Tesla's Simultaneous Brilliance and Incompetence Revealed in Teardown of Model 3

[tlb]

Is the intellectual asymmetry between creating a design and analyzing it so large that a small teardown team can reliably analyze trade-offs in a design created by a large engineering group?

For example, when they say "this flange is larger than necessary", how can they know all the possible reasons it might be necessary? Perhaps it adds stiffness or crash energy absorption, or is used to grasp the part during assembly, or avoids a resonant frequency.

[cvaidya1986]

They are iterating and optimizing the hardware rapidly treating it just like software. And pushing out versions that work fine to improve stuff later. It’s as if the car is communicating the Silicon Valley ethos with its seemingly random features that are simply optimized towards something that can be shipped ASAP. Interesting how one can deduce culture just by looking deep inside an artefact. One day aliens will try to decipher how early humans behaved by analyzing excavated iPhones.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

One of the problems with that is that hardware is not software and at some point it will have to be repaired. It's bad enough when a part changes design halfway through the model year. I can't imagine trying to repair a Model 3 five years from now and finding out that e.g., the right front wheel bearing has 10 different versions and it's not completely clear which one I need.

[stcredzero]

One day aliens will try to decipher how early humans behaved by analyzing excavated iPhones.

Those aliens will be our descendants. And they won't have to excavate. They'll just look up the right shop in Akihabara, or equivalent of the time.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/technologies-do/

[dsfyu404ed]

That's great if you just want to fleece the next round of VCs before you fold but cars last a decade or more and you can't just keep on building half baked junk and expect consumers not to catch on. Just because your lease ends at 36mo doesn't mean how the vehicle performs after that doesn't affect the company's reputation.

[samfriedman]

>Most confounding to Munro and his team was the body construction of the Model 3. "This car is the heaviest body-in-white I've ever seen," he said, calling the construction "ridiculous" and highlighting areas where Tesla needlessly added weight with things like excess metal flanges and overlapping layers of steel. "This adds weight without value," he said.

Optimizing structural design is hard. There are plenty of examples of talented young engineers with lots of budget who can make a really clever and strong design, but it will frequently also be overengineered and far over weight or cost for its design purpose. An infamous example would be the Juicero juicer[0]. It takes a lot of experience and knowledge to make a highly optimized frame or structural component.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

[TimJYoung]

For contrast, here's Sandy Munro on the Autoline Network show talking about his teardown of the BMW i3:

https://youtu.be/uDr4L6BzpP8

[cowsandmilk]

And here's him discussing the Model 3 teardown on Autoline (don't see a link to this in the article)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo

[jsnell]

I don't drive and don't care about cars in general, but I'm just riveted by this video.

[SteveCoast]

I just read a book about Henry Ford. They evolved the model T rapidly so models coming off the line weeks or months apart had significant differences. They kept evolving it for years

Reminded me of the model 3. So, I don't have a ton of faith in a single datapoint on Tesla build quality.

[pests]

Skunk Works did the same. Ben Rich mentions how by the time #9 of a plane rolled off the manufacturing floor they had devised new methods or better way of doing things. With meticulous record keeping they would be able to go back and re-engineer earlier planes.

[dotancohen]

One doesn't even need to go that far back to find relevant examples. The head of manufacturing at Spacex recently started that no two Falcon 9 cores were built identically.

[carlivar]

The Model T cost being so cheap due to supply and assembly line innovation is a big difference.

The Model 3 at $49k starting price messes up the comparison. A shame the $35k version remains vaporware since that would be a more apt comparison I think. People can and should be pickier for that extra $14k.

[birdman3131]

>The fact that Tesla can simultaneously demonstrate brilliance and incompetence in the same vehicle is not surprising, considering it is a high-tech software company trying to master complex manufacturing processes that took established automakers more than 100 years to perfect.

This is wrong. At the very least it would be since the 60's and probably later. Seeing as 1963 was the first time CNC was used by the auto industry as far as I can tell. While they have been making cars for over 100 years you really can't include the time before technologies like CAD and CAM. And even those took a while to see widespread usage. Add to that the ability modern CAD software has to model stresses bases on the different forces in play makes a hell of a difference.

Even just going back 12 years and the amount of computing you have access to vastly changes. That was when AWS came out. AWS lets you compute massive amount of engineering data without having to invest into a super computer. (Not to say the auto industry did not have those super computers before then.)

[slantyyz]

> The fact that Tesla can simultaneously demonstrate brilliance and incompetence in the same vehicle is not surprising, considering it is a high-tech software company trying to master complex manufacturing processes that took established automakers more than 100 years to perfect.

>> This is wrong. At the very least it would be since the 60's and probably later.

If you watch the video on Youtube (that someone else posted here) where Munro is talking about the Model 3, (jump to 36m20s, he gets into it about 15-20s later [1]), you'll realize that the "complex manufacturing processes that took established automakers more than 100 years to perfect" are not about advances in tooling/tech, but advances in quality control processes. If you don't want to watch the video, the acronyms Munro drops are AIAG, PPS, PPAP and APQP.

Things get even more interesting when someone on the panel asks him what would have happened if Tesla would have subbed out the design and manufacturing to a company like Magna.

[1] https://youtu.be/CpCrkO1x-Qo?t=36m20s

[joe_the_user]

I think it's reasonable to talk of a culture of engineering (or design) going back earlier than a given technology. A large company has to make sure at any given that a new approach does everything that an older approach does. The company may have access large customers for testing and requirements gathering so they can wind-up doing technology X "correctly" even if they start-out behind on technology X.

With the variety of changes different companies go through (being bought, sold, spun-off, etc), it's certainly an interesting question whether a company retains a given "core competency" or any core competency at a given time.

I know in the case of CNC manufacturing, the devices were essentially programmable lathes and one can talk of a "CNC programmer" but the system was designed to leverage the existing knowledge and population of manual lathe operators and there's no relation to computer programmers and instead the "touch stone" is ordinary lath operation I believe (a CNC programmer makes $22/hour average conveniently). Thus it's reasonable to say manufacturing culture in the US references things earlier than CNC.

You can see a similar thing in the way Photoshop, Illustrator and cousins ape paper and pencil tools - the standards, skills and terminology of layout were carried through the transition (to the point that these industry standard tools have an interface that seems fairly pathological to newbies).

[chipotle_coyote]

> At the very least it would be since the 60's and probably later.

So Tesla is a high-tech software company trying to master complex manufacturing processes that took established automakers more than 50 years to perfect? I'm not sure that really changes the implicit argument.

[jonknee]

This quote is brutal:

> A Tesla spokesperson said the primary car evaluated by Munro was built in 2017, adding: "We have significantly refined our production processes since then, and while there’s always room for improvement, our data already shows that Model 3 quality is rapidly getting better.”

Sounds like Tesla is agreeing that they sold sub-par vehicles?

[thaumaturgy]

Warren Buffett: "I am 7 billion dollars richer in 2017 than I was in 2016."

You: "So you were poor in 2016 then?"

[Rexxar]

Using more resource than necessary to build a product doesn't it has deficiencies from the user point of view.

[Diederich]

I think it means that they are claiming the production quality of their cars has increased, and will continue to increase over time.

[lsh123]

The old saying "Don't install a new Windows version until SP2 is out" is still true :)

[LoSboccacc]

In this case may be but the statement itself says now is better than previously without explicit admission that previous quality was bad.

It’s like apple, every year iphone is the best iohone yet, but that doesn’t imply directly that the previous model was bad.

[venning]

> Everything that's below the floor pan is amazing. Everything above it is what it is.

Honest question: Is everything below the floor pan designed and built by Panasonic?

[sweden]

No, only the battery cells: http://img.ismap.com/nimg/6c/67/e370d981467b8ba457e178916006...

The battery modules (a group of cells) and the battery packs (a group of battery modules) are completely engineered by Tesla.

I recommend this series of videos about Tesla's battery modules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7GR5fERXNY

[cowsandmilk]

He was very complimentary of the circuit boards, saying he has no idea where they were sourced and basically saying they were the only company using cutting edge circuitry of a quality and density similar to the latest cell phones.

[jernfrost]

I thought Panasonic only made the cells and that tesla assembles the batteries, cooling system, electric drive train etc.

[olivermarks]

https://youtu.be/CpCrkO1x-Qo 90 minute discussion of Tesla 3 with Munro and others on the excellent autoline network youtube channel ('Really heavy, really expensive')

[nojvek]

87k for a benchmark report. That’s something. Car makers manufacture in millions so 87k is a tiny expense for a high quality competitive analysis by a 3rd party unbiased firm.

I love tiny business that are the forefront leaders in a small profitable nice.

[inertial]

There's was also this article a few months ago on some glaring flaws in Tesla vs i3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16305520

[happertiger]

Are they working with Tesla to provid this feedback into their production flow? There is no mention of it. Does anyone know?

[_ph_]

It would seem odd that as Elon has his experience with SpaceX in the background, and SpaceX engineers are consulting for Tesla, that the metal construction was done overly clumsy without a reason. Equally likely is, that they had a clear plan when designing the metal work on the Model 3 - but it is not obvious to people trained in the way the automobile industry works, as Tesla certainly is thinking differently.

[ucaetano]

"The fact that Tesla can simultaneously demonstrate brilliance and incompetence in the same vehicle is not surprising, considering it is a high-tech software company trying to master complex manufacturing processes that took established automakers more than 100 years to perfect."

High-tech software company?

Tesla is an automaker, not a software company. Sure, Elon comes from the software/tech/payments industry, but putting Zuckerberg in charge of Exxon wouldn't change the fact that Exxon is an energy/oil company.

[garyfirestorm]

I work in one of the big 3's. we do crazy things too, its just that gizmodo isnt interesting in any of it :D I tend to walk in at 9 or 10 am and walk out of 7 or 8 pm. Our culture isn't any different than tech industries (maybe a little exaggeration there) I find it a little intriguing when people label(mislabel) a particular industry.

edit - one of the big 3 automakers

[sjm-lbm]

It's a bit awkwardly worded, but I get their point (I think) - take your example and swap it, for instance: if you were to exchange all the employees at Facebook for employees at Exxon, the company structurally and culturally would still be an energy/oil company even if the product they were making was software. Likewise, Tesla runs, structurally and culturally, like a software company, even though they are building cars.

[mlindner]

Automotive companies don't usually write large amounts of their own software for infotainment, vehicle controls, machine learning, factory systems engineering and the actual embedded programming for the electronics. Yes Tesla is a software company. They hire a huge amount of software engineers.

Is Apple not a software company because they make phones and give away all their software for those phones for free like Tesla does?

[martyvis]

At least they didn't say Tesla was a rocket company.

[elihu]

Another point of view is that Tesla isn't either of those things but rather an energy company.

[dsfyu404ed]

That manufacturing a car isn't something a tech company excels in even though they can build a good battery doesn't surprise me one bit.