(It's not that black and white, all automotive companies have varying degrees of expertise in both software engineering and mechanical engineering. But it's certainly interesting to watch the industries learn from each other.)
Producing for Musk companies is a fucking shit show. Specifications change mid-production on a constant basis, to a ridiculously comical extent. I honestly can’t imagine what the hell is wrong with these people that they change hole locations and part geometry for every single order, knowing full well that 1000 of 1000 units have already been produced and boxed and loaded onto pallets.
As an Elon Musk fan, it was rude surprise that their shit is so fucked.
I tried holding off on production until the last possible nanosecond, but no. No good. Changes happened the day orders are due.
The only Musk work I do at this point is emergency corrections for other local outfits who made parts with rapidly evolving and mutating requirements.
I thought that the designers would settle down as Tesla and SpaceX get through production hell, but they seem committed to mass production of no-two-things-ever-the-same.
I drive a Model S and I figure probably most things people make and do are objectively retarded, I just happen to know more than I want about this particular retardation.
Did you know what their manufacturing process was like _before_ buying your model S?
(Needless to say, we totally would have made the same kind of mistake, and probably do so every day.)
The only meaningful ding on Tesla here is #4 above: clearly this was a design flaw and should have been a recall from the start, not a customer-financed repair.
But I did that way earlier than Tesla in the process.
None of those are particularly boneheaded in isolation. It's just a bug. Bugs just happen.
(But again: design bugs should be recalls and not repairs)
That's the mass production warranty for integrated objects. Calling it "Chinese" is just weird unless you are calling attention to a claim that only china does mass production anymore.
For cars, we have the "extended warranty" which is just a bet that the car won't fail to much on average.
Same for hard drives with 3 vs 5 yr warranties.
I think you're off base here; it's the very fact of Tesla using "consumer grade" hardware that is the (notable) problem. The people who "would have made the same mistake" are qualified to pass judgment if they know they are not qualified to develop automotive grade systems.
And if you stepped up to something with effective wear levelling and a bit more capacity, instead, this bad design could have lasted forever.
Or if you socketed the eMMC, it would have been no big deal.
Uh... the drive train itself is "known to fail". Everything wears out. Everything breaks. You just aren't surprised when your transmission needs rebuilding or your brakes or shocks need replacement because those are "car things" you've been conditioned are normal. Well, electromigration is just another kind of normal wear and tear to be designed into the device.
And it's the design here that was at fault, having incorrectly planned for the replacement rate. But there's absolutely nothing weird about building cars out of parts that fail over time!
Yes! And (3) is potentially: A company who's even better at building and deploying software and hardware enters the market.
I see a lot of speculation that apple will produce a car.
But apple at the moment just designs hardware, doesn't really make it (as in they don't have their own factories), so presumably they would either need to build factory for their cars or hire some other factory(or factories) to build cars for them ?
As far as I understand most cars sold in USA are build in USA (I am not sure if that's only because of shipping costs or if there are any import taxes or something).
Even if most parts were from China finally assembly would probably have to be done in USA, and factory quite big and expensive, and have lots of trained people (to have apple standards).
Given that its apple that we are talking about car would almost certainly be an instant hit, so they would need to produce a lot of them, which again means big factory with lots of people.
How likely is it that everybody missed such factory ? Especially with press so obsessed with apple. Even if some other company like Toyota were building it for them, they would likely need a lot more additional capacity than they have now ?
And we have seen with Tesla, that scaling out is really the big problem here.
I genuinely interested how likely is it that apple cars will be on streets anytime soon.
Every established company I've worked for seems to have as many processes that get in the way as those that help.
also - nobody mentioned the amount of data collected. Is it good diagnostics or is it hoarding?
I remember the story of the guy who tried to return his tesla under the lemon law thing because of some weird failure. Tesla diagnosed it and found he would pop the trunk before every failure happened, and they used that to prove he was doing it. After that, I can see an engineering push to log more, not less.