Tesla is holding a hackathon to fix two robot bottlenecks in Model 3 production
electrek.co
electrek.co
Unbiased doesn't exist so I'm ignoring it.
and
> Perfect doesn't exist so I'm going to ignore better.
are not analogous. Now if the line were instead something like
> Unbiased doesn't exist so I'm ignoring less-biased (or efforts to reduce bias).
then you'd be onto something, but as it stands, what you've got there is a false equivalence.
You'll see that Tesla's press events have gotten plenty of extremely positive discussion/upvotes on HN. "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" has 1,493 upvotes:
But it is obvious you didn't do the search I recommended. Or else you would've seen how recent the most popular Tesla posts are. The second most popular Tesla story was posted just 2 months ago.
Well, if you get your news from sources like Electrek, you'd think so.
Yet here we are with both Jaguar and very soon Audi selling fully electric SUVs that are competitive with the Model X on both features and price.
And in the second month after launch (March 2018), Nissan sold 11 400 units of the new (150 mile EPA range) Leaf; next year they have a 230 mile range model coming out. It may not be a Model 3 killer based on range, but they sold 300 000 of the old model, so it's no compliance car.
Nissan also currently has a monopoly on fully electric MPVs (e-NV200).
These may not all be sexy cars with ridiculous modes, but if they help save our planet, I'm all for it.
On that spectrum there's Tesla, a bunch of Chinese firms like BYD then a big gap before firms like Jaguar, Audi, Volkswagen all of whom are selling products that Tesla can rightly attack as being the past, not the future of transport.
I think every bit helps, including efficiency, smaller cars, public transport, city cars and non plugin hybrids like Nissan's eNote range but Tesla is setting the pace to a large degree at the moment.
The first genuinely serious EV from another automaker in my opinion will be Porsche's Mission E, but take note of how well it can match the characteristics of a Model S, a family sedan, you can already buy today. Still, just the idea of an all-electric Porsche is badass.
> These may not all be sexy cars with ridiculous modes, but if they help save our planet, I'm all for it.
We're in agreement that any measure of EVing is good. Many of the challenges facing automakers are systemic, so they are in a tough spot even if they genuinely believe EVs are the future.
edit: is, it's going on as we speak
Buffering space is a big cost. Here's a Coca-Cola bottling plant.[1] This one has an extremely low employee count. It's mostly buffering space. That gives employees time to move to the trouble spot and deal with problems. Since Coca-Cola has been at this a while, they must need all that buffering.
In an auto final assembly plant, you don't have the luxury of big buffers. On a rigid line, there's no buffering at all - if any station stops, the whole line must stop. That leads to quality problems - if someone drops a bolt, that bolt never gets inserted. A few seconds of buffering between stations helps. That's what Toyota's kanban system introduced. If you watch videos of Toyota production lines, they have a big timer showing the cycle time of the last cycle. It's not always the same. Sometimes a cycle takes a few seconds longer. If something goes wrong, like a tool breaking or a bad part, the stations upstream use up their buffering capacity and stop one after another. But the whole line doesn't have to stop for a one minute tool change.
This is enormously context-sensitive, but it is not at all odd to have a buffer with several hours worth of vehicles in auto assembly, for example between shops (ie between body and paint and between paint and final assembly).
As you get closer to the end of the line, the buffers get much smaller, but you may have a 5 minute buffer between the last few lines in Final Assembly.
One other thing to point out here; The two main styles of conveyance in vehicle assembly are fixed position stop and stop stations (also known by many other names).
- Fixed position stop is what you call rigid line, and it is used where humans work on cars. The conveyor runs at a constant, slow speed through constant size work areas called footprints, such that each worker gets about a minute or so to do a set of assembly tasks. Humans can attach parts as the vehicle moves down the line. With fixed position stop, there is no buffer as the vehicle carriers are physically connected to a conveyor chain.
- Stop stations are used where robots work on vehicles. It is very difficult to get a robot to work on a moving vehicle (but possible). Generally these conveyors move about twice as fast as the rigid stations, but all work is done while the vehicle is stopped. Also, each vehicle moves independently between stop stations as fast as the conveyor can move, and there is some buffering between each station.
> 20 minutes of buffer in an auto plant? That's a building the size of a large supermarket.
Yes, but it's in a mezzanine above the work area.
The pay disparity between workers and executives is important and worth discussing, but what makes this particular example of it worth pointing out?
Tesla/Musk appears to be following the model of massive greedy billion dollar corporation that would rather take free work than appropriately compensate workers/consultants.
There is a massive difference between BEING PAID and NOT BEING PAID when asked to do work. Seeing how Musk overworks and underpays his workers I'm not surprised by this move.
Also if only the winners are being paid, what about everyone else? They've invested just as much time and their contributions were still valued by Tesla. This isn't Glengarry Glen Ross, these are real humans.
As far as I can tell, this “hackathon” is being done by employees on company time, so I’m extremely confused.
The volunteers email went out in an internal employee list.
> A hackathon is a sprint event where programmers are invited to compete in fixing a problem or creating a product in a short period of time with prize money for the highest performing participants.
If Ray Charles tried to shoot the broad side of the barn he's probably hit the pinch welds on a Tesla in the next town over. Superfluous part numbers (like their multi-piece wheel wells) and material excess is the kind of redundancy the Model 3 has the most of.
Tesla doesn't make efficiently designed cars any more than Juicero made efficient juicers. Tesla has carved out a market niche that they won't easily be unseated from but efficient design is not that niche.
You can simulate and model all you want. If you don't have the expertise in house you won't be able to get much value out of it.
Said it yesterday, say it again today: I’m fucking sick of seeing every tiny little irrelevant thing involving Tesla in the news. It’s STUPID. I bet google’s holding a hackathon to fix something too but I don’t see 45 upvotes on that....in fact nobody’s even writing about it. This is just clickbait bullshit.