Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target
thisisinsider.com
thisisinsider.com
This has been a big issue in auto manufacturing for decades. At one time, the Detroit automakers ran "dealer preparation centers" to finish what the production line hadn't done. Toyota's big innovation was figuring out how to get it right the first time, which got costs down and quality up. In a Toyota plant, if you have to stop the line for 10 seconds to get it right, a worker can do that. Videos of Toyota plants show a cycle time display and a vehicles per hour display over the line. It's expected that a car will take an extra few seconds every once in a while.
Is that the "dealer prep" line that always seems to appear as a non-optional line item in the price of a new car?
You can actually find the dealer prep checklist for a lot of cars with Google, for example GM has theirs freely published on their public web site.
He's talking about fixing production errors, like panels being stuck on wrong[0], or window gaskets being misinstalled[3].
As a side note, this is the first time I've heard anyone defend the lemons coming out of Detroit in the 70s. It was so bad, that my dad would check the VINs, so that he would never buy a car that was built on a Monday or Friday, because it was too likely that the workers were either drunk or hungover.[1][2][4] And this is when he was in the UAW as mechanic and then a body man.
I thought these production issues might be overblown, so I checked the deck lids on three 3s in the parking lot at work. All three were misaligned. I didn't expect them to be perfect (it's not laser perfect on my 2010 Jetta either), but I didn't expect to fit my finger through the gaps. All three cars. All three in different places. That killed it for me. I will never buy a Tesla 3.
[0] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/body-panel-gap-and-a...
[1] https://jalopnik.com/the-ten-worst-car-factories-in-history-...
[2] https://jalopnik.com/5645880/auto-workers-drinking-getting-h...
[3] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/unfinished-metal-and...
I can see panel gaps being an issue for some cars, but I can't see the deck lid being misaligned to the point where you're able to put your hand through any gaps.
A photo of my hand can be provided upon request.
EDIT: whoops, missed the context. The above just tells you the model year. But you were replying to someone that implied it could be done down to the day. It can be done down to the month, but in my experience down to the day is rare, if non-existent (none of my vehicle VINs have that resolution).
I’m telling you what I remember him telling me. How accurate he actually was, I don’t know. But Detroit earned their horrible reputation, and the Japanese manufactures are them alive.
It seems some people flag anything Tesla / Elon Musk related
Their cars work, they met their target, who cares about the details of the manufacturing process? Yes, there is room for improvement, there is always room for improvement, I let the guys at Tesla deal with their priorities.
It is a nice insight on how things are done at Tesla but that's about it.
A high rework rate is a huge red flag for at-scale manufacturing and says that something is wrong.
It seems like this should be obvious. How healthy is a software engineering environment where 80% of the commits fail at the tail end of the development pipeline and require fixes? I’ve never seen an org that bad.
Maybe, maybe not. We can look at the actual quality of the new cars instead of trying to guess.
The high rework rate could be because they catch a lot of mistakes. That would clearly be a good thing. But given what we actually observe from their cars it seems more likely that they catch mistakes with an average success rate but produce more mistakes than normal. That means both more rework, and lower quality because of all the uncaught mistakes.
A lot of people have declined their Model 3's at the dealerships due to issues, even knowing that means they go back onto the wait list.
There are tons of threads about this issue on the Tesla Reddit forums. Less so for Tesla's other vehicles.
Model 3 is completely different beast. If they succeed manufacturing it 5000, then 10,000 per week, the quality must be up if they want to make money.
For instance, mine had body damage from a road hazard - not an issue of quality, but definitely needing repair. It took a few weeks before the parts were available.
As you can imagine, if your car isn't drivable in the interim that's a big pain and rental bill, but if it is drivable then you just have to wait longer.
And you can’t sustain profitability with this level of rework.
I get that, but isn't it expected that if you create a new car factory, sort of from scratch, your FPY won't be exceptionally high? Unless you really know what you're doing due to previous experience in car manufacturing?
If you hire the right people you will have that expertise.
It seems to me that it would be an entertaining albeit high pressure job/problem sorting that out. You would of course try to engineer as much of the solution ahead of time, but in production scenarios, shit most definitely happens.
Of course it impacts your manufacturing rate, since anything not passing on first pass needs rework and possibly additional parts, making logistics more difficult etc. But all of that just influences manufacturing rate and cost per vehicle.
Multiply that over departments and many processes and the result is great inefficiency. So FPY is the KPI to stop all that. FPY is not really valuable by itself, but hopefully by the culture it supports. Swapping FPY for # delivered is false management and points to cultural issues. In this case: managing by the wrong target (# delivered instead of the "total worth of the value chain").
Nobody would care if Tesla would just deliver growing amounts of cars at falling costs. It's the bootstrapping (in the Baron of M-sense) towards false metrics that gets the poison going and management is totally working within that frame of mind. They should find their own frame, and operational excellence just might be one. (Apologies for the MBA bs-bingo, but in this case I think it's to the point.)
The question that follows on: What internal process has prevented that experience from being bought? Instead Tesla seems to have opted to gain that experience from scratch at great cost to investors (and consumers).
When Toyota first started creating their own US factories, they took the steps of shipping floor employees in the US to japan a few at a time and working for weeks of training each class. When other auto companies tried to replicate Toyota processes in their own factories, it didn't help yield in the factories in many cases because often the input supplies needed so much rework. And then they had problems changing suppliers configurations because those relationships were contentious, and not of the nature of Toyota to it's suppliers. When you're trying to stand the whole system up at once, it's not just a matter of "don't write bugs" in one part of the final assembly.
When Boeing reworked it's production design process for the 787, they had years of production problems to re-iron out, despite having years of great process experience previously.
That doesn't really bode well for their future if they consider their current production rates that imminently important to their success.
Isn't swapping FPY for # delivered while they determine the root of the issue and fix it a good plan? It keeps the money flowing in, it helps them find other issues in parallel, and keeps cars getting delivered.
I see a lot of people critisizing Tesla here, but my question is what would you do? You are already in a situation where your plant is producing cars with flaws, no pretending that you don't make mistakes or are infallible and would never be there.
Garbage is flying off the line, what is the solution that you would go with that is better than what Tesla is currently doing?
Without that information, it seems kind of silly seeing everyone proclaim how Tesla is done because of this... It's like telling your doctor that you don't want the medicine because the better solution is to just never get sick in the first place... yeah, everyone agrees, but you are sick, so here take this.
I imagine that it's significantly cheaper to fix the problem (and identify a root cause) when the car is still in pieces than to disassemble the finished product to fix the problem.
As for re-tooling, that can be done down the line with a manual fix in place in the short term (after all, they're able to fix it manually after the assembly line is completed).
Much like how in software development it's cheaper and faster to fix a bug caught in development than it is in production.
Now software is different than cars, but I'm gonna say that I'd go for the latter just about every time. Both as a developer, and as a user.
It seems like you answered your own question? These are really important for a company that's trying to make money.
Especially if the problems are known problems. If a specific step needs a person or 2 to fix a problem on 90% of cars, but afterwords it works 100% of the time, what's the issue? Changing that step to fix that problem might introduce other issues, or cause problems with the supply chain, or could possibly just not work.
Hiring a few extra people to fix the problem that you know about in order to keep moving forward not only gives you the time to really design and think about a "proper" solution, but also keeps the money flowing in.
Not making the mistake in the first place isn't possible at this point... Your options here are "stop everything and fix it at the source, burning piles of cash every second it's down" or "hire some workers to spend 37 minutes per car to fix these known issue while you work on solving them at the root".
And going with option 1 seems like a fast track to bankruptcy.
Who cares if it takes an extra 37 minutes per car, if they can maintain the same throughput, it won't matter a single bit (except possibly someone having to wait an extra 37 minutes to get their car...)
The extra time spent on manufacturing has as much to do with margins as the delivery truck getting stuck in traffic does. As long as it's not holding anything up, then there isn't an issue.
And it sounds to me like this is a temporary solutions while they fix the root cause, which seems like a really goddamn good idea vs just shutting the whole operation down and giving up.
If you need say 100 million in hardware and 1,000$ in manpower to build a car then spending an extra 100$ in manpower is cheap even * (5,000 * 0.14) = 70k per week. Meanwhile you might be paying 70k per hour the line's stopped.
Granted, you don't want to wait a full year to fix a production issue, but you can batch things so you are fixing several parts of the line at the same time. And if one of those batched fixes was not 100% correct but is re-workable then you can wait another few weeks for the next batch of fixes.
Conversely, if you where producing 50,000 cars per week then rework costs go up and shutting things down quickly to make a minor fix is more viable.
But regardless, if you really think a 37 minute fix is costing them enough that it means they are selling the car for a loss, then I can see why people are upset by this news, as it means that shutting down the entire plant would make more financial sense than selling at a loss.
But since we are both working from a guess of a guess of a guess, I'm fairly certain that an extra 37 minutes per car of work isn't eating over 100% of their profits, and that their choice of not stopping production over small fixable issues is a smart choice. And even if it were, i'd argue that keeping your workforce from getting other jobs because they can't get work at your company while you endlessly tinker with the production lines to try and achieve what only a few companies in existence have done before (almost 100% FPY) isn't good business sense either...
But then you want to throw in the cost of tooling changes, and now this conversation isn't against the cost of a car, but the entire cashflow of the business, which if you are curious you can lookup. They aren't turning a profit, and nobody thinks they are yet. But if people are holding them to the ability to get everything right on the very first try and the second there is an issue to shut down again, then they are going to be disappointed regardless.
They really need to start being a car company rather than an investment factory. Car companies, particularly the BMWs and Hondas Tesla wants to compete with, care more about their reputation than factory output. I cannot imagine a BMW exec ever sacrificing unit completeness in the name of productivity. For Honda, an unfinished car simply isn't a car worth counting. Tesla has a long way to go before winning me over. (also Toyota)
You're very naive and haven't read the news in the past few years, it seems.
PS: Referring to the emission scandal.
According to the article, it's an average of 37 minutes of extra work per car that has to happen.
Tesla's saying Tesla should sacrifice completeness because Tesla chose to sacrifice completeness. And a car with a bumper that falls off in the rain is in some way one of incomplete or unfinished.
2 years ago I bought an Audi that I was unable to get into after it dropped below freezing for the first time, because the window leaked water internally which froze and the door can't be opened unless the window comes down slightly. That doesn't mean the Audi was unfinished, or that all Audis are awful...
Shit happens, not every car is perfect, and i'm not saying it is, i'm just saying that they aren't selling half-finished cars. Defects are defects, not an incomplete product.
Having this many defects with this few cars made indicates serious production quality control issues, which just gets worse as production scales.
I would assume that defects will go down as they scale up, as things will become less manual and more automated, and they find the common problems and fix them at manufacturing time.
Are there other car companies that started from nothing that went a different direction? Did they start with nearly perfect cars then get progressively worse as they scaled up? Did they plan to mass manufacturer cars?
They don’t state in the article that the quoted facts about other automakers are for cars in their first model year.
"For some unknown reason, Tesla says that it won’t be shipping the Performance Model 3 with the spoiler included in the performance package for the early production of the vehicle.
Owners will be able to have it shipped and installed at their local service center.
The badge was also a question mark for a long time since the first 50,000 Model 3 vehicles that Tesla produced had no badge beyond the Tesla logo."
https://electrek.co/2018/07/19/tesla-model-3-performance-spo...
The factory not installing something that was part of the vehicle means that the car is incomplete.
Pretend your are Honda and you just found out this is happening, what do you do? Shut down the plant and fix it properly? Who is going to fund that? What happens if it causes other issues? How long can you afford to do this?
Or would you get some people to fix the problem after production manually while you worked on solving the root of the issue? Exactly what Tesla is doing here...
Yes.
>> Who is going to fund that? What happens if it causes other issues? How long can you afford to do this?
I don't care. I am not an investor. I am a consumer, a potential customer. I don't care whether the Tesla company lives or dies. I care about the quality of the vehicle I might purchase. Seeing this sort of problem at Tesla is a red flag. I don't want to buy a car made in a factory with such problems.
What really worries me isn't so much the problem, but that Tesla isn't in full panic mode about it. The more defensive they and their supporters are, the more rooted the problem seems. A full shutdown and re-tooling would be a signal that they are a serious company. Musk has the money to do this. Instead we read about bandage solutions. The roots of the problem must be very deep.
If you don't want a car that has ever had any production issues at any point in it's life, you don't want a car.
It's like complaining that Intel has low yield numbers for their CPUs, or that some of the apples that your local orchid grows are rotten.
The cars are being manufactured to the correct specs, it's just a different (more manual) way of doing it. If you care about nothing but your car, then you wouldn't give a shit how it's manufactured as long as it's good.
If you have an issue with the end result of these cars, that's another thing. But the FPY has nothing to do with that. A car made to shitty specs and with awful tolerances is going to be awful regardless of whether they made it awful on the first try or the 10th.
It seems absolutely insane to me that they Honda would stop the world for something like that. It's like what, $15 per car in labor? $30 per car in labor? And you want to stop the whole factory output for potentially weeks to stop that? That seems like a monumental waste of time and money.
Then Elon Musk is incompetent. Because the fact is, if you don't have the experience in running a factory, you hire someone that does. This is literally a problem that you throw money at, and it goes away.
People here seem to be implying that they should entirely shut down the entire factory and not start it up again until all of these flaws are completely fixed, and that's not "wasting a little bit of time and money" that's putting a bullet in the head of the company.
Most companies shut down their lines every quarter, it's a pretty common thing, and implying that Tesla is "failing" to make all the changes when they do so is silly, this is still a moving target, shit is still changing and improving. If they weren't closing down their line every quarter still, then i'd be worried that they can't keep up and aren't even trying to improve things any more.
How do you expect them to be "world leaders" in manufacturing technology when they have to rework so many cars? Remember, the narrative is that no one can do it as well as they can. Huge margins!
>who cares about the details of the manufacturing process?
Yeah, who cars about the manufacturing process when your whole business is manufacturing...
Investors
buyers worried for assembly quality and overall reliability?
for example a misplaced or improperly installed mounting brakets make panels noisy over time, panel misalignment will affect resale value, badly tightened glasses will opacize etc.
people aren't able to see the car they're going to get beforehand, at most they can refuse upon delivery, se yes knowing assembly line issues is kinda important for a car, not everyone is a valley software engineer pulling 150k+
edit: wow musketeers out in masses I see
Sounds as if Tesla's 'final assembly' is not that final with a little bit of work being picked up in quality control. The spin of the story is that Tesla are cheating their figures by just repairing a few extra cars to get them out the door, but there is probably a happier story than this - at least those defects were not shipped to customers.
It is okay for a new company to take time to re-learn what has gone on before. I jokingly imagine Tesla to be actually catching up to 1970's British Leyland quality control 'circles' with the next step being a relearning of the 'Toyota Way'. It takes time to build a culture of quality control, efficiency and all these good things. The only thing is that soon our friends in China are going to be offering plenty of very nice electric cars to customers who just want electric rather than dinosaur power. Will Tesla be able to compete once China have enough EVs for their own market?
This would be okay if we actually were living in the 70s right now. The problem is of course that Tesla consumes money (like basically nobody else) and the real Toyota is still around and produces as many cars on a weekend as Tesla does in an entire year.
It's not like people are going to stop buying Toyota cars out of goodwill for Tesla.
> who just want electric rather than dinosaur power.
this too seems to be part of the reality distortion field around Tesla. All big manufacturers already produce hybrid and electric cars, and their research budgets dwarf Tesla, they will be ready in a few years as the market grows.
Auto manufacturers changes models, every year. They either tweak them, completely redesign them, or launch new models. Ford even changed the entire frame and welding setup when they transitioned from steel to aluminum for the F150. None of them has these problems.
I'm sorry, but Tesla's growing pains should be over. And if they shouldn't be over, when should they? Does it take 20 years to figure out how to mass produce an item that has been mass produced by many different companies, from around the world, for about 100 years now?
At some point, you've got a man that has no previous experience running a manufacturing plant, repeating the same mistakes the industry made 40 years ago. Including most damningly trying to automate final assembly[1], because he thinks he's being clever.
Let's be honest here. Building a car with zero defects is possible. It's done every day at scale, at every Toyota plant in the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
[1] https://qz.com/1261214/how-exactly-tesla-shot-itself-in-the-...
I would be curious to know more about the impact producing so many of their own parts, to custom specs, has had on Tesla's successes or failures. This is another area where Tesla has diverged from the norms in automotive manufacturing.
Generally, it is unclear to me why Musk has taken Tesla on a course so different from how cars are typically produced and assembled, besides where it really count: electric power.
The damning part is that these not the problems that people are talking about. People are reporting not being able to put a piece of metal on straight. We're talking about gluing a rubber gasket on to a piece of glass. This is 100 years old, and this is what they're fucking up.
Also, a huge part of the manufacturing process doesn't even deal with the real guts of the car, it is making sure that the seats are installed, or there aren't panel gaps, or that the paint has been applied properly. All of those are exactly the same for Tesla as they would be for any other automaker.
I would suggest mechanical vs. electric typewriter as a better analogy.
And they couldn’t don’t without an 85% defect rate.
That doesn’t look good.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/
And I believe that they’re building almost 2,000 Model X,S cars a week.
At almost 400,000 cars a year, Tesla has got to be doing better than many expected.
Elon seems to be doing fine in this recent interview:
Edit: the heck? How is that not evidence against "Elon doing fine"? Is this just "don't feed the trolls", or auto-downvotes of anything anti-Musk?
The important thing is that they are producing 8k cars a week and that will allow them to raise money if they really need it. Specially because they have 100'000s of reservations.
* With the reservation numbers, sure, there are a large number of people who put down a refundable $1,000 for a $35K car with a $7,500 tax credit, but what is currently available is a $50K car with a rapidly expiring tax credit. I wouldn't call that proof of demand of the current product.
* Can they raise money? If they can, why haven't they? There's no MBA1 who would ever recommend leaving a company in the cash position they currently are in. Also, you seem to be under the assumption that billions of dollars exist that can just immediately appear. That's not how the capital markets work. Money raises take many months of effort to materialize.
* Also, as this article states the 8,000 cars a week metric might not be the best to focus on. Especially as a company that personally owns all the warranty liability for their cars, if 8,000 cars are being produced by cutting corners, that's not really the positive sign you would expect.
* There is no reason to think that Tesla want be selling a 35k car
* If 400000 preorders and the most talked about car in human history is not enough for you to prove that there is 'demand', I don't know how t oargue agianst that.
* Of course they can raise money, and I think even most bears would agree that this is the case. They have not raised more money because they currently don't need to raise more money, if that changes, they can do so.
Honest, people have been making doom and gloom prediction about Tesla 'cash position' for about 10 years and by now their actual cash inflow is growing massively.
* If you had actual prove that those 8000 are all broken and a warranty liability then you might have point but up to now very little of these problems have materialized and the quality has gotten better over time
Where? The biggest market is the US by far, and many other locations, like Canada, demand has dissolved without the tax credit.
> There is no reason to think that Tesla want be selling a 35k car
Other than the CEO once gave a large presentation two years ago selling it as a $35,000 car? And they raised capital multiple times under that premise? That seems pretty significant.
> Of course they can raise money, and I think even most bears would agree that this is the case. They have not raised more money because they currently don't need to raise more money, if that changes, they can do so.
Well, depends on what "raise money" means? Who is providing this capital and at what terms? Do I think Tesla could raise more debt at the 7-8% that it's debt is currently trading at? Sure, but that has a significant number of long term consequences raising debt at Michael Milken rates.
> Honest, people have been making doom and gloom prediction about Tesla 'cash position' for about 10 years and by now their actual cash inflow is growing massively.
I don't understand this at all. The company has never once been cash flow positive. What exactly do you mean by cash inflow and "cash position"? Also, Tesla was barely talked about until 5 years ago. Who are these people who are talking doom and gloom before the company went public in 2010?
> If you had actual prove that those 8000 are all broken and a warranty liability then you might have point but up to now very little of these problems have materialized and the quality has gotten better over time
The major problem here is that the company has had a number of instances being incompletely forthright with its metrics. That creates a pattern of distrust with how exactly to value the company. Any sort of financial projection of Tesla hinges completely on Model 3 margins. There's a growing concern of whether the company's quoted margins are accurate.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117616_tesla-dominated...
> Electric cars accounted for nearly 3 percent of all passenger vehicles sold in Canada in June, thanks to a surge of Tesla Model 3 deliveries.
And the article also has a graphic of sales going back to 2011:
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117616_tesla-dominated...
Looks like sales have risen each year.
Independent analysis did agree that there is no technical reason they can not build it. Building the more expensive variant while they get the marginal cost down is just smart business.
> Well, depends on what "raise money" means?
They have wide range of options, including issuing further stocks. The Saudis for example multiple times asked if they would issue more stocks exclusively.
I have heard analysis from multiple different people and pretty much all agree that Tesla is in a good position to raise money.
> I don't understand this at all. The company has never once been cash flow positive. What exactly do you mean by cash inflow and "cash position"? Also, Tesla was barely talked about until 5 years ago. Who are these people who are talking doom and gloom before the company went public in 2010?
> What exactly do you mean by cash inflow and "cash position"?
When you are selling 8000 cars a week you get a lot of cash inflow. Because the production line is up and running the capex is going down at the same time. That makes their current position regarding to cash not very problematic.
> Also, Tesla was barely talked about until 5 years ago.
Yeah I don't know who you talk to but Tesla was talked about a lot 5 years ago, and even more so in 2008.
> Who are these people who are talking doom and gloom before the company went public in 2010?
Well they actually did almost go down in 2008 but there were always people, with the S and the X and the Model 3 who claimed (a) Tesla is spending to much (b) Tesla can't deliver on time and so on.
You can find articles to that extend all the way back to 2010.
> The major problem here is that the company has had a number of instances being incompletely forthright with its metrics. That creates a pattern of distrust with how exactly to value the company. Any sort of financial projection of Tesla hinges completely on Model 3 margins. There's a growing concern of whether the company's quoted margins are accurate.
Where is this 'growing concern'. Independent analysis agree that the Model 3 could be produced at good margins. Maybe not as high as Elon hopes, but a huge amount better then any other company can do with electric cars.
It seems this huge 'OMG they are using humans' has people now speculating that humans are way to expensive and are gone ruin their margins, but their car lines are pretty efficient and they are not using excessive amounts of labor. Overall their plant is still pretty heavily automated.
Now we find out that there was an asterisk to that. The cars weren’t ready for sale without lots of manual rework.
It makes their statement/accomplishment look much worse than they tried to play it.
“85% of cars need manual fixes” is not a good look for any automaker. But it’s especially bad for one that there are lots of questions about who tried to use that goal as proof they were last their issues.
Tesla says they pay $25/hour at Gigafactory, glassdoor says they’re paying $17-$22 hours to manufacturing workers.
I’m not into manufacturing, but extra $10-15, for a car with starting price $35k, looks normal.
Fixing just this failing manual part is not the drama the competitors are declaring. Tesla also needed this artificial 5.000 number to reach their mandatory milestone.
So 37 minutes of rework per vehicle means that they're less than 5% as efficient as their competitors, despite the massive investments they've made their factory line. It's indicative of serious production issues and will be a major roadblock to scaling future production, since it means that if they don't solve the production issues leading to the rework, then they would need to spend 20x what their competitors to achieve the same volume of production.
EDIT: The 3 minutes is time-between cars. Each car takes 17-18 hours to get through the entire line. So 37 additional minutes is still pretty bad, but it's not 20x as inefficient on a time-basis. However, given the number of workers at the Tesla factory, they are still 20x as inefficient on a labor basis.
As a point of comparison, large car manufacturers get into the "how much would a lawsuit and recall cost" when discussing adding costs of $4-$5 per car.
all tasks are massively parallelized in a production line. to reach 5000 car month tesla need to crank a car every seven minutes.
now imagine a production line that pump a car out every seven minutes and you need 37 minutes manual labor for each of them
the inefficence doesn't look so minor. it's also a logisticsl nightmare, just imagine parking all those cars while the rework stations free up.
So 6 mechanics in 6 bays at the end of the line do the rework jobs and cars continue to flow out of the plant one every 7 minutes.
An extra $20 in COGS per car. Is this really so horrible? What am I missing?
Even if it’s 10 mechanics and 10 drivers moving cars into and out of the bays, with some bays idle some of the time and let’s call it an extra $60 in COGS.
Their gross margin is already way better than anyone expected to see on the Model 3, they used some very impressive electrical design to save in so many places.
Even just their rear view mirror is more than $50 cheaper than the competition’s mirrors because of their smart electrical design. [1]
Right now they need volume more than anything else. Speaking as a reservation holder.
[1] - https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-solidly-profitable-s...
just on top on my mind tooling, factory space, training, burnout, turns, above average defects that will have to be handled by the post sales network.
> they used some very impressive electrical design
oh yes they are brilliant car, no question about that. it's less impressive when you get an engineering marvel and the build quality is random depending on the hands that worked on it in post processing.
To park a car every seven minutes? Maybe one extra full time employee?
(and btw it's 3x that because full time still only means 8 hours a day)
[0]: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Tesla/salaries?location=US%2FCA%2...
Also, since Tesla has all of these cars under warranty themselves, if they do have issues after delivery, which quality control problems like this usually indicate it can really blow through their margins quickly.
2 new guys don't have a year to rework 4300 cars.
But that'll take time, and in the short term putting a guy at the end of the line replacing all the windscreens gets cars out the door today.
It's confusing, I prefer the article's headline "Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target" (the submission title is from the URL)
He’s turned into an almost political topic in that way, unfortunately.
Short seller's activity is toxic for the US industry. Allowing to make profit on other peoples failure is a good recipe to pull down an economy. Good luck with that.
What you say, if I understood correctly, is that it is normal to have disinformation news and that they will cancel themselves out. Unfortunately, information doesn't add up like numbers.
Negative news comes about companies every single day and I never hear people go on about it being caused by short sellers.
>The most common reason Model 3 cars require rework is a "failed manual task," followed by cosmetic issues
Given how entirely ad-hoc their entire production line still is, and how the car doesn't seem to be designed for easy assembly at all, this is unsurprising. But at least they don't seem to skimp on quality control.
I don't think this is true (remember, reworking only addresses the problems you can see).
Last weekend I rented somebody's Model 3 on Turo to see what it was like, and while I enjoyed it, the QC problems are real. The touchscreen crashed twice, and the cupholder in the center spar doesn't close unless you push it very slowly. This is in a $60,000 car! Things like that don't inspire confidence in long-term reliability and I definitely won't be spending my own money on a Model 3 until I see some assurance that they are overhauling their QC in a big way.
In this case, do you lose the speedometer etc while it resets? Does it reset automatically or do you have to press something? Genuinely curious.
Edit: this will become the go-to excuse for speeding in the future - "I'm sorry officer, I don't know how fast I was going, the speedometer had crashed and needed to reboot".
still I have a deposit on a M3 since 8/5, will take a large number of pictures when it ever arrives and hopefully by then it comes out fine
Then why are so many deliveries being canceled/postponed for quality issues? Their quality control, from what I read, is horrible.
I think its quite prudent to admit to uncertainty instead of being foolishly opinionated in either direction and wrong. But people are so full of themselves, its rather disconcerting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_(series_12)#Tesla_Roa...
They are also using lots of automation. This means there are lots of problems at first. With automation, once you solve a problem, it is solved forever.
How you could compare Tesla rework with other companies rework, where the threshold that determines if a car needs reworking is decided by the executives of the same companies?
I could make rework zero just selling broken cars. I bought a European car with a problem in one valve of the engine when it was brand new. I told the dealers about the strange sound, they told me it was normal. It was not and gave me lots of headaches later.
Take your Eurocar example, and then multiply that by multiple systems. And then apply that to almost every purchaser of the vehicle. And now you understand Tesla's problem. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Musk's "perfectionism" is interfering with the actual production and quality control of the vehicles and resulting in vehicles that are very far from perfect....when they easily could be, if he were to let the professionals run the company.