Tesla employees say they took shortcuts, worked through harsh conditions
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
The challenge is that once the immediate fire is out, it's easy to simply leave things in a half-baked state. That accumulates as technical debt.
Thankfully, most of the instances where I have had to deal with this has been purely software and not affected the lives and comfort of operators on the floor like with Tesla. But I can see how this happens. Even if the 'tent' becomes a permanent installation, I hope they spend the time and money to improve it to the necessary working standards that employees deserve.
well that depends on the industry. Toy manufacturer probably, aeorospace engineer, not so much. I would think of cars without drivers of belonging into the second category.
I had an old GM car and looked at it on a lift once and... "hey, what are those?"
shims. It had lots of shims from the factory to make the body straight.
I suspect there are lots of these "fixers" in many products that will work unnoticed, but people might not want to know they exist.
And it's especially odd because so much of the article is just a bunch of nothing, but Tesla makes it newsworthy by denying everything. And 50 cents says Musk has a team analysing the photos right now to try and track down the employees who took them. ...to ensure they're fired and/or sued, of course; obviously Tesla would never see people who had identified problems as a potentially valuable resource.
There's a lot more interesting details if you dig into it, but wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the Toyota Production System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System). An interesting contrast, perhaps.
[1]: I mean, we all know who's behind this PR strategy, right?
I said simply that if someone signs a legal contract and one side breaks it, the other party is well within their bounds to investigate it and potentially to litigate it as well. This is how contracts work unless they're deemed to break a law. Then a judge will invalidate it.
Do I think suing employees is good for business, or for a public image? No, I think it is terrible. You're the one who tried to put words into my mouth I never once stated.
If this was a rhetorical assertion that there is no reason for Tesla not to sue, then you should admit that you took the position that I described, you should stop pretending that I put words in your mouth, and you should apologize to me for your feigned outrage.
If you were actually asking why Tesla wouldn't use every legal tool available to them, then you should thank me for providing you with a thoughtful answer, and then apologize for attacking me and my character.
I eagerly await your sincere apology.
"Which is the Toyota Production System," replied Johnson.
"Yeah, we don't think so," countered Musk.
"The car industry thinks they're really good at manufacturing and actually they are quite good at manufacturing. But they just don't realize just how much potential there is for improvement. It's way more than they think,"
Or
"Musk acknowledged that Tesla had been "a little overconfident, a little complacent" in its ability to crank up production volume for battery packs - its specialty - at its massive battery gigafactory near Reno, Nevada. "
But yes, I could have make Musk sound like an idiot too. I chose not to needlessly take someones words out of context for click-bait. You're free to have your own opinion, and Tesla will keep selling more cars I guess. I'd like to buy one but I cannot afford one at the moment..
Most people would follow a statement like that by contrasting his ideas with the ideas of his competitor to demonstrate why his ideas are likely to be more effective. You know, make an actual argument. He doesn't do that. He just makes statements about his own superiority, and occasionally when reality intrudes too greatly he engages in a little self-deprecation.
(If someone has a link to where he makes a comparison like that in detail, I'd love to see it. Or any statement that would demonstrate he even knows what Toyota Production System is actually about.)
Who's making demands? I think Musk's demonstrated understanding of auto manufacturing is quite superficial and I'm fishing for evidence to the contrary. I'm not bothered by the fact that the evidence does not exist, I think it actually says something.
> A CEOs job is to run the company and take advise and input from other subject matter experts.
Hopefully it's obvious to you, based on how this thread started and more generally Musk's history of statements about manufacturing, that if Musk's attitude were simply "I'm just running the company and taking advice from the experts" we would not be having this conversation.
I don't think much of your posts in this thread but I'll give you credit, that's probably the first time that particular sentence has ever been written about Elon Musk.
Here's a quote from the article: "Eberhard and Tarpenning were the original founders and incorporated Tesla, while Musk, Straubel and Wright joined in a Series A round later on. A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five to call themselves founders."
Like the "World's greatest dad" cups? Actually "founder" has a pretty clear definition: a person who establishes an institution or settlement. If Tesla wants to use it internally with a different meaning that's their prerogative of course. But outside of the company that meaning of "founder" will not follow. Like a non-routable IP if you wish.
Otherwise it's not too dissimilar to this guy [0] who copyrighted a software called "EMAIL" so now goes around claiming he invented email (years after the real thing was used). Although this guy at least has a copyright.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#%22EMAIL%22_in...
If you're talking about people who have plans to join the startup at day zero but will only manage it a month or so after founding due to logistics, then it's more interesting. It gets more debatable.
However, Musk isn't a founder since he was not involved until the series A as far as I'm aware. Despite what Tesla and Eberhard agreed to, I don't think he's a founder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tesla,_Inc.&actio...
And Tesla has cut corners with engineering decisions: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
Musk wants Tesla to out-Toyota Toyota, but it hasn't yet and probably won't:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2018/02/16/tesla-th...
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2...
There's no point in ignoring Tesla's problems. It's better to be objective about it. If you want to buy a Tesla you should go in clear-eyed about the reliability issues.
Try that with your toyota!
Talk to people who own Teslas and they will bitch about their experience. Tesla annoys their customers constantly with things like: inaccurate battery charge indicators, no support for CarPlay or Android Auto, updates breaking functionality in their cars, promises for self driving which never materialize, and much more. I am sure I will hear more at lunch.
Tesla has plenty of problems, but bricking thousands of cars on OTA update isn't one of them. I've had my Model 3 since Dec 2018 and have done plenty of updates. One of them did brick my car, but it turned out to be a fault in the 12V battery. They had it fixed in no time directly in my garage. I was blown away by their service although it did take them several weeks to get the seatbelt tensioners when someone hit me head on. They've supposedly fixed that since, but I dunno.
These are not unlike growing pains in a service that is in hyper growth mode. You'll find problems like this, address them, and continue on.
You're the one claiming that OTA updates have bricked thousands of cars. The onus is on YOU to supply a source to backup your claim.
In some countries new Toyotas come with two years maintenance and 24-hour roadside assistance:
https://www.toyota.com/toyota-care
And even after that period you can have any mobile mechanic come to your home to service your car. It's not a novelty or something exclusive to Tesla.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/non-existent-custome...
That’s not great, but also not poor reliability. Their high end models do seem to be having issues, but the reliability standards for cars are extremely high these days.
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27725/tesla-fleet-company-stru...
Even if reliability is statistically poor there must be something about the particulars that keeps them afloat. Perhaps the non-essentials are unreliable or perhaps Tesla is able to succeed by cutting corners on things that have been traditionally important but aren't actually important to consumers.
Tesla is approaching half a million cars sold in a year now. If your contention is that they have a problem because hundreds of thousands of drivers are deluded fanboys willing to overlook all their faults... I don't think it says what you think it does about the company.
And there are absolutely brands that people shy away from due to the maintenance issues. Most people care more about reliability than about virtue signaling, flaunting their wealth, or being early adopters. Tesla can dominate those three markets and maybe give, like, BMW a run for their money. They’re almost selling as much as BMW now, actually. Good for them.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/28/40-tesla-headlines-on-c...
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9b71x0/40_tesl...
And for more insight google “why does cnbc hate tesla”
However, it is entirely relevant in determining whether or not the slant of the piece is necessarily factual or whether it has bias, and in determining the probability that the speaker may have left out information unfavorable to the cause they are advancing.
It is a logical fallacy, but it is only a logical fallacy. It is completely relevant in arenas other than pure, strict logic, such as meta-logical analyses about potential biases.
(There's a few other "fallacies" for which this is true too; many of them like affirming the consequent are just straight-up errors, but "appeal to authority", for instance, is a fallacy in Aristotelian binary true/false logic, but in a more realistic probabilistic logic, it can be valid to use it to update your probabilistic beliefs about the world. You just are not logically justified in taking an authority and setting your belief in their statements to a true, mathematical 100.0000...% (which is what the fallacy would be in Aristotelian logic), and you are obligated to make judgments about the quality of the authority as you make the updates.)
Of course, 50% all automobile manufacturers are in the bottom half, and sure, it's not where you want to be. But none of the rest get special attention for being so.
Want proof? Do a search for the the following: CNBC consumer reports reliability rating.
What comes up? In order:
1. "Tesla Tanks": https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/tesla-tanks-subaru-soars-in-...
2. "Tesla Slips": https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/tesla-reliability-slips-to-t...
3. "Consumer reports yanks recommendation for Tesla": https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/reuters-america-update-2-con...
4. "Tesla Falls": https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-falls-after-...
..And so forth.
Note, however, that we didn't search for "Tesla". The spotlight given them is CNBC's bias. There's an entire automobile industry out there, and at any given time, half of it is in the lower half of reliability ratings. But only one is ever given headlines for it.
That's bias.
Actually Consumer Reports placed the Model S at the third-worst of 29 positions, so at the bottom 7%. "Tesla Slips" is actually a pretty mild headline, considering they slipped 6 spots and 8 was the technical maximum.
It was Tesla as a whole that placed 27th of 29 on that list of average lineup reliability (tied with Cadillac at 28th). Tesla tied with RAM for the lowest "most reliable" model ranking at 49 pts, while squeaking by RAM and Volvo for lowest reliability of a model.
The news media loves a hero and loves even more to tear the hero down. The former sells to fans, but the latter sells to everyone.
It would be bias if they were somehow going above and beyond, but look around. The most successful companies in the world receive immaculate coverage when they so much as blink too loudly.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have an anti-Tesla bias, though; while I don't know if CNBC has it, I have observed such a thing definitely exists, at a level above the baseline that any company would be expected to attract. But it seems decently balanced by the above-the-baseline pro-Tesla bias that also exists, so, shrug I guess.
Too many news outlets are using clickbait headlines that sound like a big deal but isn't.
Here's an alternative theory: Perhaps you didn't pay much attention at how media works before, but now have a topic of interest with which you associate positive emotions (Tesla), and therefore suddenly the criticism becomes obvious to you - but only for this very topic. Your subconsciousness therefore has to alter it's previous mental model of the inner working of the media. But instead of throwing out the whole notion of the media being unbiased or neutral, your subconsciousness now just appends the new fact to the existing model: All media is fair and neutral, but not regarding Tesla. Kind of like a modified Gel-Mann amnesia effect.
But actual conscious investigation would produce more evidence that the media is always more critical. After all, no news site ever had headlines like "Today, again, thousends of airplanes took of and landed without a single casuality."
Just to be sure: This is not meant to sound condescending. It's just human. But the web makes it all too easy to find support for practically every idea ever, whether right or wrong. Which puts even more burden on us individually to observe our own internal heuristics.
These forums are getting astroturfed badly.
I work in software, and this happens all the time and it is not the end of the world. It normally means doing even more work later, or shipping without all the features. Its done by not coding in most cases.
But this is a car. What sort of shortcut could you make when assembling parts to a car that has already had every part planed out?
Edit: never-mind, I skipped a entire paragraph somehow. Tape, it is tape guys.
Using some electrical tape in places where you'd otherwise use shrink tubing is not a big deal. But like you said, trying to cut corners on a finished hardware design sounds orders of magnitude harder than doing so on software, and I worry about what else workers are being forced to do to cover for management's failures.
[edit] added word "else" for clarity
The article says that they used electrical tape from Walmart on a bracket that holds the cameras for Autopilot.
I've used some Walmart etape... that's a big deal.
That being said the circumstances around the usage in the article are very different and just because electrical tape can be safe when used properly doesn't mean its safe in the case reported used at Tesla.
Zip ties are mostly not allowed for QC reasons. Some people will crank them tight and some won't. They won't really cause much chafing if properly installed because the wires shouldn't be moving enough to chafe. There's tons and tons and tons of aftermarket wiring in work trucks out there that's been installed with zip ties and it's not any less reliable than OEM wiring.
All but the worst electrical tape will take 20+yr to come apart even in an automotive environment. It should take longer on an EV that isn't going to have as many sources of oil leaks in old age. I still wouldn't want to use it for anything other than bundling wires though.
As an aside, I've worked on aircraft (GA) and on cars and your average car sees more vibration but obviously if things fall apart in the air it's a bigger deal.
If it were my car, (and its so unimportant) than I'd vastly prefer nothing over Walmart tape. The tape is not going to do anything and its going to make a sticky mess. Tesla apologetics aside, this is not ok and I'm sticking to that.
I don't think purchasing a spool of spot tie costs much more than electrical tape and neither does heat shrink.
> Zip ties are mostly not allowed for QC reasons.
Collateral duty inspectors (and QA) ensure quality work so this is not the case. All work done is always inspected by someone who is an expert and did not participate in the maintenance.
> All but the worst electrical tape will take 20+yr to come apart
I have seen electrical tape come apart in just a few years.
> if things fall apart in the air it's a bigger deal.
If an autopilot system receives incorrect input it could kill someone.
As an aside, I've worked on military aircraft (Avionics), and I have seen what happens when a wire is loose and in contact with a vibrating surface.
That said, again, I have no experience with cars.
No it doesn't but Tesla doesn't exactly have a mature vehicle manufacturing operation.
>Collateral duty inspectors (and QA) ensure quality work so this is not the case. All work done is always inspected by someone who is an expert and did not participate in the maintenance.
This is usually not the case in general aviation. Its my understanding that this also not the case for a lot of commercial operators, especially the smaller ones with thinner margins, but my knowledge may be out of date.
>I have seen electrical tape come apart in just a few years.
Yeah, 20yr is probably an exaggeration for tape applied by rushed assembly line workers but I've seen a heck of a lot of 20yo tape (usually used to bundle wires) on commercial vehicles. Most older wiring harnesses use "harness tape" (which is basically just electrical tape with some cloth fibers in it) to keep the wire from falling out of split loom and some use electrical tape to bundle wires in some places.
>If an autopilot system receives incorrect input it could kill someone.
You could say that about a lot of things. Technology is mostly at a point where it takes a cascading failure to kill anybody. The autopilot algorithms are far more suspect then even the most lazily assembled hardware.
>military aircraft
In the military they have tons of bodies to throw at things so everything gets triple checked. This is not the case in the commercial world.
I'm going to feel slightly less safe on civilian aircraft now. I have always assumed that the independent inspection of all work was standard.
I mean, yeah, they could be doing all kinds of crazy things. But so could anyone else who needs to ship products on tight schedules. Why single out Tesla here? I mean, would you react this way if it turned out Mazda or Audi was taping down some misassembled parts?
Citation needed. I've never seen a story this thin (one photo of tape holding down a nonstructural plastic housing) run about another manufacturer. You have a counterexample?
The shortcuts in question include using electrical tape to fix cracked plastic components, passing cars known to be missing bolts or lug nuts, and reduction of testing. This whole "it's one picture of tape, there's no _real_ evidence, sheeple!" bleating is getting wearing.
* Toyota plans to recall 1 million hybrid models over wiring issue
* Toyota recalls 70,000 vehicles to replace air bag inflators - CNBC.com
* Toyota operating profit growth to drop this year on revenue slip
* Toyota is making high-performance versions of the Camry and Avalon
* Toyota struggles to save breakthrough Prius hybrid - CNBC.com
* Toyota and SoftBank are teaming up to target self-driving car services
* 2018 Toyota Land Cruiser review - CNBC.com
* Toyota recalls 2.4 million hybrids due to stalling problems - CNBC.com
2. Another recall
3. Corporate accounting announcement.
4. Product announcement.
5. Product analysis.
6. Product announcement.
7. Product review.
8. A third recall.
Those all seem awfully newsworthy to me. And they're sourced well, with citations going all the way up the corporate ladder.
How exactly do you argue that these are journalistically equivalent to "here's a picture of tape"?
The usage of the tape, as suggested by the article, wasn't for electrical insulation or wiring protection.
Definitely does seem like a weird thing to base an article on especially when Tesla does lots of other things wrong.
Right, because like I said above, the prevailing paradigm is to skewer Tesla by extrapolating from any available datapoint. So people take "tape" and invent reasons for the tape that don't appear in the article. Some of this isn't the posters' fault, because the article is sensationalized and is clearly trying to lead you to a conclusion about "tape" that it can't make with the simple facts presented.
Which is a media behavior that is, in the auto industry as of right now, almost exclusive to Tesla. No one runs dirt stories about tape on Fords, not because there isn't any (I mean, who knows, but none of would be shocked to read about it) but because even if there was, no one would care.
Whereas the people reporting the tape are saying it's standard electrical tape, used to hold cracked pieces of plastic together.
Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Anyway, your question wasn't would the media write about it, it was would you react the same way. An accusation of personal bias, which gets handed out like candy on Tesla threads. It's toxic.
At the bottom of auto/EV articles, I frequently see a sentence or two soliciting stories from tesla employees specifically. Often times the article isn’t even about tesla!
I can see disgruntled employees jumping at the chance to share their story with a journalist incentivized to write about it.
Anectodally, strange rates of lower gastric, bladder, and other carcinomas in in my peer group.
Their defense is “we didn’t know!”, but luckily judges are seeing through that.
In cities, OUTDOOR asbestos levels can be higher than indoor level simply because asbestos is still legal to use in car brakes. Since so many cars still use them and the parts are actively "wearing" due to friction, this releases enough asbestos to up the levels above indoor.
https://www.google.com/search?q=counterfeit+brake+pads+asbes...
Methyl ethyl ketone, like acetone, isn't all that toxic.[1]
[1]https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents...
To counter your .gov link:
"The principal health effects most typically associated with organic solvent exposure include nervous system damage (central and peripheral), kidney and liver damage, adverse reproductive effects such as sperm changes and infertility, skin lesions, and cancer."
https://www.osha.gov/archive/oshinfo/priorities/solvents.htm...
There are some solvents that are really dangerous. My comment is just that methyl ethyl ketone isn't one of them. It's very similar to acetone, which your body creates by itself when it breaks down fats.
Now that's not to say you shouldn't try to limit exposure (you'd be stupid not to), but in the grand scheme of solvent toxicity, MEK is one of the safer ones.
The hazardous work workers do, should not have been done in the first place.
Robotic or semi-auto wiring machines are everywhere in China. They also use zero tooling terminals where possible.
> Five people who work or worked in the tent in 2019 said they would frequently pass cars down the line that they knew were missing a few bolts, nuts or lugs, all in the name of saving time.
With other things mentioned under "Other short cuts" too
> Five people who work or worked in the tent in 2019 said they would frequently pass cars down the line that they knew were missing a few bolts, nuts or lugs, all in the name of saving time.
There are many more things discussed too under the heading "Other short cuts"
Why does his brother, Kimbal, draw a $6million/year total comp for sitting on the board. He has zero relevant experience related to manufacturing and that salary is very high compared to the rest of the industry....this always bothered me about TSLA.
I hope they are able to work these issues out.
Wonder if the Tesla spokesman has a desk there. Off the top of my head I can't imagine a reason why the tent would be such a great place to work. Equal maybe but certainly not better than a factory building that was not put up in a hurry to meet demands.
In any manufacturing job the "get it done" mantra is pretty much guaranteed to rear its head from time to time. Issuing such a strong blanket rejection for every single point really undermines the rejection.
It's in Fremont California where the weather averages 49-69F with extremes being 42F and 79F. It's outside so constantly moving fresh air, and it's covered so no sun beating down. The ends of the tent appear to be open letting natural light in and allowing you to look out at the sky.
Contrast that to a typical factory that's a climate controlled coffin.
I have no experience working in a factory setting but it seems like it's the difference between running outside vs indoor on a treadmill.
The work was extremely boring (30 second task repeated 8 hours a day) but temperature / conditions were never an issue. Workers were looked after seemingly well.
None of the temperatures listed were close to or below freezing. Freezing is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the lowest temperature I mentioned was 42F which is 10 degrees above freezing.
> Are you sure working in a tent at those temps is "pleasant"?
I listed the min and max temperatures as well as the the average min and max temperatures for a reason. The average min temperature is 7 degrees warmer than the min and both would occur overnight.
Is the tent a 24 hour operation? If not then it's unlikely that workers would have to endure the "freezing" 42F weather at all.
From the link I posted below. Rarely below 35F (~1.5C) is still pretty damn cold. Would you want your workplace to be "just about freezing" once in a while? What I mean is I'm pretty sure Tesla's statements are the regular PR thing any company in their position would put out, they just exaggerated a bit with "they actually insist on it". Maybe they took an existing example and didn't mind implying it's a general thing.
If the tent would be the better choice that people actually ask for, you'd expect more of them popping up in that kind of climate. It's just the cheap and fast choice (for the company) and these are the downsides (for the employees).
I'm not deflecting anything. You quoted some PR that said "we have a large number of employees who request to work on GA4" and said "Off the top of my head I can't imagine a reason why the tent would be such a great place to work."
I pointed out that, by your own admission, for ~9 months of the year the climate is fine AND it's outside as possible reasons for choosing to work in the tent.
The original quote doesn't say employees requested permanent positions or even year round. Two employees requesting to work 1 shift in the tent during ideal conditions would still make the statement true.
Why is that so far beyond your comprehension? You're fixated on the fact that it gets cold at night in the middle of winter as proof that no one would ever request to work in the tent ever.
I think you're just being contrary and difficult which may or may not be because you have a hidden agenda.
The year has 12. If you have to selectively pick the part of the year or of the job that supports your point then you need to widen your view. You can't just ignore whatever contradicts it. I'll rephrase: off the top of my head I can't think of a reason for a "large number of employees" to want to work in that tent without any significant disclaimers attached to the request. "Only in good weather" or lack of awareness (not realizing that work conditions are bad part of the year) would be such disclaimers.
> Why is that so far beyond your comprehension
Because if people hate it 25% of the time it still makes Tesla's statement disingenuous and supports the complaint.
> may or may not be because you have a hidden agenda
Why is this always the go to response whenever someone criticizes Tesla (short sellers!)? If you need to try to discredit me to counter my argument then I'm making a pretty strong argument.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
And the extremes you mention are still averages. So with an average low of 43F (~6C) in December [0] you may see minimums of just over 30F (-1C) so it's perfectly conceivable that it can get pretty uncomfortable to work. Same applies to summers, possibly to a lower extent.
[0] https://weatherspark.com/y/1076/Average-Weather-in-Fremont-C...
No, the op was struggling to think of a reason why a worker might request to work in a tent.
I suggested that it might be due to the climate.
You're arguing that it's inconceivable that anyone in that climate might volunteer to work outside because one time in the last 4 years the temperature got down to 32F in the dead of winter in the middle of the night.
Have you ever been to Fremont? It's gorgeous year round.
Obviously the people found the need for radiators which can be very dangerous in that environment.
The tax rebates amount to ~$4 billion subsidy for a BEV manufacturer. Maybe we should just eliminate subsidies on both and see what happens.
I am completely in favor of that proposal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
By your analogy, the Bigelow iss module is a tent... Yet it went and survived if f... space !
Am I out of date with the news? Are Tesla the safest cars? I am not a car enthusiast so I recall that Volvo has most safety features, did things change or is Tesla PR so deluded, at least I would use something like "one of the safest cars", provide some modesty,
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/04/watch-how-tesla-model-3-ea...
So your answer is not responding at my questions, I know there are probably cars that are for sure less safe then Tesla
It ignores decades of changes and infinite nuance into how cars are tested and evaluated for safety. There are all kinds of measures under which a car's safety can be evaluated, and to boil it down to "Volvo has the most safety features" is far sillier than even Tesla touting themselves as the safest cars. (Teslas do fare very well in current crash tests, though).