I'd bet that the guys at the coal face are wanting to kill their PR people right now for making promises that they know will get broken.
Disclosure: work in the automotive industry designing high volume production lines and planning vehicle launches.
Tesla might not do what they're promising. Hell, they probably won't do what they're promising. But pronouncing something impossible on the basis of industry experience can be a dangerous thing. Some things are considered unthinkable and impossible only until someone finds a way to do them, after which they are retroactively declared obvious and inevitable.
Certainly, Tesla seem to have the right ideas: Electric cars are inherently simpler, mechanically speaking, than gasoline cars, and they're leveraging this further by reducing the options and variability on the Model 3 to the absolute minimum. They also hired Peter Hochholdinger from Audi as VP of production, and he is pursuing a pretty extreme form of Industry 4.0[1] — with everything in their production process being instrumented, automated and designed for easy replacement.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0 [2] http://www.mljournal-digital.com/meleadershipjournal/october...
Tesla will almost certainly be using a combination of materials on the model 3; mild steels (cheap and cheerful, easy to press), aluminium (lightweight) and boron steels (strong). To join these materials you need a variety of techniques including resistance spot welding, aluminium RSW (altogether more difficult than steel because of the low melting point and high conductivity, and the fact that weld spatter sticks to the tip of the gun), riveting (for steel-Al joints), structural adhesives, flow drill screws, laser welds etc. All of these processes take serious time to calibrate and get right, and some are not all that robust (by high volume standards).
There are many quality loops with a vehicle launch. The tooling needs to be proven out. Tools get shimmed relentlessly to make up for panel variations - panel quality can vary from batch to batch within a press run. This is especially true for mixed material cars.
Believe me, these are not easy problems to solve and nothing I've seen and heard out of Tesla makes me think they've addressed any of these issues.
https://www.truedelta.com/Tesla-Model-S/reliability-1095
Conversely, the Toyota Prius is one of the most reliable cars. Yet it is mechanically complex with both an internal combustion engine and an electric motor, plus a CVT. So clearly engineering skill and manufacturing quality are bigger factors than the drive train.
A little context here might be good. The supposed disbelief of Blackberry was their carrier deal, as they themselves were not _allowed_ to sell phones with that feature set.
It wasn't unthinkable to build it engineering-wise. (It was expensive yet with underwhelming features, a 2G phone with no apps at a time when even feature phones had 3G and apps for almost five years.) It was unthinkable business-wise. Those rules are easier to play hard and fast with.
That there is unfounded criticism doesn't mean all criticisms is unfounded.
Steve Jobs didn't promise production of 300mil iPhones in a year when they announced it.
They currently produce ~25K Model X and S per quarter, and they're having supply issues with battery packs. (see the other, recent thread on them)
How in the world are they going to be producing 20K Model 3s by December, without cannibalizing their more profitable existing sales, and judging by their own previous growth rate and demand problems?
There a story a couple of months ago about the fact that they've saved a lot of time by going straight to the main production lines rather than building a testing line first?
Is this a good plan? Time will tell but I'm sure glad I'm not involved. :S
Sources:
http://www.newsweek.com/tesla-skips-traditional-manufacturin...
http://autoweek.com/article/green-cars/tesla-wont-test-model...
Edit: From the second link:
> Let's recap: Tesla's flawed Model X launch was partly due to not taking the time to adjust for problems identified in the soft-tooling phase of pre-production. The lesson Tesla learned? Don't bother with soft tooling for the Model 3.
Wow. Is it just me or does that sound like "The unit tests kept failing and made us miss a deadline. No more unit tests!"
To get the car all road legal it needs to be crash tested - that is usually what the pre-volume builds are used for. If they fail (and they sometimes do, because you can't do a finite element analysis on an assembly as complex as a car in the variety of scenarios that you would crash test it) then you need to reengineer the car. This usually means panel gauge increases, sometimes it means additional reinforcement parts (boron steel inserts and brackets a lot of the time). If that happens the production could be delayed by months as they'd need to find a way to feed those parts to the line and modify any tooling that might be effected.
History of his accomplishments show us "industry knowledge" doesn't really matter as he's trying to do things explicitly different than the rest of the industry.
The amount of focus and effort Tesla has put toward the tech in the Model 3 pales in comparison to the amount they have put toward factory automation. Musk has said as much in multiple interviews. He's talked about how it's 10x harder to 'build the machines that build the machines'.
See also their acquisition of Grohmann Engineering.
Having said all that, we will have to wait and see. One thing I do know is that Musk's ventures have a long history of surprising the status quo.
You might not be wrong, but the shorts get squeezed Everytime someone says this. I wouldn't bet against Tesla and the market is more than tolerant of these delays
Their initial "hand over" is to employees, not real customers, so it is really just internal testing and does not indicate anything about when actual deliveries will begin.
Hitting delivery deadlines is actually worse than missing them if you are hitting them by pushing an unfinished product which is losing tons of money per unit due to inefficient production processes and creating huge future liabilities for warranty repairs, recalls, and negligence lawsuits if someone gets injured by a defect.
There is a reason why Goldman is revising their price target down on this news and their target is half the current stock price.
"After delivering 25,051 vehicles during the first quarter, it pushes deliveries to “approximately 47,100” according to the company. [For the year.] It represents a 53% increase over deliveries during the same period last year and both Model S and Model X deliveries were higher than during Q2 2016"
Maybe a plateau could be argued looking at the graph here.
I'm not clear what like that you are referring to, or what would be a more reasonable plan.
Can't find the article but I was an interesting read
Electrek has an article quoting it. Elon was describing the idea of designing the "Machine that builds the Machines"[0].
“We realized that the true problem, the true difficulty, and where the greatest potential is – is building the machine that makes the machine. In other words, it’s building the factory. I’m really thinking of the factory like a product.”
[0]:https://electrek.co/2016/06/01/elon-musk-machines-making-mac...
Also, I should think that the level of automation required to produce a mass market car on the scale necessary to be profitable would be insane... And I bet Toyota, GM and all the others have patents on many, if not all of these production automation technologies.
For example, I would never consider dropping $90k on a car (unless I was earning many multiples of that a year), but $35k on a car that has the right range for me, and many of the mod cons of the grown up version? That's more likely.
Ask yourself this - why would anyone buy an A1, A3 or A4 when there is the A5, A7, TT and R8/RS8 from Audi? Because people want different things from cars.
Now these people can own a Tesla without hurting their bank account. I think that there is a reason why car brands are either luxury or mass market but not both.
Obligatory "If you don't cannibalise yourself, someone else will" Steve Jobs quote! I see them aimed at different markets though; I could never justify buying a Model S, but a Model 3 is definitely feasible (especially in the UK where petrol prices are high).
So no, I truly don't think that is a worry. I think this is just continuation of the bigger picture and a calculated risk.
I don't see people that can easily drop a 100k on a car decide that they're suddenly buy an average Joe car.
I still think you are right - if you can "easily" drop 100k on a model S you are not going to buy the Model 3 instead. But if you were saving up for a model S and would have eventually bought it had Model 3 not became available, then yeah, Model 3 has just cannibalized those sales.
While its cool Tesla has entered "production" with the model 3 I haven't seen one story on what the actual production line looks like. How many people are hired for it and trained? Did they get all the equipment in, installed, and certified? Surely these can be found out.
I hope this is not like the X launch where some insiders made jokes about the paint being practically wet in regards to how close they cut it getting just the stage vehicles delivered.
the big concerns going forward are obviously cannibalization of the S sales and the fact these cars will be in the hands of people who won't be as accepting of issues as the early adopters have been. its easy to dismiss issues with your third, fourth, or fifth family vehicle. However some of the 3 buyers will be likely pushing their finances and this will be their only or second.
They aren't selling car assembly robotics, so the biggest issue (one would think) would be acquiring the robotics in the first place, as it would be the theoretical company selling the robots that would be infringing any patents.
Tesla is (to my understanding) free to use whatever technology they like in their factories, patented or not, so long as the products they're selling are non-infringing.
It's kind of ridiculous actually because even if you're in a 4 person carpool its pretty horrific.
The people who use the lanes, by and large, don't need them[1], and simultaneously, California subsidizes and encourages electric car driving while having, by far, the absolute worst electrical infrastructure in the country, with no real plan to improve it[2]
Don't worry, somehow, they are saving the environment in all this, despite the fact that most cars these days probably put out less emissions than a family that ate too many beans.
[1] They are pretty much rich people lanes. None of the very large number of day laborers, etc, could afford an electric car (and there are no electric trucks they could use), but also probably spend significantly more away from their families than people who do use them.
[2] Yes, the math says that if everyone in california drove an electric car, we'd be in trouble. Even if they only charge off peak. The same is even more true of the US, I did the math out in an earlier HN post, IIRC it comes out to something ridiculous like double or triple all current residential electric usage on a yearly basis.
Before you disagree, remember there was a time they went from exactly zero HOV lanes to one.. which is an infinite increase. This time they will go from whatever they have now (usually one) to two, which is at most only a 100% increase.
Also keep in mind the day will come that all roads will only permit electric vehicles, essentially meaning all lanes are "HOV". So from 2017 -> the future we must transition to that, which means we have to start adding HOV lanes sooner or later.
That would be pretty dumb. This is a very strange claim from an overlander (assuming you agree with it); surely you're aware that batteries are nowhere near the energy density of chemical fuel, and probably won't be for a long time. We're even further away from practical electric ATVs or motorcycles. Banning gas vehicles in the next ~50 years would be incredibly destructive to rural areas and outdoor recreation.
By the time it would be semi-feasible to outlaw gas vehicles, there'd probably be no point, because electrics would be cheaper for most consumers anyway.
On the other hand,
> Tesla said that it's now "rare" for a new Model X to have "initial quality problems." [1]
doesn't sound very pretty.
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/03/tesla-delivers-22000-vehicles...
Disclosure: Short Tesla and Alibaba.
And accompanying YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcgvAYKro10&t=1648s
Here's hoping they are successful and safe too!
