be the norm. Well, hopefully.
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/pickup-truck-owner-de...
> The Ford F-150 is the single most popular truck in America today and the most-popular vehicle in 44 states. It outsold the Ram pickup in 2019 by 78%.
> The average age of the new F-150 buyer is 55. It may not be too surprising that about 16% of new Ford F-150 owners are female/84% male. About three-quarters of all new Ford F-150s are purchased by white males, although Hispanic buyers account for 22% of total incremental growth of new F-150 sales from 2010 to 2017.
> Despite any TV ads you see with F-150s in a rural or country setting, the vast majority of these new trucks are in large and medium-sized cities.
> The average household income of a new Ford F-150 owner is about $82,000 per year. By comparison the median household income in the United States is $61,937.
> If that average household income sounds high, remember this! The F-150 has a base MSRP under $30,000. But, we priced a 2020 Ford F-150 Platinum Edition with all the bells & whistles and accessories for over $74,000!
All emphasis mine. This is the market environment Tesla is operating in and attempting to displace combustion pickup sales in.
There's something like 50 million people that are very well off in the US.
Narrative this, narrative that.
In terms of folks making 80k a year buying 50k trucks (the Platinum is an outlier), resale is high and interest rates are low. The larger issue on the latter point is how sustainable this is for Ford Motor Credit Company. That's a complex topic.
The biggest knock I can think of on trucks is their interior materials are not commensurate for their price. That said the F-150 Super Crew is about as comfortable an SUV as you can buy. They are very reliable. They weigh slightly more than a Toyota 4-Runner and have reasonable gas mileage. All cars are much larger than they were 15 years ago. The Super Crew is extremely safe. Trucks are much taller than previous generations, which makes them seem outlandish.
I'm not trying to refute you, just adding color as to why things are the way they are.
Source: myself having gone through process of buying a truck a few months ago. Looked at mid size trucks (I own acreage, making hobby farm), but only could find the 60k optioned vehicles. Ended up full-size luxury trim due to tax break possibilities plus only available stock. Pretty wild right now. Used market also hosed, almost price of new.
It’s clearly designed the way it is for aesthetic reasons.
Despite absurdly disproportionate deaths from trucks [1], our lawmakers and regulators are too busy jerking off with wads of cash from automotive lobbyists [2] to care about something lame like “dying bicyclists” or “crushed pedestrians.”
[1]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/10/31/why-american-trucks-a...
[2]: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a20879691/heres-how-mu...
If you shoot a kid you probably can't get away with "well I was duck hunting at the playground, it was an accident!", but run them down in your truck and you'll have a sympathetic judge telling you this shouldn't stop you from getting back behind the wheel, and how the kid shouldn't have been there.
Why should it be the driver's fault if someone else puts them in a situation where a negative outcome is unavoidable?
An adult man running carelessly through the playground is not a significant risk.
Anyway, you don't need to bribe an elite to support American car culture. Everyone is united in wanting to own an SUV or a lifted pickup and run over bicyclists.
This isn't on topic, but I think the Grenadier has gambled and lost badly, and they're going to look like fools long-term. The new Defender is massively more rugged and capable than they thought it would be.
They have these smug videos talking about how real Defender drivers want a non-electrically-managed simple vehicle, just in time for the Government to announce that internal combustion is going to be banned, so all vehicles will require electric control for a fuel cell or a battery and motor anyway. So what was the point?
They have smug videos talking about how they've got proper rugged coil suspension. Well I work with actual military rugged vehicles and guess what they have electric air suspension like the new Defender, because it's actually better for the job.
The Grenadier people are pitching in their adverts that the Defender has turned its back on rugged users like the game keepers of the highlands. Well guess what ask a game keeper and they've already bought the new Defender.
I think the universally positive reviews of the new Defender and its off-road capability, including from reviewers looking solely at its use for example on farms and estates, makes the Grenadier look very backward. Turns out the old ways aren't always the best.
(I have a new Defender at home, and still use a fleet of old Defenders at work. I wouldn't want a Grenadier.)
I would disagree with this statement, which is why I don't think there's much intersection. More and more people are seeing pick up trucks as a form of self expression and a status symbol (which might seem like a baffling statement if you don't live in the American midwest or south).
There's a non-negligible segment that has a lot of identity tied up in their current way of life, to the point that they see electric vehicles as a threat to them.
In short, anyone that unironically owns a set of truck nuts is not going to by a Cybertruck.
I think that people who actually use trucks because a sedan doesn't have the capabilities will consider the cybertruck a viable option as it definitely has a ton of positives, although I would be very weary of sing them in remote locations as there's no way they're as maintainable as a regular truck and extra electricity is a lot harder to find or transport in an emergency than extra gas.
https://www.autoblog.com/2019/12/16/tesla-cybertruck-europea...
Funnily enough, the concept that we've been shown also fails US regulations, although those are probably much easier to rectify for the final design.
Wow I didn’t know that. How does it work? Isn’t a EuroNCAP rating entirely voluntary?
I'd like to be able to trade on my own safety, not others (e.g. sacrificing crumplezones for a more compact cabin and greater carrying capacity).
Looking at the data is looks like gm sells most, with Toyota, Ford, and FCA battling for second.
Usually the frame of a car is also part of the body these days. (T-frames and H frames rarely exists these days.
I mean you're assuming there are no deformation or crumple zones for some reason, which seems ridiculous.
Is it enough to just look at the thing?
I’ve no doubt that Tesla can make it score well on crash tests though. Crumple zones don’t have to involve literal crumpling of a metal body—it could be achieved with other forms of deformation.
Frame + Pane construction allows for crumple zones, I don't see how a unibody stainless steel will allow it.
(/s - it probably is going to be super unsafe and get bad safety scores).
2. Do something that not suitable for drive by human, like racing style steering,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/m8opqh/fun_time_wor...
The previous Austin airport (Mueller, closed 1999, now a planned community) also had an IATA code of AUS. They did a single day cutover from the old to new airport, so they were never both in commercial use at the same time (Bergstrom was an Air Force base for similar years as Mueller).
Here's the Ford F-150 assembly line.[1] One truck every 53 seconds from this line. It's mostly aluminum, unlike the older steel models but like Tesla. Mild hybrid now, full electric in 2023.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze4MZbyLnm8
Stamping is populair because it is very fast, has minimal waste and is a procedure with very little variables.
There is another benefit to softer steel in that it absorbs vibrations. But this is less relevant for electric cars, because there are no vibrations form an ICE.
Furthermore, stainless steel is too hard to be used for stamping machines, so if you use stamping you have to worry about rust.
So it is very possible that the Tesla engineers did the math and figured out that if the body did not need to absorb engine vibrations, they could save a lot of weight and ultimately energy if they used casting.
Also AFAIU, like other cars, Cybertuck skin doesn't carry all the load, but it can be more than traditional.
You can see from Munro's teardown videos the layers say in a pillar on a Model 3 or Y.