Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

About a year ago, Tesla had a little demo setup in downtown Burlingame (here in SV area). There was a Model X and a Model S. I love cars, so I went to take a peek, but when I looked at the Model X, I instantly saw so many manufacturing flaws. I could not believe how badly a $100K (or about) was assembled. I thought to myself most cars in $20k range are not that poorly manufactured. One side of the hood had such a larger gap compared to the other side. The lines of the vehicle from A pillar to back did not align.

While I was there, a couple arrived with their BWM i3. We started talking and I pointed out the Tesla flaws and decided to examine their i3. It was like one care was made in a first-world and the other one assembled in a third-world country. The gaps were so tight compared to the Model X with near perfect symmetry. You can see the difference between a company with a history of auto making and one stumbling to catch up.

These cars should all be labeled "Beta". That's the only honest thing, Musk can and should do.

I don't disagree with your assessment, but I point out that it makes the implicit assumption that Tesla customers care about fit and finish.

Tesla is selling every car they make. Not a single one lands in a parking lot at a dealer while picky buyers survey it and compare it to something else. At the moment, the Tesla market is completely people who will buy it even if it has old In-n-Out wrappers in the back seat.

What that means is that for Tesla, today, putting any money into fit and finish, rather than in speed of production, loses them money. Once they have a pipeline that can make more cars than they have pre-orders for, and start putting them out on lots for more discerning eyes, then the investment in fit and finish will give a marginal boost in sales.

In that case, I'll wait a few years, until the fit and finish catches up.

Tesla is already starting to see competitors... if they don't get better quality control, it will probably hurt them soon enough

The reason why Teslas don't sit at a dealership is because Tesla doesn't have dealerships.

Sure they do - they just own and operate them themselves.

They’re not, in the scheme of things, making very many cars, though. Once the true believers are exhausted, I suspect they’re in trouble.

The idea of the Model 3 is that there is another, much larger, set of true believers who will pay $30-40k, behind those that already paid $100k. Behind that, a much larger set if they get to $20k. In each case, early adopters can subsidize learning about the production run, and be happy as long as they get a unique experience (bumps allowed). I know a dozen folks who were part of the $100k group, and zero of them are "exhausted".

If it was getting better all the time, this might be convincing. But there’s no reason to think it is. They’ve been making cars for years, now, and the quality still seems to be dubious.

If anything, achieving significant volume may make it worse; imagine how overloaded their service department will be in a couple of years if they’re still around.

That idea has yet to be tested. That will happen when/if (pick a word depending on your opinion of Tesla) Tesla’s production levels get large enough to make serious progress on fulfilling the existing pre-orders, especially of the cheaper models (afaik, Tesla is only delivering the more expensive variants of the 3, for now)

GP didn't mean "exhausted" as in tired, they meant "they've run out", i.e., once all the true believers with cash to buy have bought, and Tesla now has to sell to the population at large.

I think the problem people are pointing out is that those cars go sold so quickly because of Tesla's great marketing and brand image. Quality problems could change that. If Tesla goes from being "the sexy new car company" to "the first company that really made proper electric cars, but now other people do it better", then they could lose it all very, very quickly.

The problem is that Tesla sells 100% of their cars to their base of automatic buyers, and they still lose money. When they try to sell more cars and compete with car makers, they will need to have comparable build quality in order to at least break even.

>Tesla is selling every car they make. Not a single one lands in a parking lot at a dealer while picky buyers survey it and compare it to something else.

What are you talking about? There are plenty of inventory Model S and Model X around. Very often you also see these sub-50 mile cars get slapped with a "demo discount" as stores try to unload them.

Model S and Model X's sale is definitely, definitely not supply constrained. You can check their earning reports to see the inventory.

As I understand it, that "inventory" is from their policy to repurchase cars from owners to assure a high resale value. They discontinued that program in 2016 apparently [1]. They also repossess cars that they financed for buyers.

I haven't found any evidence yet that they don't sell every car that comes off the assembly line, to an end user.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-prices/no-more-tesl...

No, inventory cars can be new ones as well. They were literally involved in a "scandal" last year as some sales rep put a "demo" sticker on brand new cars to give it showroom discount, in order trying to move them off the lot.

Yes, they do have less inventory than most cheaper manufacturers because 1. Their stores do not order them in advance and 2. They are built to order. That alone doesn't mean they are supply constrained because they do have the capacity to manufacturer more.

I disagree with the assumption that anyone spending $100K on a vehicle cares nothing about fit and finish. They may be willing to buy into the vision, but the segment of the population who can afford these fancy toys definitely care about their appearance.

That conflates two things in the discussion. People can care about something and have it affect their buying behavior, and people can car about something without it affecting their buying behavior.

There are certainly people who are not buying Tesla cars because they don't feel they have the value or quality for the money they cost. And I am sure there are people who own Tesla's who wished that the fit and finish was better than it is.

But from Tesla's perspective, improvements to fit and finish are addressed on the assembly line and they slow down the number of cars per day they can build. They also reduce yield by increasing quality check fallout from the manufacturing line. Taking that hit to production rate or yield does not make sense when the current customers are not either cancelling orders or returning cars purchased due to "minor" fit and finish issues.

That comes with an assumption that right now is the only time Tesla want customers to buy a car from them. Tesla wants these customers to buy another car from them again 3 years from now, and wants them to show off their Tesla to all their friends and have them remark about how cool it is, so that they want to buy a Tesla three years from now.

Not having the fit and finish perfect is going to be something that works against them on both those fronts. If Tesla is truly deciding to optimize for production targets over quality, that seems incredibly shortsighted.

That is a fair point, the 'second' car sale is going to be tougher. And yet that has always been the case since if Tesla is/was successful the second car purchase would come at a time where there were many more choices.

Very few people are alive today who have witnessed the founding, growth, and eventual success of an automobile company. It is an insanely cash intensive kind of thing. The whole notion of discriminating on fit and finish is its own interesting story when Japan, which was synonymous with "junk" cars decided to compete with American car makers on fit and finish. Until that point, only very high end German cars were achieving the level of precision that defined good engineering at that level.

There is an interesting lesson here for people who are able to see it, around prioritizing cash expenditures to achieve the highest revenue (and thus survival), rather than engineering excellence. There are examples of dead companies that went the other way. Understanding this trade off is the difference between a senior engineer and an engineer who can operate at the executive level.

> The whole notion of discriminating on fit and finish is its own interesting story when Japan, which was synonymous with "junk" cars decided to compete with American car makers on fit and finish.

In that case, I think there's a big distinction because of the different market segments Toyota/Honda operated in at the time vs. Tesla now. People buying a $20,000 car are more willing to accept a couple of quality kinks. That's not nearly the same case in the premium segment that Tesla still competes in.

> There is an interesting lesson here for people who are able to see it, around prioritizing cash expenditures to achieve the highest revenue (and thus survival), rather than engineering excellence.

That's a possibility -- that Tesla needs to get to profitability fast enough in order to stave off death. But I'm not entirely sure that if their brand doesn't survive that it's a fate worth living.

Also, that doesn't really entirely jive with their behavior. Tesla has been burning hordes of cash investing in new initiatives like the Tesla semi-truck, operating SolarCity, the PowerWall, etc. If they were so concerned about getting to profitability why would they be making those massive investments now? Also, why would they not issue more debt or equity in order to give themselves a longer runaway? Given their earlier bond sales, they easily could acquire more capital at a low coupon.

Owner surveys show that Tesla is #1 in "would you buy another one". Can you suggest any data that shows Tesla is having a significant problem?

Personally, when I look at the UI on the vast majority of cars, it's embarassing. Fonts don't even match, it's like looking at a website from 1996. I could say that all Fords should be labeled "Beta" until they can get up to Tesla quality. But, people just care about different things in a car. Some people do not care about how many millimeters the gap next to the hood is.

One can argue the quality of physical manufacturing process has a larger impact to the long term reliability and core functionality of a car than say... fonts in the infotainment system.

But maybe that's just crazy talk.

I'd be on board with you if we were talking about cars falling apart or actual maintenance.

UX in radio receivers drive me crazy every day. Slightly non-symmetrical gaps in hardware I don't look at? Not really ever.

And you'd think the latter would tell you something about maintenance costs. Maybe it does in aggregate? But I've had expensive lemons and beaters that withstood anything, and vice versa, it just really depends.

You're right, to a degree. The benefit of electric cars is they're mechanically simpler, and so these tolerances do not matter quite as much for long-term reliability.

EVs are only simpler when it comes to drive train. When it comes to body fit/finish this is the reason early Tesla Model S had issues with door handles being stuck and leaky moon roofs.

I don't know about you, but if my $100k car is literally leaking water during a rainstorm, I'd call it a reliability issue.

If electric vehicles are so much simpler then why does Tesla have relatively poor drivetrain reliability ratings compared to gasoline vehicles? By contrast the Toyota Prius is mechanically extremely complex, yet it's one of the most reliable and durable vehicles on the road.

This is exactly my impression. A friend bought a new Tesla S and one day while getting out of it I saw some quality problems that are easily seen on the outside by just passing by. I wonder what problems could arise if I inspect it in details.

We have developed one of the modules for all BMW series and I used to visit some of the BMW plants in Europe so I have a relatively good impression of their quality. Just an example: the tires are screwed manually by hand. With an automatic screwdriver, but still by hand... in Germany. When I asked why, they said that they have tried doing this automatically, but back then ( 5 years ago) there was no robot that could do it with that quality. So sometimes quality depends heavily on experience. And Tesla does not have enough experience.

This friend of mine had to bring back his Tesla a couple of weeks after he bought it, because the salesman told him on the day he received the car, that there were some small details that needed some improvements. On a 100k car. And unfortunately they have not fixed the flaws that I observed. Apparently there were also other things to fix.

I am huge fan of Tesla. I hope they succeed. But I will not but one in the 10 years. I will just let them gain some experience with serial production first.

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