People have been saying that for years at this point, and yet the quality problems remain. How much more time does Tesla need?
Given there are a lot more of them made, seems like they are getting better.
(I am an owner of Model 3 and find it to be a joy of a car.)
I don't think Tesla deserves a free pass with these issues, but I also think they should be expected.
Tesla gets held to a separate standard, and excuses get made for it, because people want it to succeed. I want it to succeed, too, but my definition of success includes making reliable cars. (And preferably sacking Elon Musk, but that's unrelated.)
I'm not saying that makes it excusable but I think the scale is important, other major car manufacturers have been around 4-5x as long.
By the mid 90s the domestics had more or less closed the gap. They just didn't apply the techniques and processes to the product lines they didn't care about (i.e. economy cars, they were selling SUVs hand over fist after all). And if you look at MRSPs for foreign and domestic economy cars throughout the 90s the prices more or less reflect the respective OEM's level of investment in those product lines. If you wanted an economy car you bought a Civic. If you wanted a shitbox you bought an Escort for less money.
I completely disagree with that. I bought a Cadillac in 2012. Its build quality was lower than anything I've seen from BMW, Audi or Volvo. I'm talking about really inconsistent panel (internal and exterior) gaps and misc vehicle rattles. It's also worth mentioning the Cadillac was the most expensive vehicle of the group and very much a line that GM cared about. I have no idea how Ford is doing, but GM is still not comparable to German/Swedish/Korean manufacturers.
I would even argue ford's model of manufacturing turned the last remnats of workshop based work into the mass producing factory.
They've only been mass manufacturing for about 4 years now; previous models are low volume models with a lot of hand assembly.
Musk says that manufacturing is a couple of orders of magnitude harder than designing and building prototypes. He's learning these lessons the hard way. If you can survive the lesson, it's the best way to learn them. Little consolation to those who buy the lemons during the learning period, though.
This is also a tale about America. Tesla's Chinese factory gets first place on a similar survey to the JD Powers initial quality survey that Tesla America got last place in. America just doesn't have the deep well of manufacturing knowledge that a new company like Tesla can draw on.
This is what would worry me as a potential customer. That the manufacturer selling me their product considers such disasters acceptable in order to ship a few more units. It's not that often lately than manufacturers are willing to do this (think GM ignition key scandal, rather than VW pollution cheating).
Is this serious? America has been offshoring domestic auto manufacturing for a couple decades now. The people who worked in those factories didn’t just die, they’re mostly still available for hire. There is no metric in manufacturing knowledge where America lags that far behind other first world countries, let alone the rest of the world.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/america-military-...
[2] https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/05/22/americas-ind...
There's an episode of This America Life about it: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
Tesla aren't starting from nothing, they're able to use all the existing knowledge about putting together a factory to build product.
Conversely, do _you_ really think that - evenly applying an adhesive to an incredibly smooth surface (repeatably) to bond it to a frame and have it undergo twisting, vibration, and extremes of heat and cold, aerodynamic effects / pressure, exposure to moisture, UV and atmospheric contaminants and retaining its adhesion for the expected life of the vehicle -
isn't advanced engineering?
All Tesla have to do is "buy the right glue", and then "make sure it gets put on correctly". That is a bit of production engineering but seriously it's not hard to lay down a bead of adhesive, place the glass in, and then check that it's been done.
>>> check that it's been done
Seems like they cut some corners here.
I'm not saying that attaching glass to metal is at the same level of complexity as semiconductor fab, but it's a far cry from using some Elmer's Glue to stick two pieces of construction paper together.
And yes, I'm pretty sure Tesla didn't create their own adhesive for the purpose, but I'm equally sure 3M doesn't have an off-the-shelf "Model Y Roof Adhesive, 500ml" product. Or perhaps they did, but the engineering constraints to develop it were those of normal passenger cars, sunroofs, etc., not taking into account the various forces acting upon a 4'x7' sheet of glass at highway speeds, or perhaps the temperatures or speeds of an industrial applicator robot (or conversely, the slowness of a human applicator).
To go back to your original assertion, no, it's not hard to lay down a bead of adhesive, place the glass in and check that it's been done. If in fact the failure mode was 'Failure to apply adhesive', well, that's a fairly egregious and easy to spot problem. If it's 'adhesive failed for unknown reasons after a short period of time', that's an altogether different problem.
Repeat this step with literally every weld, seal, screw, or other component. Then get it right for hundreds of thousands of cars regardless of the condition of the factory line and workers/robots.
de Havilland was making airplanes for 33 years when the famous Comet crash occurred.
Manufacturing is a learning process. There's a lot of engineering in every detail, and there will always be room for improvement.
I suspect there’s some sort of NIH thing going on.
Ever talked to somebody with little to no software experience who will tell you how easy it should be to just slap some code together to build a the next Google? It's like that.
I used to build test equipment for aerospace and safety critical equipment for coal mining. I'm well aware that even with rigorous control you're going to get some errors. But "the glass fell out because we glued it wrong" isn't a normal manufacturing error. It's a mistake that requires more than one process to fail.
Which is stupid in a world where you can drawn on 150+ years of manufacturing experience.
Sure, in IT and tech it might work, but those fields are relatively young.
Your logic suggests either a) they haven't bothered hiring people experienced in quality control for car manufacturing, or b) they have, and yet their cars are _still_ this badly made. Neither is a good look.
I don't know what the Tesla culture is like, but if it skews toward the tech "move fast and break things", just hiring experienced QA folks won't magically get everyone onboard to strict, controlled processes.
I drive a Subaru now. If I could get an EV version of my present car with comparable range, I'd buy it today and never look back. They say by 2035 they'll have electric versions of all their major models[1], so I guess... sometime in the next 15 years, for me?
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30613610/subaru-crossover...
If they made a Crosstrek/Forester-type vehicle with 300-400 miles of all-electric range, kept the ground clearance, roof rack, and usual interiors, I've always imagined that those vehicles would sell like hotcakes. I know I'd be interested in immediately trading up, in a way that I probably won't be otherwise for a long time.
They do one thing - they make solidly reliable 4-wheel-drive cars - and they do it quite well. But I've never seen them be the first on any new thing the industry is doing, no matter how good it is.
Market share of new BEVs in Germany, January 2020 to September 2020:
Volkswagen-Audi-Porsche: 33%
Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi: 18%
Hyundai-Kia: 13%
Tesla: 12%
Mercedes: 9%
BMW: 8%
You don't have to wait, the competition is already outproducing and outselling Tesla in Europe. And all of these car companies have new BEV models in the pipeline that are going to further erode Tesla's marketshare, because Tesla has nothing in the pipeline for the European market over the next couple of years.
I think the list for Canada is even smaller, though I am not sure.
Here's hoping some more of those come to the States soon.
Producing cars in itself is not a new process from a manufacturing perspective, especially not the non EV parts. (like body work and structural work).
What kind of quality control does tesla have, when it is not able to reliably produce cars with the same finish and fit. Most manufacturers have been able to do this for atleast 30 years. it is not like the industry doesn't have solutions to tackle these issues at scale.