Tesla’s New Car Smell | Hacker News Reader

Tesla’s New Car Smell

mondaynote.com

214 pointsokket198 comments

> I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”, prescriptions for car manufacturers that are lucidly detailed in The Machine That Changed The World (a great and, in parts, sad read). In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals. If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspect, correct, and quickly adjust their own production process.

This isn't just a minor set of sins. Tesla apparently fundamentally does not grasp the concept of Lean Manufacturing+ as developed by Toyota, also known as the Toyota Production System++.

+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing

++https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System

Tesla is doing stamping on-site and in-house. They have to store their in-process inventory somewhere. Toyota tends to push that problem back on their suppliers, demanding small just-in-time deliveries at a steady rate regardless of the optimum batch size for each part.

It's an classic problem in manufacturing. Where do you put the in-process inventory? Near where it's made? Near where it's used? Someplace else? What batch size do you use for each part? Bigger batches produce lower costs, but you have to put the stuff somewhere. There's software for optimizing this. But over-optimizing that can be a mistake.

Part of the Toyota system is to deliberately keep sources of confusion away from assembly, because confusion in assembly, where many parts come together, is likely to affect both quality and cost. It's better to have trouble upstream, where there's more buffering.

Tesla is in this mess because their production line is running far slower than planned, and their production planning was for a higher rate. So parts manufacturing and final assembly are out of sync.

I agree with all respect to Jean he's a computer guy and not a Mech Engineer. If Tesla has cheap land and can store locally why not - remember that Japan doesn't have as much land space as the USA has

JIT just pushes the costs on to smaller suppliers who a large company can effectively bully in the same way big supermarkets bully framers.

"JIT just pushes the costs on to smaller suppliers who a large company can effectively bully in the same way big supermarkets bully framers."

This is not how the TPS works (At least not in theory. In practice, bullying may or may not happen - I don't know about any). The idea behind JIT is that you can react to changes in external circumstances faster.

Also, the suppliers should also not have huge stockpiles of parts. Then they can, too, react fast to changes in demand. But this can also cause problems: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-toyota-group-and-the-...

If you have a stamping plant, you usually have far fewer presses than part numbers. You stamp out some part, then change dies to stamp out another part. Die changing and adjustment is time-consuming and is non-productive downtime. Once a press and die set is running well, it will produce parts at a good rate without much attention, but die changing is labor-intensive. The less often you change, the lower the cost per unit.

The optimal batch size at the stamping plant may be quite different from the batch size the assembly plant wants. That means in-process inventory, stored somewhere.

In the scale of auto body parts, dies weigh many tons and cranes are needed to do a die change. Clamping a die into position is complicated. There are quick-change systems. They're expensive.[1][2]

What's probably choking Tesla is that they planned their stamping batch sizes for a much higher production rate than they can currently achieve. Much of the planning for the Model 3 production line was based on the assumption that not much would go wrong. They made hard tooling for parts before using prototype soft tooling to save time.[3] That's a win only if you get it right the first time.

(I once worked in an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. They had to deal with problems like this. People talked about "setup" a lot. A basic fact of manufacturing is that setup and changes are much more difficult than production. Once you get a production machine set up, it's mostly putting in blanks and taking out product, and that's often automatic. Setup requires skilled people. There's been a lot of talk about "agile production" and a "lot size of one", but the real economies still appear only when you make large numbers of something. Look at the pricing for some on-line service that makes custom things for you. There will be a big price break as the quantity goes up.)

[1] http://www.thefabricator.com/article/stamping/10-common-quic... [2] http://www.thefabricator.com/article/stamping/how-quick-die-... [3] https://insideevs.com/tesla-insider-speaks-out-on-problems-o...

There are two ways of doing production: large batches, like you describe, and TPS. It is counterintuitive but TPS makes small batch production more efficient and more cost effective than large batches because it looks at the production system as a whole. You may want to read up on it - Check out The Machine That Changed the World.

that's not how I recall JIT is the parts arrive just as needed on a mature production line continually making tweaks to parts is more akin to small batch production

Paywall link.

But don't Japanese companies replicate this setup even when they set up factories the USA?

They do, and it has been proven successful. I think it is unlikely that Tesla will be able to deliver high-quality cars while maintaining high efficiency if they continue like this.

The article lists another reason for not storing parts locally. It allows for rapid adjustment requests to the part supplier when Tesla realizes a part needs a slight adjustment to its design.

Very similar concept to agile software development — setup everything for rapid iteration.

Work in process is extremely expensive and large batches are more expensive than just in time production. This is the core of TPS and its not disputed.

Toyota’s recalls are expensive, as they involve a network of dealers who need to be paid for providing the repair and maintenance.

Tesla’s vertical integration of service centers has an interesting side effect - recalls and repairs are pretty cheap, as the costs of service centers and loaner vehicles they give out are fixed and have been borne already.

I wonder if that makes the company more dismissive of potential issues.

If you look at how Toyota's dealership network operates in Japan (Toyopet, Netz, etc.), you'll see that Toyota is capable of vertically integrating the entire distribution chain very well. My own experience of buying (in my case a Suzuki kei model) a domestic car in Japan was quite eye-opening: my dealer came to my house and had tea with us, found us the best, least-expensive configuration of the car, dropped it off at the house some weeks later, and then stayed in touch like a member of our extended family, checking in every few months to let us know he was available. When I accidentally left the dome light on overnight night, he drove an hour each way to deliver and install a new battery, at 10PM, in the rain. And we had to beg him to invoice us. Sure enough, when I sold the car about a year later, I offered it to him first. He took the Shinkansen from Nagoya to Kyoto to pick it up, had tea with us, handed us an envelope with about 70% of the original purchase price in cash, and drove it home without even so much as an inspection. (By the way, the purchase price was $13K for a 2017 model that got around 80mpg.)

The inefficient dealership network is not something that emanates from Japan, but is Japan Auto adapting to local customs, legal requirements, and standards.

I am fascinated about this . Do you know where we can get more info about the way businesses treat their customers in Japan?

It’s basically impossible to learn about Japanese culture by reading things in English. For some reason, Japan brings out the worst kinds of cynics and misanthropes, all of whom feel the need to dispel anything positive that’s said about the place. In my experience, many businesses in Japan go beyond customer service and provide what I would characterize as hospitality or the kind of consideration that could only be repaid with goodwill and familial loyalty. Not to say that they are infallible: I bought a knife from one of the oldest blacksmiths in Kyoto and he flat-out forgot my order until we bothered him a month later. Damn good knife, though.

I kept this loosely-translated list of business principles from an NHK doc about thousand-plus-year-old companies in Kyoto.

- Honesty is a matter of course

- Make no sacrifice

- Examine quality

- Draw customers without words

- Do not allow your products to be defiled

- Purify yourself

- Do not overcharge

- Sell authentic items at suitable prices

I know this list may sound silly and melodramatic to some ears, but I think people should try harder to listen to lessons from the past—even if the provenance is slightly dubious.

I am just surprised why the western companies don't copy this model more.That would be an advantage. Zappos is doing that from what I heard.

I can't be the only person that would rather have the manufacturer of my car - for most of us the second most expensive thing we own after a house - have their incentives be to minisie the chance of shipping defects.

Those same incentives prevent those companies from fixing simple mistakes unless/until they are proven to be material.

Tesla is somewhat generous about voluntary proactive recalls on their dime http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-recall-model-x-suv-dont...

With that said, I agree that owning a first-year production model from Tesla is an iffy proposition. Late adopters get a fairly reliable workhorse, judging from owners' forums and anecdotal personal experience.

> Tesla’s vertical integration of service centers has an interesting side effect - recalls and repairs are pretty cheap

This is assuming that Tesla's centrally managed monolithic dealer/service network will be run more efficiently than the distributed and competitive dealer networks typical of other car companies.

That assumption runs counter to typical economic thinking that competitive market based solutions will be more efficient.

Dealerships are not that competitive, though.

They are awarded on territorial basis to guarantee some monopoly within a geographic market, and the incentive system (inventory requirements, bonuses) benefits current owners opening in new markets rather than new players stepping in.

Their business model also relies on frequent customer visits for repairs/maintenance and subsequent upsell, so their incentives are somewhat misaligned with manufacturer's. So even if Tesla did a complete 180 on their service centers and started selling dealerships, they might not have many takers considering their maintenance needs and potential revenue https://www.tesla.com/support/maintenance-plans

Lastly, while a network of independent mechanic shops might be an indicator of competitive markets working properly, that market is far from transparent due to information asymmetry between the service buyer and the service provider.

This is scary because it points to a potential future where they're treating cars like software. Weekly/monthly visits to the garage to get the car equivalent of "Weekly bug fixes and performance improvements" would be absolutely off-putting.

They are doing it already, they launched the latest batch with emergency braking off, to be enabled after some real world testing.

What makes you think Tesla doesn't fundamentally grasp it? This anecdote? The plural of anecdote is not data.

Your wikipedia link on the Toyota Production System says it was developed between 1948 and 1975. So it look 27 years to develop. Working for a startup myself, I'm very aware of Kanban and other TPS-inspired work processes. Sometimes in startup-hair-on-fire-mode that all goes out the window and I think that's where Tesla is in company maturity right now.

> Sometimes in startup-hair-on-fire-mode that all goes out the window

If that's how you use it, then you also don't grasp it. The point of a process is that it supports you in hard times. (In easy times, any process will do.) In my view, the essence of Lean is patient incremental gain. Giving in to panic is throwing all its benefits away, and creating both immediate and long-term problems for yourself.

A good counterexample to your theory is Toyota itself. They created the hybrid category from scratch. They are still the market leader. They started by building one. They moved on to a small annual production volume. As they worked out the kinks, they sold more and more, eventually starting to sell in the US. As far as I can tell, at no point did they enter "hair-on-fire mode".

Hmm, good point. I agree with you about patient incremental gain. I wish my boss and other leaders did. Maybe I also work for an Elon Musk, come to think of it. And yet, I'm still not sure my boss and others don't _understand_ lean manufacturing and its related disciplines. They just seem to pick and choose when they want to apply it. I was recently reading about Jeff Bezos and his "Day 1" mantra as well... perhaps the question is whether that sort of thing can apply to cars.

Toyota also had profits of billions of dollars from other lines to back their Hybrid model.

Tesla is basically a really big startup, and has nowhere near the cash reserve to take 6 years to bring the model 3 to market. It it basically get it out NOW, or fold. In 6 years Ford etc. etc. already has a model 3 equivalent for sale and knows how to manufacture. You can't play it so safe in an established market if you want to dive in.

I don't think it works like that.

"Getting it out now" means building a very reliable, high-volume production line. If you rush that, you get an unreliable production line, which unless you just ship garbage, will be a low-volume production line or a very expensive production line. Or both.

I understand why "hair-on-fire mode" feels right. One's internal feelings of urgency are matched by dramatic action. The chaos and excitement of red alert gives nobody time for contemplation and lets everyone ignore the uncomfortable feelings that might come from that. But people in that mode make terrible choices, drastically undervaluing the long term.

In software, it's especially easy for us. Our products are rarely life critical, people are used to them being flaky, and we can fix things later by shipping new versions. None of these is true about cars. People used to ship garbage anyhow, which is why the US car market in the 70s and 80s was plagued with problems. And why Toyota and others could make such inroads.

Tesla should absolutely be taking risks, especially product feature and marketing risks. But taking quality and productivity risks in hopes that they can somehow make it up later strikes me as a terrible idea.

So to try and bring back to software terms. There can be two reasons for a shaky launch in a software product:

1) An app is solid, has awesome QA... but the environment does not. You need to shake out some networking bugs / load bugs, etc.

2) The app is terrible. Every part of it is broke. needs a total rewrite.

To an end user both feel the same, but the expected curve to make it stable is VASTLY different.

In theory Tesla has been in the car business for at least a few years. It MAY be closer to 1. Maybe 2 or 3 vendors are 3 months behind schedule in delivering production machines. Which is bad, but not "we are totally screwed" bad.

On the other hand, it is insanely ambitious. It totally could be a #2 totally screwed bad.

Time will tell.

Or maybe Tesla "has been in the car business for a few years" and, in typical "disruptive" startup fashion, is ignoring lessons learned the hard way over decades. Mostly because, it seems, anything an established company does is wrong as a mater of dogmatic definition.

I just don't get the theory being passed around here that if they don't nail the process absolutely right on the first try (okay, third) that it can't improve.

What's wrong with improving the process as you go, as Toyota almost certainly did?

The problem is that from what Gassée says, the are behaving in ways that work against Lean-style continuous improvement.

It's sort of like saying, "Why can't you just clean this enormously messy code base up one bug at a time?" Sure, you can in theory. But it's a very rare project that does it. Even places that do total rewrites often eventually end up with as big a mess as they had before. Why? Because the real problem is the ideas, relationships, and habits that got them the messy code base in the first place. That is extremely hard to change.

How serious the problems are will determine if they are 2 month to fix problems or 2 year. If they are 2 year then model3 is in for some trouble.

It's pretty self-evident if you read the next two paragraphs:

> (Ironically, the Fremont plant is prominently featured in “The Machine…” as the locus of the ultimately failed GM-Toyota cooperation.)

> As I watched Tesla’s messy, hiccuping line, with workers dashing in to fix faulty parts in place, my mind travelled back to the Honda plant I had visited years ago in Marysville, Ohio. Clean, calm, everything moved smoothly. I was so shocked by the contrast that I imprudently voiced my concern. That didn’t go over well with my fellow Tesla owners. I was a killjoy, I was calling their choice into question.

So we have an actual first-hand description of the differences between Tesla's and Toyota/Honda's understanding of lean manufacturing. Even in the very same building in fact. And I'm pretty sure the author is describing the production of Model S or X, not the new Model 3. Since those cars have been in production for a while now, there's no way they wouldn't have implemented something like the lean manufacturing system unless they simply don't understand it.

I’ve been to a factory tour. The author’s anecdote is off the mark. What I observed were mostly robots doing the assemble and welding and then the typical assembly line for installing the interiors. It was smooth and had a cadence. Mr Gasee was talking about Just-In-Time (JIT) concepts and lean inventory and when he saw parts on a shelf it contradicted his idea of JIT. JIT doesn’t mean you can’t have safety stock. Tesla is also pursuing vertical integration and prefer to make subassemblies in-house. I have my doubts about Gasee’s agenda.

I really find it hard to believe they don't understand the TPS. Sure. Maybe. I don't know.

It seems more likely to me their "goal" (pun intended for those readers of "The Goal") is the TPS but their particular supply chain may not currently allow for it.

So even that interpretation leaves me wondering "why didn't they take that into account earlier"? Do the fancy computer-control-all-the-things people have too much influence compared to the boring practicalities of things like "how will we build this?"

Fundamentally my question on Tesla is now: if you're priced as a "we have a fundamentally better way of doing things that will disrupt the industry" company, but the core process in your business is still fundamentally inferior, will you have a long enough runway?

I used to be a bear on Tesla for grumpy "I don't like the decisions and design choices they make" reasons, but now the business itself seems a bit underdeveloped.

Here we agree. I come across as a Tesla fanboy in these comments but I think Tesla's valuation is crazy high, too high, and I still think there's a chance they fail completely like so many other auto companies (a tough business).

My theory is Musk knows the only way he'll be able to compete is attracting the best talent through stock incentives, and to do that he needs to jack up the stock price by pushing engineers way past what they are comfortable with.

An underreported stat is the increase in TSLA outstanding shares, which I think is Elon throwing stock incentives at his employees to make them go faster, as a TPS alternative (for now?)

https://ycharts.com/companies/TSLA/shares_outstanding

The increase in shares was due to secondary offering https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/26/tesla-motors-maxed...

Tesla’s stock behavior is due to the ongoing game of “who blinks first” between TSLA shorts and TSLA short-squeezers. With $10 billion short position the company’s fundamentals are reduced to a side show.

Your article only accounts for about 7.9 million new shares from the secondary offering, but many more have been issued.

It's primarily from equity grants. Even your article says Musk tacked on his stock option exercise as part of the secondary offering, which increased the dilution.

> I really find it hard to believe they don't understand the TPS. Sure. Maybe. I don't know.

American carmakers didn't get it for decades. Even when they thought they did, they performed Lean rituals without real understanding. This was despite Toyota trying vigorously to teach them.

History shows that knowledge transfer is really, really hard. Humans are just not very good at it :(

(A similar story is told of the spread of the use of Feynman diagrams in physics - I’ve read that their spread was far slower than you’d expect given their utility: For whatever reason it wasn’t enough to be told that they were an incredibly useful tool by people you trusted - it was only when non users actually worked together on problems with Feynman diagram users, or were taught by Feynman diagram users directly that their use actually spread. Both of these transfer methods required physical proximity which restricted the use of Feynman diagrams to a small number of labs for a surprisingly long time.)

Definitely. And in this case I don't think it was just knowledge that needed transferring. It was culture and values.

There's a This American Life episode (centered around what is now Tesla's plant) that covers this well: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/...

Fascinating story, do you have any idea where you read that?

Nope, but a quick Google suggests that this paper:

“Spreading the Tools of Theory: Feynman Diagrams in the USA, Japan, and the Soviet Union” by David Kaiser, Kenji Ito and Karl Hall

http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.SpreadingTools.pdf

must have been the original source research.

edit: Also, there’s a book (by one of the authors of that paper): “Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion Of Feynman Diagrams In Postwar Physics” https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002Y5W2X2

The Kaiser et al. paper cited by 'pja is fascinating. This passage (at 887) practically puts the reader in the room at the Institute for Advanced Study:

... Thus, when [Freeman] Dyson arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in September 1948, Feynman diagrams in hand, he immediately joined ten fellow ‘postdocs’ in theoretical physics, the largest cohort yet.

[J. Robert Oppenheimer had reorganized the Institute to emphasize post-doc training for physicists; he was quoted as saying that "the best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person."]

In fact, the new building that had been planned to hold offices for the newly expanded ranks had not been completed on time, so all of the postdocs wound up sharing desks in one large room for the first 6 weeks of their stay – an architectural arrangement perfectly suited for the sharing of tacit knowledge.

They huddled around large tables swapping ideas, pressing Dyson to explain the details of how to use Feynman diagrams. He delivered several sets of long lectures to the group, supplemented by constant, informal conversations.

By the winter of 1948–49, Dyson had organized them into several groups, each working on distinct diagrammatic calculations. One pair, Kenneth Watson and Joseph Lepore, worked with Dyson to calculate high-order terms in a certain model of nuclear forces, while another duo, Norman Kroll and Robert Karplus, took up Dyson’s lead to undertake similarly complex diagrammatic calculations in QED.

So effective were Dyson’s tutorials that Wolfgang Pauli wrote to another of the young Institute theorists that May, asking what Dyson and the rest of the ‘Feynman-school’ were working on.

</blockquote>

(Extra paragraphing added.)

Thank you! That was really a great read, and I wouldn't have sought it out without your help.

'pja, you should post the Kaiser et al. paper to HN on its own.

That's a good idea. Done.

Excellent. I just upvoted it; I hope the time zone difference won't keep the post from being seen.

It got a second chance & got 33 votes the second time, but no discussion. Oh well - maybe it needs an explanatory blogpost or two in order to draw people in.

> Even when they thought they did, they performed Lean rituals without real understanding.

This reminds me of a certain other industry cargo culting a certain other methodology, but I cannot put my finger on it ...

Might be the production _rate_ for the previous models doesn't mesh well with their suppliers. We buy plastics in runs of 15,000 parts. It takes us a couple of months to go through those. And then we order more. The manufacturer doesn't make 200 parts a day. Or 1000 a week. The do a full run of 5-20,000 every three months. Which takes them a whole day, once the machine is setup they run it till the order is filled. Sometimes it's obvious they do higher runs and then break up the shipments.

Okay so our products are cheap and simple. But our yearly totals of 50,000 to 100,000 units is comparable to the what Tesla is hoping to get out the door. Tesla's numbers for previous models weren't nearly that high. Gonna be hard to just in time that.

Personal feeling. What an automaker is doing by outsourcing parts to suppliers and then making them manage inventory is. a) they as someone mentioned, keep the inventory management away from the production line. And importantly allowing suppliers to apply higher levels of scale then you could other wise. Important because likely many of Tesla's suppliers production machinery has vastly more capacity then Tesla needs. Telsa and other automakers are thus 'renting' time on those machines.

Frankly I think Tesla is ramping to this scale for the first time, it's bound to be a mess.

TPS is, in part, a way of configuring your supply chain in order to ramp up production smoothly.

Tesla wants to ramp up production as their primary goal right now; if their supply chain is preventing them from doing so then they've funamentally failed.

> I really find it hard to believe they don't understand the TPS.

I agree, but that makes this more confusing and (at least potentially) more damning for Tesla. It's not that hard a concept; if you're running a manufacturing company but you screw up your supply chain badly then...I dunno. Maybe you're bad at running a manufacturing company? Supply chains are really important when you're doing something like making cars. And people having been advocating TPS since before I was even born.

So...it's a conundrum.

Obviously Tesla is doing _something_ about this because what is the Gigafactory if not a major part of the supply chain?

Toyota is a global car manufacturing company who has been manufacturing cars (and building new car factories) for many many decades now. This is will be Tesla's first high volume line of vehicles. I think it makes sense for some time to work out kinks in process and meta-processes.

Even a couple of years back when Toyota passed GM as highest volume maker of vehicles, the execs at Toyota said there was a moment where they took their eye off clean processes and Toyota quality suffered a bit. Some of that I suspect had to do with the timing of the retirement of a generation of very experienced people in Toyota. I think they've since been on a corrective course.

I think it makes sense for some time to work out kinks in process and meta-processes.

I think it makes sense to consider the state of the art for reliable production lines. But NIH syndrome will have its way.

If they're still in hair on fire mode after having many years and multiple previous models to practice on before the Model 3, that's the part that makes me think they don't grasp it.

Elon's software background, plus SpaceX which is fundamentally a very different kind of manufacturing, probably works against him here. Software startups essentially hate process (for often-good reasons) and view process as mostly a thing you put into place out of necessity after you've successfully navigated the growth phase. The stories from their production floor are the single most worrying thing that's come out about Tesla - bad vendor quality control, overengineering a la the Model X, all those other things are comparatively simple to grasp, learn from, and overcome. Why wasn't "learn how to mass-manufacture reliably" a much earlier goal?

Just because a system took 27 years to develop doesn't mean it takes 27 years to learn.

Tesla has been designing and producing road-worthy vehicles for 14 years. If they're in startup-hair-on-fire mode right now, something is very wrong.

Which new automaker of the past 40 years do you compare them to as far as measuring what is wrong?

Hyundai turned their quality around pretty massively in 10 to 20 years after entering the US market. So is our new bar for Tesla "do they run out of money before they can replicate what Hyundai did"? Doesn't seem like shooting for the stars.

Seems like blind replication isn't the answer alone ( http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207540701223493... ), which is unsurprising, but Tesla's sales targets and their current production line process as-reported seem at odds.

This stuff is very well-studied and making basic errors seems like a problem of hubris coming from a software industry that's in a much less mature state.

Every large, successful automotive manufacturer uses some flavor of TPS.

Tesla isn't a startup though, they've been building cars for ten+ years and have a lot of smart people working for them that could've looked to wikipedia to figure out how the other car manufacturers manage to be efficient.

I really doubt the problem is "nobody there understands the theory". More likely, as a large public company with considerable presales and aggressive public commitments, the ops people are probably being pressured to "just push a few more cars through manually today, while trying to improve the automation". It's easy to armchair-COO the situation and claim that you would halt the entire line (or problematic parts of it) for 30+ days unless/until every step is at 90%+ yield, but if Musk or the Board is saying no to that, you are basically trapped in a suboptimal local maximum that you know how to escape, but are socially unable to.

> In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals.

I'd imagine that is hugely affected by the lead time on the parts in question. If you're in a Japanese industrial town and every part's manufactured within 20km of your factory, it'd be a perfect approach. If you're in Palo Alto, California and some of your parts are manufactured in a Japanese industrial town, then "just enough" stockpiled parts may well be a three month supply.

Well, it's exactly the experience you get when you criticize Tesla on HN.

I am under the impression that the criticism here on HN is more nuanced than I normally read on the web.

It is. Always when we are not talking about Tesla, Apple or self driving vehicles.

The difference is that Honda doesn't make interesting cars. People are ready to cut Tesla some slack because they are truly innovating.

> The difference is that Honda doesn't make interesting cars.

You might have missed, for example the Honda Insight hybrid launched in 1999. Cd was 0.25 which was the lowest drag coefficient for a production car for a decade until bettered by a large electric sedan with 0.24...

Then there are the conventionally-powered Integra, S2000 and NSX[0] which are renowned amongst driving enthusiasts.

[0] actually the latest NSX is also a hybrid

All of those cars are not even close to recent except for the NSX. And even the NSX was dead for over a decade before they brought it back! Honda used to have some interesting, fun, simple sports cars... But those days are pretty far behind them at this point.

One low-volume, $150k+ car does not make it seem like they "make interesting cars". They certainly have in the past, but at the moment they really don't from a sports car perspective.

The Type-R has universal praise.

Honda's been know for quality for decades, I'd say that counts as an interesting car. Just not by your definition which sounds like it just means electric.

Because they put a battery in a car?

Because they single-handedly forced the market against its will to accept electric cars, and we're all better off thanks to it, now that regular car companies decided to join the party too.

Forced? Not really. They made a good battery-powered car and a lot of governments heavily subsidized fully electric cars.

They made a first quality electric car that both solved the range problem and was sexy enough to attract a wide enough audience, thus for the first time making electric cars a viable and desirable alternative to ICE cars. The subsidies followed.

Federal subsidies in the US started in 2008, while the Model S wasn’t released until 2012.

Governments have heavily subsidized combustion engine car makers.

Because they built a car that people lust after. Breaking it down:

Exciting, classy exterior shape Retracting door handles Giant touch screen World class consumer software UI Regular OTA updates Ludicrous mode Auto pilot

Each of these is individually incremental-- the sum is amazing... just like the iPod and iPhone: there were many MP3 players already in the market and my Windows mobile 5 smart phone worked pretty well - but nobody lusted after those things.

Nope, because they made a car without a combustion engine and still managed to convince some people to buy it.

As an Honda element owner I would disagree. Except that its discontinued and nothing out there now matches its practicality. Stylish it is not however.

I was a fellow Element owner for some years. Interesting was just about the nicest thing that people who didn't get the ride would say. I loved that thing, it just wasn't the most fuel efficient vehicle I've owned and my commute changed to a point where fuel efficiency became more important than being able to do interesting things with the seats or insides. But still, interesting nonetheless.

> Tesla [...] are truly innovating.

LOL

Disclaimer up front: I work for a Tesla competitor.

People believe funny things about Tesla and Elon.

But before I talk about that, let me say: I've been extremely impressed with Tesla and Elon for their ability to eventually deliver, and to build unparalleled excitement around electric vehicles.

I believe Elon is truly a visionary.

Now for the funny things:

1. You can throw money at problems to fix them: If you do this you end up with a 1980's Jaguar - lovely and fast and fun, but unreliable, and overly expensive, and your competition will eat your lunch.

2. Tesla shouldn't be graded on cars or car production, they are an X company (X= software, technology, etc): Whatever kind of company you think Tesla is, right now they make cars and that's all you can grade them on right now. If you want to make a bet about the future, go for it, but realize that it is a bet.

3. Automation will solve this: GM spent about $60 Billion on advanced automation in the 1980's because they could not believe that Toyota was building cars at the cost and quality with human labor (this is a gross simplification). 10-15 years later, GM basically adopted the Toyota Production System. It may be possible to build quality cars in a cost effective manner with near 100% automation, but I do not believe it is possible to build them BECAUSE OF automation. You must have a good quality process first. Elon's previous comments about having a bed near the end of the production line rings alarm bells for anyone who has been in manufacturing. You cannot inspect your way to quality.

> You cannot inspect your way to quality.

I have to emphasize the sentence you ended your comment with. Anybody who has worked in volume production has heard this phrase too many times to count.

People who never learned the difference between QC and QA never seem to understand this phrase either. Doesn't mean they are dumb, but does mean they don't even understand the scope of what they don't know.

Another common misunderstanding is the dynamics of the learning curve. Costs of high volume production drop precipitously (and quality typically increases proportionally as well) but incrementally as volume goes up. A common misunderstanding is that that means you work incrementally to get better. But that is true for systems set up from the start as high volume systems. Tesla the company has been at it for almost 15 years (Musk has been there for 13 of them) and still appears to be in low volume manufacturing mode.

It's not super surprising when you consider that Space X makes small volume, bespoke hardware. A big backend system is still a one-off even if you run huge volume through it. Cars, phones, etc are a completely different game.

> People who never learned the difference between QC and QA never seem to understand this phrase either.

Can you please explain the difference?

QC means you don't sell duds, you test them, if they fail you don't send them for sale.

QA means you make sure that products aren't duds, you do that by finding what causes the failed products to be made and fixing it.

Meta: The focus on QC instead of QA brings to mind the UK government approach to education, adding more tests instead of using the time/resources devoted to tests to educate the children.

You need both; they serve different functions. QA is choosing to use flame-retardant material; QC is installing a fire alarm.

QA addresses your process, from repeatability (e.g. ISO9000 in the cases where it makes sense -- less often than it is used, but sometimes it's crucial), incoming materials inspection, choosing processes that error in directions you want (should you mill material away from a billet, potentially taking not enough, or cast and potentially have the part shrink? Some systems can handle a too-small part better than a too-big one; other systems are the opposite) etc.

QC can be thought of output validation (i.e. testing, which is a lot of it): are my products of the necessary quality/within spec etc? Sometimes you can do 100% inspection, sometimes you have to use statistical methods (there are whole ISO specs devoted to nothing but sampling algorithms).

If you are not clear in your mind about the differences, the jargon can confuse you more (e.g. incoming materials inspection is sometimes referred to as "incoming QC"). But from this you can see why you "can't test your way into quality": the tests happen too late in the process.

QA is like linting, having a style guide, having a strong type system and so on.

QC is looking for bugs for in the usual suspects for every output and fixing them as you discover. This can be automated and/or manual.

I am not they, but QA is process oriented and QC is product oriented. How you do it vs. what the results are.

QA is defect prevention. QC is defect detection and removal. If an activity causes rework then it's QC, not QA.

QA is about how you work to ensure you build a quality product QC is about the tests you do to ensure a quality product has been built.

Etymologically, Quality Control implies some sort of feedback. Quality Assurance merely implies a filter at the end of some process.

Interestingly, your inference is almost opposite to the commonly accepted definitions.

That's really interesting and quite counter-intuitive to me!

Actually QA applies from the beginning of the process while QC is the check.

QA is checking that your output is good.

QC is making sure that your output is good before it gets to QA.

It's actually the reverse.

Either you or I have it back to front.

Just to 3

Unknown to analysts, investors and the hundreds of thousands of customers who signed up to buy it, as recently as early September major portions of the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand, away from the automated production line, according to people familiar with the matter.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-teslas-production-delays...

> major portions of the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand

Reminds me of some other automotive companies when a new car is launched..

Good to see "do things that don't scale" being applied to the very definition of things that need to scale.

I feel the need to correct the record. You do the things that don't scale in order to better realize/appreciate where to put the effort to fix them. Tesla has the equivalent of an mvp/poc production line. You'd be kidding yourself if you think they're not improving it every minute. And you know the improvements they're making are the ones with the biggest impact, in that exact order of priority.

If you try to make the perfect assembly line before you deliver 1 car, you'll be making huge over-engineering expenditures and costly assumptions which result in even greater net production losses.

> still being banged out by hand, away from the automated production line, according to people familiar with the matter.”

The press is up and running:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaInXGBg9G7/

Based on a 3.7 second cycle time, they can bang out 5,837,837 body panels per year (assuming some math an automotive engineer on /r/teslamotors provided that takes into account downtime and typical automotive labor scheduling: 50 weeks/year * 5 days/week * 24 hours/day * 3600 seconds/hour)/3.7 second panel cycle

EDIT: csours: Thanks! I removed my grossly inaccurate prediction of per-vehicle pressed components.

in_cahoots: Original response was to comment that Tesla is still banging out components by hand; this is possible, my rebuttal is that they do have parts of the line that are fully operational.

I’m not sure how this is relevant? Production is only as fast as its slowest component; it doesn’t matter if you can bang out a billion body panels per year if you don’t have enough human labor to put the pieces together.

6 is much too few. You have floorpan, roof (even if the roof is glass you still have to hold it), hood, liftgate/trunk, each door inner, each door outer. Thats 12 big ones, then all of the little ones that stiffen the big ones, and the other little ones that make things like the door pillars. There's probably like 70 stamped metal parts in all.

There are probably a number of press lines and the press lines would be changing dies periodically to make different parts.

That's what stamping looks like. Here's Subaru banging out car doors.[1] About the same cycle time, using automated loading and unloading.

[1] https://youtu.be/r9byGJtbCws?t=63

”You cannot inspect your way to quality.”

Exactly.

Once you understand (grok) this, a lot of efforts become obviously silly. Like standardized testing regiments for K-12 public education.

Source: Former QA/Test manager, back when we still pretended to care about quality, eliminating defects, reducing costs.

"2. [...] right now they make cars and that's all you can grade them on right now. If you want to make a bet about the future, go for it, but realize that it is a bet."

This. But the potential is huge compared to other vendors for being more biased to research than production. Other vendors are forced to keep time, people and money allocated to maintain their 19th century gas engines production while Tesla can use all its resources for new things. Having a lot of brain power devoted to new ideas will inevitably bring achievements in other fields, which won't necessary become Tesla products. A serendipitous discovery could lead to a patent for something they cannot produce or aren't interested in producing (say a new medical machine) but could license to others.

> Other vendors are forced to keep time, people and money allocated to maintain their 19th century gas engines.

GM had to sell 600,000 high-margin trucks to raise the same amount of funding that Tesla got from investors (VERY ballpark numbers). With those funds, GM also had to invest in over 30 assembly plants around the world and 12 or so product launches, not including engine and transmission programs.

The author is only comparing production ability and basic mechanical stats with the Bolt and Leaf.

I am on the Model 3 waiting list for the Autopilot. Heck, it could be gas powered and I'd be on the waiting list for the Autopilot. I don't need full autonomous. I just want the best system, and currently Tesla has it. So hopefully they figure out their production issues.

I also just bought a 2018 Honda Odyssey as our main family car and it can't even do adaptive cruise control under 20 mph. I think people underrate how far ahead Tesla is in these areas. Their competition is currently Google and Uber, not Chevy, Nissan, etc.

It's not that your Honda can't (edit: actually their specific model can't, others from Honda can), its that Honda didn't want to enable it under 20 miles an hour because they want to discourage use off highways. I wouldn't be surprised if your Honda has a similar to AP1 Mobileye sensor in the mirror, I know my Volt does and Chevy intentionally limited engagement to 15 mph and up even though once engaged, it can work down to 1 mph. There are Hondas with AP style autonomy via comma.ai and that's just supplementing the sensor set with an Android phone and some basic CAN bus access.

Tesla's "innovation" is being willing to ship "beta" features for better or for worse.

It's not like Chevy couldn't have used the same data it uses for LKA to do lane centering, by as Tesla has shown, doing that can cause "wrong" steering outputs (I.e. ones that would put you in a ditch), and opens up the system for abuse by the driver.

Where as only using it for LKA means when the sensor is "wrong" the worst case is a wrong LKA warning instead of doing what Teslas do on "fail road". And you can't abuse LKA easily. I've noticed my Volt seems to be tuned so that if you try and abuse LKA and let go of the wheel, it'll take longer and longer to apply corrective steering, causing the car to "ping pong". But if you hold the wheel and intentionally try and pass a line with firm, but wrong steering input (as you'd expect with a distracted driver), it will smoothly guide you along the lane as precisely as a human driver would.

To me Super Cruise is a more major innovation than Autopilot. AP works in more situations but the situations it works in, that Super Cruise doesn't, are situations where AP is notorious for having bugs that vary from inconvient to downright dangerous. It reminds me of how people compare AP to other equivalent systems like Distronic + based on disengagements, ignoring the fact that more disengagements can be preferable if it means avoiding events where there isn't a disengagement but the system is wrong

I live in Southern California. On highways is exactly where I want to use it under 20 mph!

I thought yours was like the one on my Volt and many other cars from various manufacturers in that you can't enage under 20-15mph, but you can resume from a stop, if you already engaged it previously.

But it looks like Honda is the odd man out, as some of their cars have ACC, but don't have what they call "Low Speed Follow" which is the ability to slow down to a stop, then resume with the push of a button or the accelerator

What makes you think Tesla has the best system? The managers in charge of autopilot keep quitting. The media says they are quitting because Elon is making deceptive claims about autopilot. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

It’s not like choosing a fridge, where there are 500 models available.

There are two autopilot systems commercially available today - Tesla Autopilot and Honda Sensing Driver Assistance. Two more are slated to be released - Cadillac SuperCruise and Audi Traffic Jam Pilot. The rest is an all-you-can-read buffet of press releases about some great tech this one company tested in this one lab (I hear Waymo is great, and Volvo’s is even better).

Pending Cadillac’s and Audi’s road tests in 2018, Tesla Autopilot v1 is the best driver assistance suite available commercially in 2017, even with all of the executive departures.

Subaru's eyesight is there since 2015. Afaik, Honda sensing and eyesight are very similar.

Test drove a 2015 Acura, took multiple corners on the freeway unassisted while pacing the cars in front. No clue how long they've had that technology. I'm sure there are more equally impressive cars/packages that we don't hear much about.

I looked at Honda's PR site for Honda Sensing Driver Assistance. Lane departure, forward collision warning, collision mitigation? So, in other words, everything my Golf has? Hell, the DSG Golfs will even go to a full stop on laser cruise. It takes a button press to get it to resume, but it's pretty damn close to non-steering autopilot (yes, it has lane keeping, but like most of these systems, it makes you take over after a few seconds of inattention).

Also they've disabled autopilot for the time being.

It's an interesting time for Tesla, they feel like the automotive equivalent of AMD - David keeping Goliath honest. How many automotive companies saw Tesla become an actual disruptive threat and then spent tens of billions on self driving and electrification? Tesla isn't going to compete with Honda or Toyota by copying their model (or even their manufacturing process).

Take a minute and look at the bolt and the leaf - they're god-ugly, emotionless, unsexy modes of transportation. Buying a leaf is the result of sitting down with a spreadsheet. Need some anecdotal proof? Think to yourself how many of your coworkers, friends and family you can see driving one. How about a model 3? I see more model S's during my commute than I do leafs, volts and bolts combined.

Another place to look for confirmation is the lithium ion battery line which was built in collaboration with Panasonic. Panasonic is 2/3rd the size of Toyota and are well versed in manufacturing process.

If Tesla wanted to borrow a page from the incumbents they'd be doing so, they have enough brains from those companies already on staff. It's a safe bet that there are very few idiots in upper management at Tesla. Elon isn't the type to ignore a process problem, he's a modeling/simulation junkie and probably figured out something that the others are missing. That's not to say things are perfect, but I don't think they're as dire as the article makes them out to be.

The shareholders have faith, and although Tesla shares are slightly bubbly, they're still doing unbelievably well on most fronts.

A lot of this is confirmation bias at its finest. Not saying you're wrong, but I think it's naive to assume Tesla has some "secret sauce" - there are equally smart and competent people at Tesla competitors. I would bet that the risk and decision making process may be different (incumbents may want higher probability of success to make a bet, while Musk's NPV analysis is different), but again it's naive to assume they don't understand at all what is or isn't possible in manufacturing

> How many automotive companies saw Tesla become an actual disruptive threat and then spent tens of billions on self driving and electrification?

0. You have fallen for the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. Tesla was not the first company that worked on these things. They were just the first who decided to sell a semi practical implementation and hype it up as if it where completely finished and polished.

True for the self-driving part, false for the electrification part. Tesla seems to be the first company to solve the range problem of electric cars, thus delivering something practical for almost everyone.

In the Bay Area (Tesla home territory) I see a lot more Leafs than Teslas, mainly because the Leaf is the cheapest way to get a carpool lane sticker. For people who commute on congested local highways the time savings of carpool lane access can make a Leaf effectively "free". Nissan is leasing them extremely cheaply due to the government electric vehicle subsidy and to meet CARB zero-emissions requirements.

Disabled Autopilot? I am not aware of the Autopilot being disabled by Tesla on cars that have been sold and are on the road. Unless it is Model 3 cars, which there hasn't been much written about.

> Also they've disabled autopilot for the time being.

Can you elaborate?

My subaru’s adaptive cruise control has been pretty amazing. I still have to do most of the steering, but that’s probably a good thing in terms of keeping me engaged. I can easily go hundreds of miles from stop and go to 80 and cruising without touching the gas though.

I spent all of 5 hours in a new Subaru Outback I rented this summer and wasn't impressed.

I could set the cruise control to a certain speed and it would normally slow down if there was congestion, which was very nice.

But it wouldn't work at bends in the road, because the system was seemingly just directly ahead line-of-sight. I wanted to see if it would slow down itself in that situation before I had to slam the breaks, it would have plowed into the much slower-moving car ahead of me.

So my experience is that while these systems help in bumper-to-bumper traffic on congested highways they're still to dangerous to rely on.

Huh, I have relatives who really love the system in their outback. I know the system in my VW impeccably follows cars in front of it, in bad weather, at imprudent speeds, around sharp bends, perfect.

Don't the BMWs of the world have this tech integrated into their cars too?

I get Tesla's cars are really good, but my understanding was that it wasn't "miles ahead".

Yes, actually, most of the "Autopilot" features have been available in production cars for over a decade. Tesla is really late to this game, although people can't seem to realize it because of the distortion field.

And that's before we get into disengagements per 1000 miles, where Tesla trails most of the industry by far.

No wonder Musk tries to demonize AI. Self-driving is a race to the bottom, with its development slashing car sales by an order of magnitude. That would be bad for an established, mature, car maker, but would be crushing for a company relying purely on future growth.

Not only Tesla is behind most in self-driving, it is the most exposed to the downsides of it.

> Self-driving is a race to the bottom, with its development slashing car sales by an order of magnitude.

This isn't bad if you're the only one who can ship self-driving cars with acceptable quality and volume as you'd be disrupting the rest of the industry to fuel massive growth.

Steve Jobs was also famous for denouncing something right up until Apple had "the best on the market" of that same thing. It seems like standard CEO playbook.

> This isn't bad if you're the only one who can ship self-driving cars with acceptable quality and volume as you'd be disrupting the rest of the industry to fuel massive growth.

Fixing it:

This isn't too bad if you're the only one who can ship self-driving cars with acceptable quality and volume as you'd be disrupting the rest of the industry to fuel massive growth.

But you won't be the only one for long. And then the entire industry will downsize.

And Tesla is (1) the most susceptible to it, since most of the enterprise value comes from expectation of future growth and (2) it lags behind other makers in self-driving tech.

> No wonder Musk tries to demonize AI.

Ockham's razor suggests it's more likely Elon Musk simply got convinced by the Yudkowsky/Bostrom view on the problem of Unfriendly AI (I particularly recall Musk starting to talk about AI only after reading Bostrom's Superintelligence, but that might have been just a coincidence).

Also note that Musk is "demonizing" advanced AI that doesn't exist yet, but is huge on self-driving.

Ockham razor suggests that he's doing so to avoid losing money. That's a far, far more simple explanation.

It doesn't pass the sniff test. Musk demonizing AI to slow down progress in self-driving even though he's very big on it and pushing hard to make it work? What?

Yes many other's have autopilot-like tech. BMW's system on the 7-series and newer 5-series is about as good as Tesla's AP1 and better than AP2. AP2 is still far behind the curve.

I compared Tesla Model 3 to Bolt and Leaf.

7-series and 5-series are simply too expensive. If BMW can get it in the 3-series at a Tesla Model 3 price, things will get interesting.

Even VW Golf has (as options) quite a bit of these things. obstacles radar(adaptive cruise control/city safety), blind spot and lane departure warning, self parking...

It’s not an off-the-shelf sensor one can buy, integrate, and congratulate oneself on the job well done.

The learning systems need to be fed data to improve their models, so that they can understand bad lane markup, merging lanes, diverging lanes, lane splits and highway off-ramps, construction cones and barriers, motorcycles and trucks being obstacles and flying plastic bags and garbage not being an obstacle.

Unless they’re buying this data some place else, it needs to come from millions of miles driven by the current owners.

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/PR20170912.as... -- interesting comments by NTSB on a Tesla crash that involved the autopilot. Seems like their autopilot is similar to autopilot's in other cars, but with different (my read was it was more "relaxed") settings. Tesla seems to have since adjusted their settings though.

Have you seen this, https://youtu.be/PwOnsT2UW5o?

You might be able to DIY.

I have to agree completely. Autopilot is miles ahead. While I'm waiting for my 3 preorder, I took a test drive a Model S. I haven't felt as moved by a technology like Autopilot since I first swiped on the first iPhone.

Coincidentally, we're in the market for a 2018 Odyssey as our family car too.

Tesla Autopilot 2 failed to impress me for my specific use case. I have elderly parents, and city-street capable Autopilot would have made a sale at the test drive; the constant cognitive strain of defensively driving is very stressful for them though they put up with it for now, and such a feature would immensely add to their quality of life.

When I took the Tesla test drive in a Model X with my parents, the rep took pains to educate us about the limitations of Autopilot. Lane following in the highway, below 50 mph around curves, and doesn't recognize traffic lights in the highway. Can't avoid collisions below 7 mph. Can't lane follow in city streets. Can't self-drive on main city thoroughfares. I'm probably missing the message, but I don't see how this is that much more revolutionary than a Honda Sensing suite that I could purchase in a 2018 Odyssey [1]. For all the Reality Distortion Field is putting out from Tesla, I was expecting more.

As it was, I can see value if I sit in rush hour traffic on the highway for an hour or more each day, each way. But unfortunately, that is not my use case. And I can get the same tech on other more mature platforms to address the bulk of the value for that use case.

A lot is riding on Tesla's promise to bring full autonomy In The Future. I fail to see how they are besting Waymo at productizing full autonomy or even taking the next incremental steps towards that goal. If I wasn't in software and following what Waymo et al were doing to move towards full autonomy, then I would probably be dazzled, but I'm struggling to figure out how Tesla's driver assistive tech is getting us to full autonomy faster than Waymo.

I'm on the Model 3 waiting list, but that test drive has me seriously re-considering a 2018 Honda Odyssey instead. I'd welcome feedback on what I missed.

[1] https://automobiles.honda.com/sensing

Odd. I drove in a Tesla and the owner showed off the Autopilot by having the car stay in a city street lane and have the car stop itself as the car in front of it stopped at a red light. When the car in front continued on, so did the Tesla.

My Odyssey can't do that.

Now I'm confused why Tesla would sound so limited, unless they are trying to cover their ass legally on how you SHOULD use autopilot versus how you CAN use it?

Hoping Tesla owners will jump in here with clarifications/corrections. My understanding is you can engage Autopilot as long as there are lines to follow, but it gets dodgy in many city street driving situations [1], so many owners simply follow Tesla's advice and only engage Autopilot on simpler highways. By the time you get to the point where you have to cognitively engage all the time supervising Autopilot for the odd situations, you might as well only engage adaptive cruise control.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Does-Tesla-Autopilot-work-on-city-subu...

Did you consider (for your family car) a Chrysler Pacifica? It's a PHEV minivan with 33mi electric range. Sure not fully EV, but close enough for grocery grabbing and some commutes.

Our 2012 Sienna is doing well and doesn't do too many miles, or I'd have considered upgrading.

Yes. Chrysler has made some very puzzling choices with the hybrid. Like no memory seats. On a $40k+ car. My wife is over a foot shorter than me so that's really weird. Maybe we shouldn't weight that feature so highly but it has very real practical convenience for us.

Yeah, I don't get that. I suppose even on the top-line ($46k) trim it's not there?

Personally, we don't share much - she drives hers, I drive mine and only share duties in the weekend.

With our separate commutes, and a PHEV and and EV we could literally not visit gas stations except on road trips.

Correct. Not on any hybrid, even the 2018, no matter what trim.

Off topic - but curious of why Odyssey > Sienna? ...as I'm having a hard time deciding.

Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is in Honda (and lots of other cars). Toyota is currently in a state of rejecting these integrations, which I think is foolish.

Haven't done serious research, just reading some reviews online and going to the car show. I think I read that the Odyssey rides more quietly.

I also like the 2018 Odyssey's visual refresh. Sienna hasn't changed in eons it feels like. Inside, I wasn't a fan of the second row seat tracks on the Sienna.

Did you test a Mercedes and Audi as well?

I did not. I don't foresee these two with a car in the $25k (after incentives) price range with semi-autonomous driving. And unlike the top level comment, I really want something fully electric (for the planet).

Don't forsee Tesla getting to $25K. The Model 3 really costs $50-$60K, and the incentives are going away.

I'd also suggest Genesis [0]. Almost S-class level in terms of features and comfort, with easily half the price. It's a luxury brand of Hyundai, so as a fan of brands like Mercedes I was skeptical at first, but damn is it a good car.

[0] https://www.genesis.com

Manufacturing ramp-up is exactly this sort of thing. Building by-hand as you work out the process and employ more automation. I'm not sure this is unexpected?

As an investor I know full well Tesla has a ticking clock. They must achieve scale before the giants can catch up. People underestimate how god-awful slow the big car makers are. They haven't even come to terms with what Tesla is really doing yet. None have anything like the software experience. My guess is Tesla has 5 more years before the big makers can truly become competitive (assuming they all fire their software engineers and hire new ones today).

Time will tell. If they're still fumbling a year from now then I'll start to get concerned. If they can't churn out at least 250,000 vehicles per year within two years I'll be very concerned.

> People underestimate how god-awful slow the big car makers are

I think it’s exactly the opposite. People enamoured with Tesla and Musk tend to over-estimate how slow the old car makers are, because they’re so used to the “Silicon Valley story” that we will inevitably come in and take over everything.

Look: it’s 2017. Everybody has read the Innovator’s Dilemma, everybody knows how fast e.g. Palm, Nokia, etc. went out of business. The old companies aren’t stupid, and they aren’t sitting around waiting for Tesla to eat their lunch.

> None have anything like the software experience.

GM is arguably in the lead right now as far as autonomous driving capability. They’re at least tied with Google and certainly ahead of Tesla.

I’m going to be blunt: you don’t sound like a very good investor. You sound like someone who makes decisions based on hype and wishful thinking instead of real evidence. My recommendation would be to get out now before you lose your shirt.

And companies like VW, BMW and Toyota are also investing a large amount om money into autonomous driving, they just keep it more behind curtains than Tesla.

Ditto with electric tech. You can buy an electric VW right now, and from reviews I've read it's apparently a fantastic product. The difference is in hype. VW very boringly made their existing dependable and well known Golf electric.

This may be true, but why don't they have auto-pilot (or at least adaptive cruise) on their Bolt? One reason I didn't buy one - why pay ~$40k pre-incentives for something without a key luxury feature?

> GM is arguably in the lead right now as far as autonomous driving capability. They’re at least tied with Google and certainly ahead of Tesla

GM is definitely not tied with Google.

Exactly... you're writing to tell me that Tesla's factory in 2016 was not as advanced as Honda's? Well... I'm not surprised. Honda is extremely good at producing extremely large numbers of cars and Tesla produces very few.

Tesla is trying to "lean startup" the Model 3. Not clear whether that was originally their intention, but the fact that they're building parts of the Model 3 by hand immediately brings to mind the kind of non-scaleable stuff that people in the software industry do at early phases of their evolution (things that are hailed as "the right thing to do). Maybe Tesla's undoing is that there's a little too much of the Silicon Valley ethos going on there.

I don't think that's a fair comparison; I'm sure they had a plan for mass-scale production for model 3 from the start, the problem is if that plan/approach will work or not in a reasonable time.

The non-scaleable stuff was most likely done in parallel not to delay initial deliveries, they don't need to validate the product idea.

People that are caught up on this "miss" obviously do not follow the guidance very closely. On the last conference call they repeatedly downplayed the importance of the Q3 delivery guidance and repeatedly stated it would be difficult to predict and that there was a high degree of uncertainty. They repeated this ad nauseam.

Here is a sample: >So, I would simply urge people to not get too caught up in what exactly falls within the exact calendar boundaries of a quarter, one quarter or the next, because when you have an exponentially growing production ramp, slight changes of a few weeks here or there can appear to have dramatic changes, but that is simply because of the arbitrary nature of when a quarter ends.

That is why there has been little stock movement despite this miss. Run rate at the end of Q4 is a different story. That is very important guidance.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4094115-tesla-tsla-q2-2017-...

Also, another indication that this guy know anything about Tesla's goals or guidane... Tesla has repeatedly stated they are not going to increase Model S/X production beyond 25k per quarter. They think that's close to the total addressable market and it's costly to expand production beyond that.

I really thought that the article was literally about the smell of the cars :)

Me too. I wondered if it was related to this discovery about China's revulsion to that fragrance. http://www.npr.org/2017/07/29/540214689/chinese-buyers-don-t...

I wasn't sure, but now that I checked, it's clickbait, and flagged it

It's not a very good article so I'm really not invested in this, but the title isn't "clickbait". It's a play on words, a rather creative use of the ambiguity of language.

You can complain about Tesla missing a deadline by a year but you need to also consider them pulling the rest of the industry forward by 10 years when they do it

That may be a compelling HN argument about the heroism of Elon Musk, but for a competitive car company, "pulling the rest of the industry forward 10 years in the span of 1 year" is a very bad thing.

I just kept thinking, “well yeah, but the optimists might be right, and Musk has done amazing things before.” Then...

That reeks of fundamental issues at odds with “It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain. We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term.”

Maybe mass production is that one step too far.

> What seriously worried me was a July 2016 visit to Tesla’s manufacturing plant... In an exchange with a trusted industry observer, I found out that he had had exactly the same experience only weeks ago, but he couldn’t write about it by “virtue” of the NDA he’d signed.

Did Gassée's NDA expire or what? He's certainly divulging details about the factory. He previously wrote that he couldn't write about his visit due to an NDA.[1]

[1] https://mondaynote.com/chairman-elons-great-leap-forward-68f...

"If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspect, correct, and quickly adjust their own production process."

Isn't one of the advantages of having a minimal, electric vehicle that there are fewer moving parts?

Telsa is in a interesting position as a software/car maker. There production line is like an algorithm they are adjusting on the fly, and it's obviously going to be messy when you don't have multiple decades of manufacturing experience.

Still, Tesla's learning curve is steep, and the M3 is a much more simpler car. Don't be against Elon, it's quite possible he'll be able to figure out how to make 10K/week once the kinks are figured out.

The world's leading assembler of cars, Toyota, doesn't use artificial intelligence but human intelligence to make its processes run smooth and continuously improve them. A large human component is necessary in production and this idea of using software and full automation to optimize it is a pipedream.

Isn't a pipedream basically exactly what Elon is always trying to produce?

Why is this a bad thing and why isn't software/full automation achievable?

Makes some good points except for the competition, I think its weak. Always wondered why Nissan intentionally made such an ugly car, I think the Leaf is no longer sold in Australia due to poor numbers. Isn't the Bolt a hybrid?

No it is an EV. The Volt was the hybrid. Confusing naming. Decent range and acceleration but no RHD model so not an option for Australia. Sad to have a GM plant going idle in Adelaide and no electric car subsidies.

I wonder if there are many side effects from this sort of schedule slippage apart from just needing more time.

If the only result is the schedule slipping, then investors can continue giving to Tesla with the assurance that things happen "eventually".

If this is actually indicative of greater disorganization, then perhaps we'll see more issues later on. But my impression is that this is _the_ major issue for Tesla... and ultimately it's an issue that can be solved with more money.

The biggest problem is the one the author mentioned at the end of the article: If Tesla takes too long, they might be outpaced by more mature competitors. That demand will move elsewhere or dissipate if it isn't capitalized on.

Production issues in car manufacturing can be solved by adding more resources just like adding more programmers to a software project can. Nope, not at all.

What I'm saying isn't that the production issues get solved. What I'm saying is that if you have enough money, delays aren't as much of an issue in itself. You can wait things out.

Valve surely has a lot of developement issues leading to delays, but they still got Half Life 2 out and made a bunch of money off of it.

No, you did say that money solves production issues.

to clarify, what I meant by "issue" is production delays. There are underlying issues for sure, and those won't be solved just with money.

But many side effects of delays are mitigated by throwing money at it. And spending money is usually an easy option, if you have a lot of it.

It's getting less and less clear.

A greater problem may be the insider trading that might be going on according to the author.

That allegation is completely unproven. An with that set of facts ("some people know more than others", "the stock price changes") you can literally find "insider trading" for any given stock, in any given week.

Hmmmmm. If I were a short seller, this might help me make my game plan.

Or not. Markets aren't rational, it could be costly.

I worked for Tesla for 5 years, joining with a cohort a few months before Model S launch in 2012 and departing recently to take a rest. My role involved architecting, developing, and helping support many software systems focused in the financial domain. These systems process all of the downstream events arising from sales, procurement, production, and other activities of the company with financial effect.

Many often wonder why large software system projects are difficult. Many often wonder why running large organizations such as governments is difficult. In this topic some wonder why large scale vehicle manufacturing processes are difficult. These fundamentally share properties.

One key challenge is that system, organization, and process complexity do not grow in a linear manner. If you have ever tried to estimate software development time for larger projects you understand how wildly inaccurate it can be. The number of interaction points multiply with growth. Progress feels extremely fast at the beginning. As the system surface area grows it becomes increasing difficult to push incremental improvements forward. A single person or small team comprehensively understanding the entire system and keeping enough of it in working memory becomes a challenge. There are design and management strategies to combat the challenge but in my opinion only time and iteration can truly overcome.

The single most important long-term factor here is whether quality and continuing improvement is part of the culture or not. I believe they are, as suggested by the production target miss. A process of prioritizing and then fixing sub-optimal system and process interaction points, both internally and externally, will drive the company to high output while maintaining quality over time. TPS [0] concepts are well known but one doesn't simply download and install it in an afternoon. It can take decades to optimize.

The single worst decision the company could make is to pump out vehicles to meet a production target metric while sacrificing quality. That has been tried before in this country (and at the same factory several decades ago no less [1]) and did not work out well.

For perspective: Competitive threats are just not a very big deal. Globally, 72 million cars were produced last year [2]. If Tesla captures just 1% of that market it is still a huge achievement - 720k cars per year. Even if we assume they sell only the lowest price Model 3 at $35k and ignore all other vehicle and energy products that would equate to over $25 billion in revenue - 10 times the 2016 annual figure. The market will also grow as the global economy does. There is plenty of room.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI#Background [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/262747/worldwide-automob...

In taking delivery of my wife’s Model S, we were treated to a group tour of the site. Everyone marveled at the robot porn,[...]

Everyone but yours truly. I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”

And I can't help but notice that his truly is still putting his wife's truly into a Tesla, not a Toyota.

There seems to be a wave of stories critical of Musk currently, and most seem to be rooted in some sort of ill will towards the man. Other than that, I just can't wrap my head around these alarmist screeds, considering a few months' delay is, if anything, so little one wonders if Musk is spending too much time on production...

It's annoying for customers, but hey: at least you're not one of those customers whose vehicle gets blown up 5 miles off the coast of Florida.

I ca

If you've got money you might also buy a Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Lambo, BMW, Jaguar, etc, instead of a Toyota too, because who cares about things like quality control at that point, and you want something different, but you'd be laughed out of the room if you said "I know Alfa Romeos are better made than Toyotas because they're fancier and cost more."

There has definitely been a wave of backlash against him. The pro union crowd and those who hope his car company fails

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