On the day of the leak I read that the whistleblower leak was about safety, but all of these newer articles (e.g. the one you linked) focus way more about privacy/GDPR. Like, the opening sentence begins with how Tesla didn't adequately protect personal data and the conclusion is about the size of GDPR fines.
The wording in the article "[t]he breach would violate the GDPR" implies that the act of the whistleblower leaking the information IS directly the violation...
I'm a fan of whistleblower protections, but if there isn't anything reasonably interpreted as illegal on the safety front, and he shared everyone's private information creating a violation of the law, then he should obviously face legal consequences without any extra protection whatsoever.
I am struggling to even see what the whistleblower intention is really. He leaked a seven year period of drive assistance complaints and it was just 4,000 (this sounds like a surprisingly small amount of complaints for a layman like me). Was Tesla hiding this in court cases? Were they not following regulatory reporting requirements?
Well I mean it’s clearly a PR puff piece. Genuinely curious, how long have you followed Teslas manufacturing endeavors? Back before Elon became an insufferable social justice warrior, I was a big fan of Tesla.
The thing is, they pretty much carted out these same talking points about revolutionizing manufacturing with automation for the Model 3 and it was a colossal flop. They had to build giant tents in their parking lot to make a standard production line because the automated one shit the bed. Not sure why it would be different this time.
I don't see a date on this article. If it's just been published, I can't helped but wonder it's part of a rainy day campaign given the Guardian article that was just published.
American labor keeps getting more expensive and is just not cost competitive with Mexico. If their goal is to make a $25k car without massive automation (which failed spectacularly with the "Alien Dreadnought" -> Megatent disaster), they don't have a whole lot of choice. If you want more domestic manufacturing, a better bone to pick would be with the USMCA allowing this.
> According to Moravy, vehicle assembly processes haven’t changed in the last 100 years, which he says is “really silly.
Where to start with this article?
Here is a good spot I guess.
First off, Moravy is wrong.
If anyone thinks that auto manufacturing and the "vehicle assembly process" has not substantially changed in the last 100 years, then they are totally ignorant of the industry and of the exacting details associated with something as complex as automotive manufacturing.
The other vital thing that this article fails to mention at all is how manufacturing is shaped by the larger concerns of the product lifecycle - which is (or should be) the actual "product" that leaves the factory.
"The car" is just a hunk of metal that embodies the product lifecycle - which can be competitively unique from manufacturer-to-manufacturer.
One cannot talk myopically about "costs" and whatever happens on the manufacturing floor without bringing in the total concerns of the product lifecycle (i.e. service, end-of-life, market requirements).
That is difficult to do in an article because the total size and complexity of each automaker's product lifecycle is immense (and largely unknown externally from the automaker in question), but it must be done.
> If something goes wrong in final assembly, you block the whole line and you end up with buffering in between.”
Which is how, fundamentally or in part fundamentally, the Toyota Production System works - and it is difficult to argue with the quality results at Toyota.
Honestly, I am not seeing much of a difference here overall.
There are various component assembly lines that do run outside and "in parallel" with the General Assembly lines at incumbent automakers.
I am not even sure how this is debatable.
> “However, there are some quality-related risks involved, such as potential gaps in fit and finish,” warns Pischalnikov. (snip) “The reason that’s always been done is for color consistency, to ensure that there’s a perfect match between the doors and the rest of the car body,” Prasad points out. “By not having to assemble, disassemble and reassemble vehicles, you can reduce production costs and eliminate waste.
Which are quality control aspects that Tesla still seemingly struggles with, near as I can tell.
I am all for encouraging automakers to explore new methods of automotive manufacturing and BEV production will present significant opportunities to do so, but this article from Assembly Magazine is, at the very least, incomplete.
100% agree with you, having been in and around automotive factories for years. Tesla is really capitalizing on two things here:
1) Tesla customers seem extraordinarily willing to overlook production defects and servicing/repair issues compared to customers of other OEMs. This lets them get away with lower manufacturing quality tolerances than they normally would, as noted in the article mentioning the water ingress issues. Seems like they're going to further capitalize on this customer tolerance with the paint process changes.
2) As a result of only building BEVs with no legacy support requirements, Tesla is able to design the manufacturing process and vehicles themselves to be more efficient to assemble. It's a definite competitive advantage today and that's another thing some of their intended changes here will try to capitalize on. The question to me is how long it will be until the traditional OEMs catch up here.
> As a result of only building BEVs with no legacy support requirements, Tesla is able to design the manufacturing process and vehicles themselves to be more efficient to assemble.
While automakers reuse factories, they have no qualms about building new ones and closing old. I have family that works on assembly lines and every couple years they get an offer to move to New Mexico, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia or wherever the new factory is being built.
What is the legacy albatross that hangs around ICE manufacturer necks?
A combination of supply chains, unions, dealers (they hate BEVs), support requirements for existing vehicles, cannibalization of existing vehicle lines, and (at the moment) cost of capital.
The sad thing is, I ran into actual mechanical engineers who failed to see these issues with Tesla's approach, and hype, showing a shocking lack of knowledge about mass manufacturing. So the Tesla hype is working, even if it is mostly unfounded in reality.
This article is a learning example on how submarine advertising and marketing looks like. This is how you write a "legitimate article" that spreads disinformation and praises a corporation.
> The other vital thing that this article fails to mention at all is how manufacturing is shaped by the larger concerns of the product lifecycle - which is (or should be) the actual "product" that leaves the factory.
> "The car" is just a hunk of metal that embodies the product lifecycle - which can be competitively unique from manufacturer-to-manufacturer.
The thing is, Tesla doesn't have a concept about product lifecycle once the car rolls off the line. They don't care about tuners and tinkerers, they don't care about aftermarket sales (e.g. people realizing they might want a trailer hitch), they don't care about people ending in accidents (or why else does it need months for spare parts for a body shop), they don't care about maintenance (because let's be real, unless you get a lemon car, all you'll need to do for 10-15 years is brake and tire changes!) and no one forces them to do so either, so they do what makes the most profit for them: easy assembly trumps everything, and not having much of a dealer/service station network means you don't have to invest money into building it and schmoozing up dealers' arses for incentives.
Their entire structure is fundamentally different from conventional car makers. Add on top what the Chinese are doing, and the conventionals are headed for some really dark times.
We have heard this story before. A few years ago Tesla was building an "alien dreadnought" that would use 100% self-building robo-workers. This failed so badly they fell back on a circus tent in the parking lot. Their factories are piled with junk, plagued by safety violations, spew toxic chemicals, and their QC is so laughable that their cars are less reliable than Jeeps.
Tesla's problem is not scale. Their problem is that they cut every corner known to man in pursuit of scale. As a result, their cars are the lousiest shitboxes on the road.
Wow, if churning out the "lousiest shitboxes on the road" leads to the making the best selling car in the world, imagine what could happen after all of these improvements? It's such a mystery why Toyota, a paragon of automotive excellence, would describe the Model Y as a "work of art". I mean, that's just puzzling, isn't it?
Be careful with conflating 'popularity' with 'quality.' Tesla should be wary of their recent success. There's the potential for huge backlash when people start to realize Tesla's support is poor if your issue lies outside the bounds of the 'typical' issues they're expecting.
This article repeats itself multiple times (in a way that frustrated me). Here is the result of throwing it through the Kagi Universal Summarizer:
"Tesla plans to revolutionize automotive assembly with its unboxed production concept, which aims to reduce costs by 50% and factory space by 40%. Instead of linear assembly lines, Tesla will produce subassemblies from large castings and assemble vehicles in parallel. Tesla engineers believe this will enable them to scale production to 20 million vehicles per year. The unboxed process involves delaying 3D assembly for as long as possible to simplify operations and automation. While some experts are skeptical, others think the concept has merit and could transform automotive manufacturing if Tesla can overcome challenges with parts alignment and sealing. The unboxed assembly concept could enable huge gains in the paint shop by compartmentalizing and painting different vehicle sections simultaneously."
One change that people don't appreciate much is that Tesla has gotten much better at making their cars. While other automakers now have models which spec-wise are competitive with the 3 and and Y, only Tesla and maybe BYD can make EVs profitably at scale. This is why they've been able to cut prices and still be decently profitable - a Model 3 RWD costs $40,240, which is about $33,500 in 2018 dollars (when the Model 3 started selling).
I expect legacy car makers will follow Tesla's lead on this process (and switching to 48V) much as they are now following and introducing large castings in their cars.
Similar with VW, when their CEO talked about the amount of time their cars spent on the line and in QC versus Tesla, and he talked about it reaffirming that VW could and should spend time improving this, he still only talked about getting the numbers from approximately 3x to approximately 2x, which to me implied "We don't think Tesla does enough QC", which correlates with something I read that said approximately 70% of factory-new Tesla's need SC visits in the first month to correct delivery defects.
Their 'innovations' often consists of disregarding established (established for a reason, best practises) methods because of Elmos' superiority and NIH complex. He is not an engineer, but an autocrat.
I could start with omitting s flame trench thing in Boca Chica b/c "it would take too lomg", the (illegal) changes to their Fremont paint shop and the resulting fires, not keeping spare parts available b/c of frequent iterations applied during production, skipping brake tests, shit design decisions leading to many broken ball joints on their control arms ("whompy wheels"), the "lets use touchscreens not certified for automotive usage" (resulting in yellowing and seeping glue issues)...
Judging from me jacking up downvotes, i guess you guys still like to believe in Teslas and SpaceX innovations and superiority, so keep on doing that!
Bringing down Enron, Theranos and others took a while too; this valid-venture-turned-into-a-fraud (Musks product is the stock price) is not so obvious. Stay tuned!
When it does happen, it'll be because of woke politics for sure though, not because of any legitimate wrongdoing. Nothing will convince us Elon isn't the brilliant genius engineer maverick Rand foretold.
> not keeping spare parts available b/c of frequent iterations applied during production
I think part of this also is that Elon is obsessed with the numbers. Deliveries, deliveries, deliveries. To him, every part sitting waiting on a shelf for service, repair, etc., is a part not going on a new build.
People needing service can wait, because they have no choice. The quarterly numbers can't wait.
SpaceX regularly lands rockets vertically on floating barges in the middle of the ocean. Tesla broke open and is dominating the electric car market. What on earth are you talking about.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, such as with snarks, swipes, or putdowns. You can make your substantive points without any of those things, which are destructive to curious conversation.
But I have a few decades of insight into software development. And from that I can say that it is actually possible that a whole industry can be insanely inefficient without anybody noticing.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds for cars and huge efficiency gains are possible.
Have you heard what happened to the US car industry in 1990-2000s? The loss of trust from their customer base. The loss of market share to the Japanese car makers. The demise of Detroit.
Certainly something was wrong with the entire industry, and nobody seemed to pay enough attention, at least among its captains.
> “The reason that’s always been done is for color consistency, to ensure that there’s a perfect match between the doors and the rest of the car body,”
I was interested to learn this was also a consideration in apparel manufacturing: dyed fabrics have some perceptible color variation between batches. So, although some complex components are made separately before being combined, these components have to be managed so that all the visible fabrics from the separate components being combined into a unit came from the same dyed batches of materials.
(Our startup had to figure out at which stage of a high-end production line to integrate part of our supply chain integrity technology.)
The main benefit of assembling subassemblies separately appears to be that if there is some issue on the production line (eg. a machine is broken), then just that one subassembly line has to stop, and everything else can continue.
To get the benefits, you need storage racks for completed subassemblies.
And, when the machine is fixed, you have the opportunity to run just that line with more operators faster to 'catch up' and refill stocks of that subassembly.
I really wished people read up on the Toyota Production System, JIT and actually understood it before commenting on whatever press release Tesla or other put out.
No shit, you need storage? Please, do tell me more...
I'm afraid most of the JIT methods of 'not needing storage, everything is just in time', is in fact asking the suppliers to do storage for you.
JIT tells a supplier, 'I need X parts available at exactly Y time. If they are late, I will punish you massively. You can't deliver them early either.'.
So the supplier builds the parts early (so that any machine breakdowns/unforseen problems don't cause them to be late). The supplier then stores the parts till the exact time and delivers them. Parts are still stored, just the cost and effort of the storage is borne by the supplier.
You can see this if you take apart a car and look at date codes on, for example, microprocessors. They'll be months or sometimes even years apart.
Floor area of a warehouse is very cheap compared to the ~ $13 Billion worth of cars that a factory will churn out in a year.
The machines you put in a factory, and the people you employ in the factory are the expensive bits. The actual concrete floor area is super cheap.
If someone has looked at the total cost of a factory, calculated the cost per square foot, and then said "if only we could reduce the square footage, we would save money", then they are fooling themselves.
The article alluded to the idea that reducing floor area and would reduce the cost of getting parts to the right place. If your process is 500 feet long instead of 1000 feet long, you just made your material handling workers up to twice as productive.
True, but in a way you want stuff to be spread out for the same reason.
If the truck that delivers window motors can unload at a loading bay near the window motor storage racks, which is in turn near the place on the production line where window motors is installed, then at no point does a member of staff transport any goods along the length of the line.
Cram the line into a tiny floor area, and you are unlikely to be able to achieve that.
I believe that this modified assembly line has another unstated yet massive benefit...
Namely, cars are expensive and hard to ship - they don't pack well, and they have tariffs.
Yet car subassemblies in many cases ship really well - you can probably pack 500 doors in a 40 ft container for example, with a shipping cost half way around the globe of $5/door.
And tesla, having factories all over the world, can then manufacture subassemblies in places with low material or labor costs (depending on the subassembly), and do far less final assembly in the destination country, avoiding import tariffs, high labor prices, and loss of efficiencies of scale.
Since they're vertically integrated, they have a lot of pricing power - can can decide if a car door is worth $50 or $1000 as they like as far as 'country of origin of materials' goes.
And they can also build a 'car factory' (ie. subassembly bolting together factory) in nearly every country worldwide, grabbing tax incentives from a lot of governments who would love to have a car factory. They can write "Proudly made in X to a US design" on all cars sold in X - saving on destination shipping, while also being the 'local' car for buyers who are nationalistic.
You just described ever single automotive, aerospace or heavy machining equipment supply chain currently running on this planet. Every single one of them.
Apple? Verticaly integrated? Tell that Foxxconn, they'd like to hear their contracts got cancelled.
Ford, like the first one, tried vertical integration. You can google how his rubber plantations worked out. Vertical integration stopped being a thing in the 70s, and for good reasons.
It seems like this is great for producing a car as cheaply as possible. If one of those 3 parts (front casting, rear casting, structural battery) is damaged in a wreck, it seems probable that the car would be totaled by the insurance company.
It's not clear how a damaged casting could even be repaired.
In an ideal world, cars would be driving themselves and not crashing into one another, of course.
69 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThe wording in the article "[t]he breach would violate the GDPR" implies that the act of the whistleblower leaking the information IS directly the violation...
I'm a fan of whistleblower protections, but if there isn't anything reasonably interpreted as illegal on the safety front, and he shared everyone's private information creating a violation of the law, then he should obviously face legal consequences without any extra protection whatsoever.
I am struggling to even see what the whistleblower intention is really. He leaked a seven year period of drive assistance complaints and it was just 4,000 (this sounds like a surprisingly small amount of complaints for a layman like me). Was Tesla hiding this in court cases? Were they not following regulatory reporting requirements?
The thing is, they pretty much carted out these same talking points about revolutionizing manufacturing with automation for the Model 3 and it was a colossal flop. They had to build giant tents in their parking lot to make a standard production line because the automated one shit the bed. Not sure why it would be different this time.
Where to start with this article?
Here is a good spot I guess.
First off, Moravy is wrong.
If anyone thinks that auto manufacturing and the "vehicle assembly process" has not substantially changed in the last 100 years, then they are totally ignorant of the industry and of the exacting details associated with something as complex as automotive manufacturing.
The other vital thing that this article fails to mention at all is how manufacturing is shaped by the larger concerns of the product lifecycle - which is (or should be) the actual "product" that leaves the factory.
"The car" is just a hunk of metal that embodies the product lifecycle - which can be competitively unique from manufacturer-to-manufacturer.
One cannot talk myopically about "costs" and whatever happens on the manufacturing floor without bringing in the total concerns of the product lifecycle (i.e. service, end-of-life, market requirements).
That is difficult to do in an article because the total size and complexity of each automaker's product lifecycle is immense (and largely unknown externally from the automaker in question), but it must be done.
> If something goes wrong in final assembly, you block the whole line and you end up with buffering in between.”
Which is how, fundamentally or in part fundamentally, the Toyota Production System works - and it is difficult to argue with the quality results at Toyota.
Honestly, I am not seeing much of a difference here overall.
There are various component assembly lines that do run outside and "in parallel" with the General Assembly lines at incumbent automakers.
I am not even sure how this is debatable.
> “However, there are some quality-related risks involved, such as potential gaps in fit and finish,” warns Pischalnikov. (snip) “The reason that’s always been done is for color consistency, to ensure that there’s a perfect match between the doors and the rest of the car body,” Prasad points out. “By not having to assemble, disassemble and reassemble vehicles, you can reduce production costs and eliminate waste.
Which are quality control aspects that Tesla still seemingly struggles with, near as I can tell.
I am all for encouraging automakers to explore new methods of automotive manufacturing and BEV production will present significant opportunities to do so, but this article from Assembly Magazine is, at the very least, incomplete.
1) Tesla customers seem extraordinarily willing to overlook production defects and servicing/repair issues compared to customers of other OEMs. This lets them get away with lower manufacturing quality tolerances than they normally would, as noted in the article mentioning the water ingress issues. Seems like they're going to further capitalize on this customer tolerance with the paint process changes.
2) As a result of only building BEVs with no legacy support requirements, Tesla is able to design the manufacturing process and vehicles themselves to be more efficient to assemble. It's a definite competitive advantage today and that's another thing some of their intended changes here will try to capitalize on. The question to me is how long it will be until the traditional OEMs catch up here.
While automakers reuse factories, they have no qualms about building new ones and closing old. I have family that works on assembly lines and every couple years they get an offer to move to New Mexico, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia or wherever the new factory is being built.
What is the legacy albatross that hangs around ICE manufacturer necks?
> "The car" is just a hunk of metal that embodies the product lifecycle - which can be competitively unique from manufacturer-to-manufacturer.
The thing is, Tesla doesn't have a concept about product lifecycle once the car rolls off the line. They don't care about tuners and tinkerers, they don't care about aftermarket sales (e.g. people realizing they might want a trailer hitch), they don't care about people ending in accidents (or why else does it need months for spare parts for a body shop), they don't care about maintenance (because let's be real, unless you get a lemon car, all you'll need to do for 10-15 years is brake and tire changes!) and no one forces them to do so either, so they do what makes the most profit for them: easy assembly trumps everything, and not having much of a dealer/service station network means you don't have to invest money into building it and schmoozing up dealers' arses for incentives.
Their entire structure is fundamentally different from conventional car makers. Add on top what the Chinese are doing, and the conventionals are headed for some really dark times.
https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press-releases/20...
Tesla's problem is not scale. Their problem is that they cut every corner known to man in pursuit of scale. As a result, their cars are the lousiest shitboxes on the road.
https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...
https://electrek.co/2023/02/28/tesla-model-y-work-of-art-toy...
Be careful with conflating 'popularity' with 'quality.' Tesla should be wary of their recent success. There's the potential for huge backlash when people start to realize Tesla's support is poor if your issue lies outside the bounds of the 'typical' issues they're expecting.
Bad news travels fast.
lousy shitbox > perfect corolla
"Tesla plans to revolutionize automotive assembly with its unboxed production concept, which aims to reduce costs by 50% and factory space by 40%. Instead of linear assembly lines, Tesla will produce subassemblies from large castings and assemble vehicles in parallel. Tesla engineers believe this will enable them to scale production to 20 million vehicles per year. The unboxed process involves delaying 3D assembly for as long as possible to simplify operations and automation. While some experts are skeptical, others think the concept has merit and could transform automotive manufacturing if Tesla can overcome challenges with parts alignment and sealing. The unboxed assembly concept could enable huge gains in the paint shop by compartmentalizing and painting different vehicle sections simultaneously."
One change that people don't appreciate much is that Tesla has gotten much better at making their cars. While other automakers now have models which spec-wise are competitive with the 3 and and Y, only Tesla and maybe BYD can make EVs profitably at scale. This is why they've been able to cut prices and still be decently profitable - a Model 3 RWD costs $40,240, which is about $33,500 in 2018 dollars (when the Model 3 started selling).
I expect legacy car makers will follow Tesla's lead on this process (and switching to 48V) much as they are now following and introducing large castings in their cars.
I only find one unnamed source calling it a work of art and
>However, Toyota is not entirely sure that EVs made by Tesla or BYD would stand up to the company's rigorous internal quality standards.
I could start with omitting s flame trench thing in Boca Chica b/c "it would take too lomg", the (illegal) changes to their Fremont paint shop and the resulting fires, not keeping spare parts available b/c of frequent iterations applied during production, skipping brake tests, shit design decisions leading to many broken ball joints on their control arms ("whompy wheels"), the "lets use touchscreens not certified for automotive usage" (resulting in yellowing and seeping glue issues)...
The customers and employees suffer.
?
https://elonmusk.today/
I think part of this also is that Elon is obsessed with the numbers. Deliveries, deliveries, deliveries. To him, every part sitting waiting on a shelf for service, repair, etc., is a part not going on a new build.
People needing service can wait, because they have no choice. The quarterly numbers can't wait.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I have a few decades of insight into software development. And from that I can say that it is actually possible that a whole industry can be insanely inefficient without anybody noticing.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds for cars and huge efficiency gains are possible.
Certainly something was wrong with the entire industry, and nobody seemed to pay enough attention, at least among its captains.
I was interested to learn this was also a consideration in apparel manufacturing: dyed fabrics have some perceptible color variation between batches. So, although some complex components are made separately before being combined, these components have to be managed so that all the visible fabrics from the separate components being combined into a unit came from the same dyed batches of materials.
(Our startup had to figure out at which stage of a high-end production line to integrate part of our supply chain integrity technology.)
To get the benefits, you need storage racks for completed subassemblies.
And, when the machine is fixed, you have the opportunity to run just that line with more operators faster to 'catch up' and refill stocks of that subassembly.
No shit, you need storage? Please, do tell me more...
JIT tells a supplier, 'I need X parts available at exactly Y time. If they are late, I will punish you massively. You can't deliver them early either.'.
So the supplier builds the parts early (so that any machine breakdowns/unforseen problems don't cause them to be late). The supplier then stores the parts till the exact time and delivers them. Parts are still stored, just the cost and effort of the storage is borne by the supplier.
You can see this if you take apart a car and look at date codes on, for example, microprocessors. They'll be months or sometimes even years apart.
Floor area of a warehouse is very cheap compared to the ~ $13 Billion worth of cars that a factory will churn out in a year.
The machines you put in a factory, and the people you employ in the factory are the expensive bits. The actual concrete floor area is super cheap.
If someone has looked at the total cost of a factory, calculated the cost per square foot, and then said "if only we could reduce the square footage, we would save money", then they are fooling themselves.
If the truck that delivers window motors can unload at a loading bay near the window motor storage racks, which is in turn near the place on the production line where window motors is installed, then at no point does a member of staff transport any goods along the length of the line.
Cram the line into a tiny floor area, and you are unlikely to be able to achieve that.
Namely, cars are expensive and hard to ship - they don't pack well, and they have tariffs.
Yet car subassemblies in many cases ship really well - you can probably pack 500 doors in a 40 ft container for example, with a shipping cost half way around the globe of $5/door.
And tesla, having factories all over the world, can then manufacture subassemblies in places with low material or labor costs (depending on the subassembly), and do far less final assembly in the destination country, avoiding import tariffs, high labor prices, and loss of efficiencies of scale.
Since they're vertically integrated, they have a lot of pricing power - can can decide if a car door is worth $50 or $1000 as they like as far as 'country of origin of materials' goes.
And they can also build a 'car factory' (ie. subassembly bolting together factory) in nearly every country worldwide, grabbing tax incentives from a lot of governments who would love to have a car factory. They can write "Proudly made in X to a US design" on all cars sold in X - saving on destination shipping, while also being the 'local' car for buyers who are nationalistic.
But yeah, Tesla is the first company to try that.
Apple is the only other company which can claim to be similar in that aspect.
Ford, like the first one, tried vertical integration. You can google how his rubber plantations worked out. Vertical integration stopped being a thing in the 70s, and for good reasons.
It's not clear how a damaged casting could even be repaired.
In an ideal world, cars would be driving themselves and not crashing into one another, of course.