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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

> I'd argue that something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you.

The corollary to that is that if you get to the point where you need to check on the vouchsafety of all your contractors - en masse - something is seriously wrong with your company.

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I think Elon was pretty clear that he considers the situation to be seriously wrong, hence the extreme approach. It's a refreshing attitude; this sort of problem is common in most large companies.

I agree. Tesla is only worried about one thing right now: they are about to run out of money. If Elon has identified that contractors aren't providing the necessary ROI or at least traceability to the ROI, he's making a smart choice to let them go. Tesla is, in the view of some, on the brink of failure, where failure is defined as insolvency.

Yeah, a startup founder seeing a problem and having a clumsy, heavy handed, poorly thought out reaction is super refreshing. Hadn't been this refreshed since like, Friday.

you know he founded PayPal, right?

Which sold to eBay for $1.5b

His first company was acquired by Compaq for almost half a billion.

He’s listed by Forbes as one of the top 25 most powerful people on earth.

Tesla is a 15 year old company.

I feel like “startup founder” should not the operating phrase here.

Not to diminish his achievements but...

> you know he founded PayPal, right?

Confinity (Levchin, Thiel, Nosek, no Musk) launched PayPal in late 1999. X.com (founded by Musk) merged with Confinity in March 2000. In no way can Musk be considered a "founder" of PayPal.

> His first company was acquired by Compaq for almost half a billion.

Zip2? $340M. Nowhere near half a billion and that was in 1999 at the height of the ridiculous tech bubble.

The man's done a lot of stuff - there's no need to embellish them.

Something is seriously wrong with most large companies, and most of them simply ignore that. Good to see Tesla being different in that regard.

I dunno, GM and Ford build a fuck-ton more cars and have better build quality (which is shitty by int'l standards). Seems like Teslas's problem is bigger.

They have been building basically the same cars for far longer so that does not say much.

Tesla is attacking too many different problems at the same time IMO. Just building batteries at scale and low cost is on it's own a huge undertaking. Now add cars, self driving systems, charging network, home battery and solar etc.

It's over valued as a pure car company, but the other lines could also be huge companies on their own.

Having owned both a GM and a Tesla, I'm amused by the idea that GM's build quality is better. I actually liked my GM a lot, but quality was lacking to say the least.

year make and model?

I only ask, because honestly, I bought ( ordered and customized online really ) a new 2015 GMC Canyon and I love this truck like I've never loved another vehicle in my lifetime... and literally NOTHING has gone wrong with it, not even a loose screw... or burnt-out light bulb...

For a 3-4 year old car, having nothing break yet should be regarded as about par, not some outstanding accomplishment. These things should be lasting at least a decade with reasonable maintenance, and every component that can't last a decade should be on the maintenance schedule for preemptive replacement.

2005 Malibu. The side mirrors stripped their gears, the exhaust got a leak and needed complete replacement, the brake rotors got scored in a bizarre way that the shop couldn't understand, the tie rod ends went bad a couple of times, the instrument cluster stopped working spontaneously, then on my next drive started working equally spontaneously, the ABS system would occasionally go on strike for no apparent reason, from time to time it would somehow start badly and end up in a weird low idle state where it ran extremely rough, but the good ol' "turn it off and on again" would usually resolve it....

My Tesla has not been problem-free either, but it hasn't been that bad.

Having driven Fords, GMs and a Tesla, I'd say GM isn't international standard either, but Ford is definitely.

In terms of driving experience, most Ford cars I've driven (Contour, Focus, and Taurus, probably all from early 2000s; they are probably better now) handle like boats; turning radius comparable to an oil tanker, unresponsive brakes and gas, etc. So there are tradeoffs among all makes and models within those makes.

All the things you mentioned are design decisions not build quality related.

Weeelll... given that a modern car is a complex dynamic system I would presume it's not to trivial to state where exactly design constraints concerning build quality end and dynamics and handling start.

For the end user they both affect the 'feel' of the product - how it behaves on the detail level when in use. "I have a door I have a hard time closing" and "the dynamics feel a bit clumsy" deal with totally different things on the engineering level, but end users (generally) are not buying engineering but holistic products.

Namely, concerning this comment: Are there compromises made on the design of the handling to facilitate the build quality? And if there are, then those are not two different things, but systems which interact - hence, it's relevant to offer commentary on one while discussing the other.

> it's not to trivial to state where exactly design constraints concerning build quality end and dynamics and handling start

Maybe I'm being overly simplistic here but I'd say if the finished product doesn't match the design then it's a build quality issue, whereas if it does match the design and it's still crap then that's a design issue.

Arguably if they end product doesn't match the design because the design isn't feasible to manufacture then that would also be a design issue.

Unless the design is limited by build quality issues. The AK-47 is perhaps the most famous example, but most designs are a back and forth around the manufacturing process.

This is exactly what I've meant.

Ford doesn't compete with Land Rover, Mercedes and BMWs but deliver a good value-for-money nonetheless. Compare that to a Cadillac Escalade from GM: Worse quality than a Ford, priced at Mercedes level.

I've never driven a modern for F Series but I have driven most of their Sedans and I can understand why they're withdrawing them from the US market. They're quite bad.

We took a road trip from Poughkeepsie to Niagra in a rented Ford Focus. It had a USB charge port in the center console that came out when we went to unplug the cable. This got me prodding about at the rest of the interior and most of it was too easily removable with my bare hands. It was scary to think who the whole passenger compartment might just explode in your lap with an accident.

I know many parts of the car are held together with retention clips and other tool-less mechanical fasteners but this Ford was exceptional. I don't know if it was down too the poor materials quality or the shoddy engineering of the fasteners but everything could be pulled apart with astonishingly little effort.

Wonder if that means it should be easily repairable? :)

Maybe, but that would violate the DMCA. :P

And good luck finding the proprietary parts. My friends motorcycle displays used encrypted handshakes to connect to the rest of the engine - ostensibly to prevent theft, but incidentally delivering lock-in.

Yes, but startups are shitty and wavy by nature, it stabilizes with time. While culling the contractors, they might lose sight of something important and get into the next crisis. I don’t think there is any other way around. Sometimes it’s even external factors like wars and financial crises like the dinosaurs of the automobile industry had.

Tesla is a public company founded in 2003, not a startup. It's a year older than Facebook.

While it definitely depends once your definition of startup... I bet most people in the automotive industry consider it a “startup”. Especially considering the age of the competition, Tesla is a brand new startup company with hyper growth in its plans.

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