Tesla orders its first 8k-ton Cybertruck casting machine
teslaoracle.com
teslaoracle.com
Living in Italy, sometimes it's hard to see why the country is still in the top 10 economies in the world, due to the fact we lack mega-corps and global consumer brands (luxury aside). The truth is that Italy is all-in on small businesses, with thousands on niches companies that fill a very specific spot in the world supply chain. I really hope that this model proves to be sustainable and we can find a path to growth again at some point.
If you then force (or "heavily encourage" with tariffs etc) other companies to "buy local", you're hurting those other companies by having them buy the product that's unable to compete.
If you intend to cite negative second and third order effects as a counterargument - have you considered whether or not any negative second and third order effects might be applicable to yours?
The reason why Italian and German small businesses are so innovative is because the global market is hyper-competitive.
Moreover, Detroit cars didn’t get worse but rather stagnated in comparison with Toyota/Deming’s continuous improvement model.
To be fair, that ‘81 VW camper in our driveway doesn’t fair much better. I’d rather rely on an ‘80s Chevy Citation to get me home than that piece of parts-bin shit. Part of the problem for a lot manufacturers were 70s-era emissions controls, which is a small part of why a 4000 lb. vehicle has an engine that put out 68bhp.
The well 20-something yuppies who got dragged around in their parent's well cared for 90s Japanese cars and look back fondly on those days.
The edge between manufacturers is very, very, small. 20+yr and 3+ owners later how a vehicle is treated will completely dominate who made it when it comes to how reliable it is going forward. 90s domestics definitely ignored the sedan and compact market a little, after all, minivans then SUVs were where they money was. They didn't innovate. But they gave their car platforms the same sets of tech and systems that the flagship SUVs got so they're no less reliable. The "hurr durr domestics are unreliable" tropes that HN loves comes from the fact that they're cheap (compare MSRPs of the day if you don't believe me). So people bought them with the intention of treating them as disposable. So then they don't hold their value, so then they get sold to people who can't afford to do maintenance. And the cycle continues.
I think a similar story happened to a lot of American families, and the stereotype grew.
The largest market for European companies is Europe itself.
And there would obviously be retaliation. Europe makes a lot of the world's things-for-making-things (like this casting system, say). The market for that sort of thing would shrink due to retaliatory protectionism, and the quality would get worse due to in-Europe protectionism.
In general, closed-off markets tend to produce poor quality consumer and industrial goods, priced too high.
That's what the latter stages of "Made in America" labelling consisted of.
Enel has a lot of hydro power plants installed in Latin America. Of course you won't see that living in Italy.
https://www.enel.com/media/explore/search-press-releases/pre...
But yeah, you don't see that from Italy.
Fiat seems to have outsourced their 500 abarth design to the devil himself with intercooler,turbo, and thermostat placements that seem to actively dare the customer to try to service these parts without removing the engine.
on the other hand Maserati decided engines are just too hard, and outsourced the whole problem to Ferrari without any thought at all. a Primo engine mated to garbage undersized Hydraulic mounts and cheap stamped pot-steel tie rods. If you ever wanted a Ferrari experience well youll get one after about 40k miles as the idle will be as rough as a 458 on a cold track day due to the use of a cheap variator.
And if you've got the dosh for a modern Ferrari theyre no better. the 599 eats belts, the F12 belts are routinely known to just fall off, and the knock issue in the 488 never saw a proper fix...you were just expected to have an engine crew that would replace your spark plugs when knocking occurred. all of them.
EDIT: oh hey i forgot about the F430! the car that would eat its clutch if you ever drove it at an incline in reverse. about a six-thousand dollar part, and again your engine team was just expected to replace it as a consumable.
FortNine had the oil of a bunch of motorcycle brands analyzed. Aprilla and Ducati are two of the most expensive motorcycle brands- they make extreme performance luxury machines. They don't even make entry or mid-level bikes. They're both intensely race-focused. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GAUo8eUXeU
Spoiler: Aprilla did 20x worse than the next-best, Ducati did 50x worse. They were an order of magnitude worse in every size of particle inclusion. Harley Davidson has possibly the worst reputation of any non-chinese motorcycle manufacturer and the best Ducati or Aprilla could do was to come within a 5x worse margin.
Like... oof. Americans make the biggest, Germans make the lightest, Italians make the prettiest. Only the Swede makes the quickest.
One issue that should not exist on the 488 and it’s shameful that Ferrari didn’t do better is the brakes. They go off and the pads and rotors get worn down very quickly after hard driving during track days. This should be unacceptable at this price point. Porsche did it right.
Disclaimer: While Italian, I am no startup/industry owner, so anyone in the field could probably give a more insightful opinion.
So what you get is small businesses who choose to not go past that demarcation.
> The body of the Cybertruck is a unibody shell
The profile is full of sharp edges at torso/head level for pedestrians. The shell concept sounds like it would have nothing in the way of planned deformations zones for outside pedestrians or crumple zones for inside passengers.
Again perhaps this is just marketing bad ass looks and they will sanitize the final release but pretty scary if not.
It does seem there were changes to the tests in 2020, but not 2021, and they say "2020 assessments differ significantly from previous years and star ratings should not be directly compared with those from earlier years."
So IDK, your comment seems misleading?
What he said makes sense. The tests get harder in order to ensure cars become safer. My car got the best safety rating when it came out, but that was 11 years ago. If Tesla hasn't changed its design for the 2020/21 models to improve safety, then my guess is it doesn't make sense for them to waste their resources testing it.
In fact, on the Euro NCAP website their latest 'safest cars' list is from 2019, and you see that Model 3 and Model X are the safest cars in their category. You really think that the safest cars in 2019 can't pass the tests in 2021?
https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/best-in-class-ca...
Edit: This thread is about the cybertruck and its edges that won't get a good score in the Vulnerable Road Users test. The old Tesla's don't even score as high as new small cars do.
Tesla needs to compete with legacy automaker trucks if they’re to drive down the petroleum used by those fossil fuel vehicles (hence the need to keep per unit costs down). The fault for failure to prioritize pedestrian and bicyclist safety falls on federal policy makers, who could enforce these safety requirements by statute but don’t. Tangentially, it should also be wildly illegal to lift your pickup for on road use.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
This will be a car that at least _should_ be bought only by very well off people. I'm sure some people will take on silly debt and spend most of their annual take-home salary on a car, but that won't be the norm. Well, hopefully.
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/pickup-truck-owner-de...
> The Ford F-150 is the single most popular truck in America today and the most-popular vehicle in 44 states. It outsold the Ram pickup in 2019 by 78%.
> The average age of the new F-150 buyer is 55. It may not be too surprising that about 16% of new Ford F-150 owners are female/84% male. About three-quarters of all new Ford F-150s are purchased by white males, although Hispanic buyers account for 22% of total incremental growth of new F-150 sales from 2010 to 2017.
> Despite any TV ads you see with F-150s in a rural or country setting, the vast majority of these new trucks are in large and medium-sized cities.
> The average household income of a new Ford F-150 owner is about $82,000 per year. By comparison the median household income in the United States is $61,937.
> If that average household income sounds high, remember this! The F-150 has a base MSRP under $30,000. But, we priced a 2020 Ford F-150 Platinum Edition with all the bells & whistles and accessories for over $74,000!
All emphasis mine. This is the market environment Tesla is operating in and attempting to displace combustion pickup sales in.
There's something like 50 million people that are very well off in the US.
Narrative this, narrative that.
In terms of folks making 80k a year buying 50k trucks (the Platinum is an outlier), resale is high and interest rates are low. The larger issue on the latter point is how sustainable this is for Ford Motor Credit Company. That's a complex topic.
The biggest knock I can think of on trucks is their interior materials are not commensurate for their price. That said the F-150 Super Crew is about as comfortable an SUV as you can buy. They are very reliable. They weigh slightly more than a Toyota 4-Runner and have reasonable gas mileage. All cars are much larger than they were 15 years ago. The Super Crew is extremely safe. Trucks are much taller than previous generations, which makes them seem outlandish.
I'm not trying to refute you, just adding color as to why things are the way they are.
Source: myself having gone through process of buying a truck a few months ago. Looked at mid size trucks (I own acreage, making hobby farm), but only could find the 60k optioned vehicles. Ended up full-size luxury trim due to tax break possibilities plus only available stock. Pretty wild right now. Used market also hosed, almost price of new.
It’s clearly designed the way it is for aesthetic reasons.
Despite absurdly disproportionate deaths from trucks [1], our lawmakers and regulators are too busy jerking off with wads of cash from automotive lobbyists [2] to care about something lame like “dying bicyclists” or “crushed pedestrians.”
[1]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/10/31/why-american-trucks-a...
[2]: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a20879691/heres-how-mu...
If you shoot a kid you probably can't get away with "well I was duck hunting at the playground, it was an accident!", but run them down in your truck and you'll have a sympathetic judge telling you this shouldn't stop you from getting back behind the wheel, and how the kid shouldn't have been there.
Why should it be the driver's fault if someone else puts them in a situation where a negative outcome is unavoidable?
An adult man running carelessly through the playground is not a significant risk.
Anyway, you don't need to bribe an elite to support American car culture. Everyone is united in wanting to own an SUV or a lifted pickup and run over bicyclists.
This isn't on topic, but I think the Grenadier has gambled and lost badly, and they're going to look like fools long-term. The new Defender is massively more rugged and capable than they thought it would be.
They have these smug videos talking about how real Defender drivers want a non-electrically-managed simple vehicle, just in time for the Government to announce that internal combustion is going to be banned, so all vehicles will require electric control for a fuel cell or a battery and motor anyway. So what was the point?
They have smug videos talking about how they've got proper rugged coil suspension. Well I work with actual military rugged vehicles and guess what they have electric air suspension like the new Defender, because it's actually better for the job.
The Grenadier people are pitching in their adverts that the Defender has turned its back on rugged users like the game keepers of the highlands. Well guess what ask a game keeper and they've already bought the new Defender.
I think the universally positive reviews of the new Defender and its off-road capability, including from reviewers looking solely at its use for example on farms and estates, makes the Grenadier look very backward. Turns out the old ways aren't always the best.
(I have a new Defender at home, and still use a fleet of old Defenders at work. I wouldn't want a Grenadier.)
I would disagree with this statement, which is why I don't think there's much intersection. More and more people are seeing pick up trucks as a form of self expression and a status symbol (which might seem like a baffling statement if you don't live in the American midwest or south).
There's a non-negligible segment that has a lot of identity tied up in their current way of life, to the point that they see electric vehicles as a threat to them.
In short, anyone that unironically owns a set of truck nuts is not going to by a Cybertruck.
I think that people who actually use trucks because a sedan doesn't have the capabilities will consider the cybertruck a viable option as it definitely has a ton of positives, although I would be very weary of sing them in remote locations as there's no way they're as maintainable as a regular truck and extra electricity is a lot harder to find or transport in an emergency than extra gas.
https://www.autoblog.com/2019/12/16/tesla-cybertruck-europea...
Funnily enough, the concept that we've been shown also fails US regulations, although those are probably much easier to rectify for the final design.
Wow I didn’t know that. How does it work? Isn’t a EuroNCAP rating entirely voluntary?
I'd like to be able to trade on my own safety, not others (e.g. sacrificing crumplezones for a more compact cabin and greater carrying capacity).
Looking at the data is looks like gm sells most, with Toyota, Ford, and FCA battling for second.
Usually the frame of a car is also part of the body these days. (T-frames and H frames rarely exists these days.
I mean you're assuming there are no deformation or crumple zones for some reason, which seems ridiculous.
Is it enough to just look at the thing?
I’ve no doubt that Tesla can make it score well on crash tests though. Crumple zones don’t have to involve literal crumpling of a metal body—it could be achieved with other forms of deformation.
Frame + Pane construction allows for crumple zones, I don't see how a unibody stainless steel will allow it.
(/s - it probably is going to be super unsafe and get bad safety scores).
2. Do something that not suitable for drive by human, like racing style steering,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/m8opqh/fun_time_wor...
The previous Austin airport (Mueller, closed 1999, now a planned community) also had an IATA code of AUS. They did a single day cutover from the old to new airport, so they were never both in commercial use at the same time (Bergstrom was an Air Force base for similar years as Mueller).
I do have one reservation, which is that this feels a bit like the creation of a dispose-only car. Trying to bend this unibody back into shape seems like it's going to be incredibly difficult. I'm trying to imagine how if at all we're going to fix a cybertruck, after it slides into a tree or pole. I was so delighted to see the Model Y front-unibody come out of that press, but a second latter, I was shocked, mouth open aghast, trying to imagine these cars as anything other than disposable.
Like the NAND situation on Teslas, there's so much amazing high tech wonders afoot here. But vehicles, over the generations, have had to learn that maintainability, repairability, and sustainability are real factors too: there's many years of engineering that have gone into not just making cars, but making them able to be kept running. I know Tesla's not the only one doing unibody work, that this isn't entirely 100% a novel problem, but I'm still a bit jarred, a bit worried, that we're creating a truck- a vehicle format known for getting beat up a bit- that might not be repairable.
Ideally, they would sell you a new front/rear casting and recycle the bent old one. I don't see this happening though as they have more motivation to hide behind "unseen damage" to sell you a new car.
Actually no, casting requires more material for equal strength, and you loose materials in voids.
But given Tesla's pricetag, and already huge weight, it might make sense. Even most poorly designed aluminium part is likely to be lighter than steel at least by a tiny bit.
It is also not that much faster, as manufacturing from steel is automated so much these days, and cast parts needs further finishing.
And, MAYBE, having a huge casting machine, and some finishing is cheaper for Tesla than going with bigger metalworking line with their current scale.
Tesla developed its own aluminum that does not need to be heat-treated. It might still need some finishing, but not a very complex process.
Check out this video of Musk and Sandy Munro (former Chief Engineer at Ford) talking about it:
There are some bars in the front of the front casting. If those were damaged, you would just cut them away and weld replacements in place.
If the main part of the casting gets bent, it will have been a very severe accident that you are lucky to walk away from. Repairing the car will be the least of your concerns.
Here's the Ford F-150 assembly line.[1] One truck every 53 seconds from this line. It's mostly aluminum, unlike the older steel models but like Tesla. Mild hybrid now, full electric in 2023.
Stamping is populair because it is very fast, has minimal waste and is a procedure with very little variables.
There is another benefit to softer steel in that it absorbs vibrations. But this is less relevant for electric cars, because there are no vibrations form an ICE.
Furthermore, stainless steel is too hard to be used for stamping machines, so if you use stamping you have to worry about rust.
So it is very possible that the Tesla engineers did the math and figured out that if the body did not need to absorb engine vibrations, they could save a lot of weight and ultimately energy if they used casting.
Also AFAIU, like other cars, Cybertuck skin doesn't carry all the load, but it can be more than traditional.
You can see from Munro's teardown videos the layers say in a pillar on a Model 3 or Y.
Again, I'm happy to be wrong here, but I'm not seeing the evidence of this being a casting machine. And I'm seeing a lot of circumstantial evidence that is indeed a press.
This company already makes such machines for Tesla and this is the newest one.
You can find videos of machines like that being assembled right now in Berlin and Austin. And you can find videos of it working in Fremont and Shanghai.
This video Tesla battery day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQfKZ5lo9dc
That they have order an even bigger one has been part of investor calls and presentation.
Here you see it assembled in Austin: https://youtu.be/02KR9sb5P6E?t=687
You can see that it is vertical, a stamping machine stamps horizontally.
May well be semi-solid rather than just injection casting given them bragging about "alloy not needing heat treatment"
Maybe they're calling it a press because the molten metal is being rammed into the mold under pressure vs. gravity. I agree that there's poor naming at play here muddying the waters.
A die casting process starts with molten metal, and the metal is injected under pressure to fill the die cavity. The mold is separated and the new part is removed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyBsdJkQu8
After die casting and the part cools, a press may be used to trim any excess off.
Gravity casting had problem with voids, and fine features, but otherwise much more economical.
Injection, or semisolid casting is much more expensive, both because of more expensive machinery, and mold expense.
Only very small scooter engines I know are mold/semisold cast, everything else I know is gravity cast.
I wonder if these modern high pressure casting produce results closer to forging.
That is one thing I admire about how Elon thinks. Don't solve problems. Make them go away by simplifying the design.
Not easily, stainless is very finicky requiring proper shielding of the heat affected zone.
I thought it was a joke...
Probably there's more to it and I'm out of the loop :D