Tesla Model Y Owners Find Cooling System Made with Home Depot-Grade Fake Wood
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
A big part of their hesitation to allow outside service is probably the fact that any given Tesla may have any number of slight adjustments that require slightly different parts or repair tactics, and they don't really want to publicly admit how many different variations of everything there is.
You can see in these pictures that in addition to them using some stock wood trim pieces... those wood trim pieces differ a bit from car to car. One would hope if the materials used between these cars differ, that their system knows this, in case one approach proves to be defective or dangerous, and they need to track down every car that they employed this hack in.
Cars aren't software; to do that with cars without large identical (by intent) production runs (to control for process noise) it would seem like you would need extraordinary process control (and every indication I've seen has that Tesla varies from incumbents in the opposite direction), otherwise you are chasing process noise.
Yeah, I’m gonna stop you right there. I have serious doubts a company that sees no problem with making a quick Home Depot run for some faux wood trim in order to get a car out the door is meticulously documenting all their little hacks.
I have no idea the risk/reward equation here. I am guessing most people voting and commenting here have no idea the risk/reward equation. My comment was only pointing at that lots of people are going to have an opinion on this that is mostly dictated by their previous assumptions about Tesla as a company.
> I have no preconceived notions, but this is clearly A. I honestly can't understand how anyone can see this as anything but A.
Congrats, you've failed the test. Earlier today I didn't realize it was possible to fail a Rorschach test
Reminds me of that time the psychologist kept showing me pictures of my parents fighting. She insisted that they were just blots of ink. I'm not sure what she was playing at.
Maybe it's A, maybe it's B. Oh, you only see an A? Fail.
Do you trust that some engineers at Tesla needed a solution to a problem, modelled it out, did some materials testing and discovered that this plastic panelling was the right material for this job?
It does look bad because it's obviously not produced by Tesla, but so many parts are outsourced already in car manufacturing, this could be a solid engineering choice that's getting some bad publicity.
Of course, it could also be because some intern was tasked at solving a design problem and slapped this together overnight, and no one ever checked his work, and it went into production.
Alllll about trust.
That would be more credible if it was the same in all cars; it is not (see the source).
IMHO, I doubt they spent even that much time on it, and that is what worries me.
And if they need to do this (due to part shortages?) what OTHER bizarre substitutions might they be making?
Again, there's an outside chance that this is a proper product that just looks really cheap-DIY-y, but I wouldn't bet on it.
First, they designed this cool octovalve thing so they could use the one heat pump for all the heating and cooling needs of the car.
Second, they have this LCC hanging off the side of it, a top heavy part mounted laterally with no support other than where it's bolted to the octovalve at its base.
Third, they realise there's a problem and need to relieve stress from the mounting point. So there we get the metal strap with a spreader.
Fourth, they realise there's no point getting plastic moulded parts specially made when they can just use bamboo, wood, or fake wood which are not only cheaper but have better vibration damping qualities than the plastic part.
No doubt they'll redesign this part at a later stage, but since it's a contract-manufactured part they need to give the contractor time to roll out the new part and they need to deplete inventory. Will the new design involve modifications to the octovalve? Perhaps the new design will simply have a bracket down the side to provide vertical support?
It can be a dessert topping and a floor wax; its a hack, potentially smart depending on the constraints posed to those doing the hack, to get the job done whole minimizing costs and supply chain constraints.
It's also, quite arguably, something evidencing a lazy and dangerous design process at a higher level than the level at which it is a potentially smart hack.
> The LCC (Liquid Cooled Condenser) was probably not designed to be mounted horizontally so they added the cinch strap which needed edge protection to prevent crushing the condenser contact surfaces... enter corner molding from Home depot. Will be interesting to see if that corner molding holds up over time. The cheap stuff is mostly air, the better stuff has more plastic content. If you do 3D printing you know what "fill" means..... look how the strap crushed the plastic corner molding in this photo. If it crushes/compresses it more over time.. the strap will be lose and the condenser will shake/possibly stress crack at it's base?
I did like this sarcastic response to it:
> See OP??? The Home Depot wood trim on yours exceeds the factory spec! At least it will not get crushed by the strap because it's not cheap plastic corner trim from Lowe's like others have.
There are a couple things I notice when I look at the shortage workaround. 1.Fake wood pieces are longer than the proper plastic piece(Why?).
2.Fake wood pieces are wrapped in green tape, proper plastic piece is not.(Speculation, metal strap edge cuts into fake wood. If so, how long will tape hold up with vibration?)
3.At least 2 different materials were used as a substitute, are these materials equivalent? Is there confidence in the supply chain of these parts that there was not a bad batch that will fail under heat or stress?
4.Overall quality of workmanship. In two of the 3 pictures, the lengths of the 2 fake wood pieces do not match. This points more to a production line workaround than a sanctioned fix.
5.The proper plastic piece has a larger area in contact with the cooler assembly than the fake wood pieces. This will result in more force being transferred to a point and possibly resulting in crushing damage to the assembly.
I work in a facility that assembles heavy off road equipment, we do sometimes use BOM parts if we encounter a shortage. Unless the part is identical in fit and function i.e. using a slightly oversized hose clamp, we will go back and rework the machine so that it conforms to our quality standards before we ship it.
If I was tasked with coming up with a replacement for the missing part, I would propose something like this: https://www.grainger.com/product/GRAINGER-APPROVED-Edge-Prot... Rather than use something that looks obviously out of place.
The fact that it's needed in a complex machine shows that it's not one that is precisely made, I would think.
The engineer who made this decision has a burden of proof to his boss (and maybe regulators, don't know) to show that this is safe.
The random internet commenter suggesting it is unsafe has a burden of proof to show that either it is actually unsafe, or that at least that Tesla didn't internally meet it's burden of proof.
(I say this as someone who is short $TSLA right now [and a non-practicing Mech E]; this looks perfectly reasonable to me.)
1: Compressive strength of wood perpendicular to the grain varies but you can estimate with a healthy safety margin about 200 PSI. 100x - 1000x weaker than metals, but still not zero.
The same company that erected a factory-in-a-tent (unconventional but also appropriate) to hit aggressive production targets seems like one that would consider and execute appropriate but unconventional substitutions.
I guarantee you that the materiel is not "wood" and is indeed much weaker in all relevant parameters. And I suspect that no one at TESLA has any real handle on the compressive strength of this material.
Well, yah. Is it that big of an ego-blemish to have "something so cheap" in your space-chariot?
It looks like a bit of a bodge, but plenty of that goes on, and the less automated a process the more it will happen. (Because if highly automated it's more difficult/expensive vs. ditching the problem unit, or waiting for the designed-in part rather than re-tool.)
Here's an interview Elon did with Sal Khan back in 2013. He literally had employees running around to buy as many USB cables as he could.
My brother in law has a law firm and he happen to work with two different car manufacturing brands. He was explaining how two brands choose the glue differently to build the same part of their products. While for the Chinese brand it was only important that the glue has the minimum standard to be used in their production line, the Japanese brand was very specific about which exact glue from two particular brands can be used there. Which both happen to be more expensive than similar products with same standard on paper. But Japanese would only use that particular product because they did all their quality and durability tests with that.
This only seems so chintzy to us today because of how much we take for granted from manufacturing today. Modern automakers are running lean operations that are insanely optimized (being able to keep consistent production with barely any inventory). Tesla has famously had problems achieving lean production (keeping huge inventories of other parts, and consistently running out of others).
This wouldn't be so embarrassing if Musk had not spent so much time throwing shade on other car manufacturers.
Or it can be sign that Tesla still runs their supply chain management in a style that works for small volume luxury sports cars.
Assuming it's safe, then the worst part, for Tesla, is probably just the terrible optics. It's one thing for a do-it-yourselfer to hack their own car, but I suspect nobody really wants to drop $60k on a new car that's hacked together.
For me personally, I’d rather daily drive the X4. The Model Y wins in pure track performance but the X4 is serviceable. Where the Model Y really falls behind is comfort and luxury. The X4 is just miles and miles ahead in those two categories.
There are other considerations, like maintenance, resale value, gas, etc. I wouldn’t necessarily buy either of these cars but if I had to choose I would rather have the BMW.
Anyway it looks like poor supply chain management. They ran out of the plastic corner pieces.
When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.
"What’s shim?"
"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."
"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"
"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"
"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."
I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!
Ach, du lieber!
Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.
You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.
I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.
In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.
For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.
That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.
What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-de...
Rob, I hope you never look at the welds on Ferrari Testarossa, F40, Dino, or any Maserati from the <=80s for that matter.
wood won't burn at 160C.
And anyway, this is seemingly taking the place of a plastic part, and if the heat exchanger wasn’t melting the factory-spec plastic, I imagine it’s not hot enough to start this wood smoldering.
(I still would prefer my fancy car have the proper, automative grade plastic.)
Staying below the "fail fast" temperature does not make it safe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA
The question is, how will it handle years of the daily heating and cooling cycles that the cooling system will undergo? I don't know and likely no-one does ... because it hasn't been rated or approved for that task. it isn't even a standardised part, how can it be?
...you'll find out at the regular inspection and service that you are required by law to have at intervals far more frequent then "years"? That's part of the point of them, both to notice fleet issues that will be reported back up and conversely to implement directives ("it needs to be replaced with this updated strain relief at the next service") coming down.
Sure, it's more likely than not that the fix was signed off on and totally acceptable, but the story doesn't have enough information to be certain of that.
I imagine there’s industrial-grade 3D-printing material, but if they’re in such a time crunch to get these out the door for Q2, it was probably quicker to just send an intern to Home Depot.
Bad quality followed up by bad quality.
When I benchmarked Tesla years ago, the exterior(and interior) panels were awful in their Autoshow build. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't fixed it yet.
I gave them a pass at the time because everything was new and in low runs. Now with 500k/yr, there's really no excuse.
Tesla is the Apple of Automotive.