Tesla factory looks a bit slow, I guess because it’s new.
Many steps are missing, like assembling doors/ hood before oaint shop. Interiors assembly also missing. I assume these are the more proprietary things from Tesla. What they showed are the common processes/tools across many manufacturers.
They had too many cars parked inside the factory, normally that means defects that need to be fixed.
The biggest producing automotive factory in the world is the famed VW Wolfsburg factory.
Makes me wonder how many people would notice if someone didn't inform them that it was possible.
As long as my car doesn't leak water and it drives straight, I'm a happy camper.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_Bearing_(advertisement)
As an example: Nobody cares about clubbed fingernails either, but it can indicate something much worse.
Toyota and Honda economy cars are assembled with more rigorous quality standards than a $100k Tesla.
Not playing devil's advocate for Tesla here but how long have Toyota and Honda been building cars? It's true that every iteration is superior but they started out making some fairly bad cars back in the day.
Showing my age here but when Japanes cars started getting popular in the UK it was only because British cars had become so bad. Even then, it was common knowledge that a Japanes car was only good for 2 or 3 years since the bodywork couldn't cope with our weather and would just rust away.
Global automakers in the 80’s learned the limits and perils of automation. Musk decided he had to learn that mistake for himself, years later admitting the process needed people more than he imagined.
The collective knowledge gained in making quality automobiles since Toyota started until now is widely available, especially with someone who has the resources to hire people with that experience.
Yes, this is a fair point, I do concede.
86 and 59 years, respectively. If it takes Tesla another 72 years to figure out how to build high quality cars someone else will eat their lunch.
I had the service and maintenance plan, treated it like a baby. Happened just outside of the plan. Trust gone.
Sorry, but that "common knowledge" is wrong. Source: I know people working in the VW engine research and design lab, and they can be very talkative (probably to the point where they broke NDAs while a little drunk).
What is true is that VW, at a certain point, did invest significantly more in diesel engine tech than in petrol engine tech. But not to the point where they ignored petrol engines. They couldn't afford to do so, as they were serving many markets where diesel is rather uncommon (for personal cars). And at that point in time, they already had petrol engines that were very competitive and often even leading the pack (depending on the model). Not that any of this matters a lot today, as all that is quite a bit in the past now.
That isn't to say that some VW models are rather shit when it comes to reliability. The VW Jetta, which isn't even sold in Europe I believe, has a particularly bad rep in that regard.
Specially for petrol engines, the 2006/2007 EA111 TSI (1.2l and 1.4l) have a particular bad rep for reliability, and later EA111s are a mixed bag at best. Earlier EA111s and the successor, the EA211 (1.0 to 1.4l), do not have the same bad rep, and in fact got at least decent reliability rep and favorable mpg rep. The "bigger" EA888 (1.8l/2.0l) initially had a design flaw that caused excessive oil consumption in a lot of cases, which was later fixed in future iterations of the engine.
Nobody really cares about this. Esp if Tesla build quality is poor and VW is great I'd think the fast build is doing them no favors.
Currently, the Volkswagen Wolfsburg Plant is the biggest automotive factory in the world by number of vehicles produced by a single factory. That number is 815,000 vehicles per year. The tesla factories that are currently built are in theory capable of 1 million vehicles per factory apiece, but are not there yet. If tesla can out-manufacturer VW, obviously they'll be more likely to sell more vehicles, and further erode VW's business.
Here's a similar video from Honda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCuclAl9AGo
What's missing from the Tesla video is arguably the most important part: the batteries.
These are fine operations and the piece being worked on may not be placed in the correct place to the mm, otherwise there will be constant stops and damaged parts
Adding a say simple laser distance measurement sensor to make sure the piece is at the distance it is supposed to be is not difficult, computer vision and AI maybe overkill but a simple sensor ?
Also a lot of inspection seems to done by hand, while good inspectors can be smart about finding issues , Why not scan the entire car and see if there are abnormalities over accepted range ? it is like manual QA, I rather have automation suite rather that inconsistency of a manual process.
I am sure people are already thinking about it, Musk certainly was making a big push for more automation (and ran into a ton of difficulties )
Also, most of the parts of a car that wear out are shared between EV and ICE. Modern ICE drivetrains rarely break and routinely last the lifetime of the car.
Things that break on ICE vehicles commonly EVs don’t have: * fanbelts * flywheels * alternators * starters * spark plugs * transmissions * etc
In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
Have you been to a service center? They're packed, especially when compared to Tesla's market penetration. And none of the cars I saw there were wrecked. Just broken.
Tesla cars will most likely last about the same length of time as a current ICE vehicle, because what mostly kills vehicles is body rot. I'm even open to the argument that Teslas will have lower average lifespan, to be honest, due to the rate of change in the EV marketplace.
Service centers are packed because there aren’t enough of them. If you look at the ratio of service centers to teslas on the road you’ll see the problem rather starkly… there aren’t enough of them.
Tesla supplants this problem by heavily leaning on mobile service, which is awesome, but fundamentally, the service org has scaled at maybe 20-30% the speed of the manufacturing org.
I’ve personally owned 3 Toyotas with over 150k miles on them with very little maintenance. One of them was from 1994. One(my wife’s current car) has almost 200k on it.
Do you have a Toyota with higher than 300k miles on it? If not, why?
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43592/heres-how-a-tesla-model-...
The tech in the Model 3s tends to be significantly better than these old model s cars mind you and they still hold up to 400,000+ miles. I bet you’d get an engine rebuild or two and maybe a new transmission or two after 400k miles on a gas car as well.
In fact there is a lawsuit for the corolla 4 cylinder from the mid 2000s(one of the Toyotas I've owned) because the odometer stops working at 300k miles/kilometers due to some bug: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/some-toyota-models-...
Gasoline car engines are more complex while that can in theory mean lesser reliability, we should also consider that they been around a lot longer , we have had a lot of time to develop manufacturing process and mature them .
Battery vehicles are very very fast evolving, also Tesla is not exactly known for well manufactured vehicles
Finally also the availability of know how and feasibility to fix a motor is lot harder than gasoline engines , there maybe a tendency to replace the motor than fix it because cheaper or easier for Tesla like how phones do it.
Here you go. This driver has driven three of them over 300,000 miles:
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/driver-1-million-driven-priu...
Both cases where I sold my Toyota were because I was moving cross country and had to downsize to a single car, at least temporarily. We still have the other one.
Belts are maintenance parts, and are extremely unlikely to break if changed on schedule.
> flywheels
You would need a shaped charge warhead to break a flywheel.
> alternators and starters
Electric motors and servos exist in electric cars as well, to drive fans, pumps, brake servos, and so on.
> spark plugs
It is extremely rare for spark plugs on fuel injected engines to break, but they degrade and are cheap and easy to replace. Much easier than brake pads or tires.
> transmissions
Very rarely break, but the transmissions in electric cars share the same basic components.
> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
If this was true, it would mean teslas are babied and only used sparingly in forgiving environments. But there are still too few old teslas around to produce meaningful statistics about drive train/chassi failure modes, which usually happen much later in the cars lives. The oldest ones are essentially babied "boutique" individuals.
Maintenance changes on cars are: tires, brake pads, fluids (oil, cooling, hydraulics), and some belts, shock absorbers and suspension parts.
It is true that electric cars don't need oil changes.
As an example, the tesla model 3 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 8 yr/100,000 mi powertrain.
By comparison, the BMW M4 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 4 yr/50,000 mi powertrain.
Now the powertrain warranty being twice that of BMWs tells me they expect it to last at least that long. Perhaps I'm misreading something here?
The oldest teslas with the most miles are primarily taxis. I'm not sure I'd call a taxicab a "babied" vehicle.
Say that's required every 200k miles on average. Lot better than a 30k battery replacement.
But, the battery costs will continue to drop, so this will be interesting to see.
https://evannex.com/blogs/news/7-myths-busted-after-200-000-...
https://enginepatrol.com/how-long-tesla-model-s-last/
https://electrek.co/2020/05/11/tesla-model-x-extreme-mileage... Note: Electrek is a Tesla fanboi blog that masquerades as news, but the facts are the facts
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43592/heres-how-a-tesla-model-... Multiple references to teslas with 400,000+ miles
https://www.carscoops.com/2020/08/what-are-the-maintenance-c...
Etc.
The aluminum stamping on that scale is basically unique to Tesla but other companies are now slowly starting to copying that approach. However Tesla seems to be moving forward faster then others are catching up. In total this reduces the size of the bodyshop considerably.
That said their traditional welding lines seem to still not be as perfect as those from other manufactures. This is mostly true for Fremont, Shanghai has a better reputation. Berlin will hopefully follow that. In that department Tesla has no advantage.
The painting line is state of the art but not unique to Telsa, and new major expensive car factory would something similar. Most such factories are of course older so Tesla is ahead but there is certainty no moat there.
In terms of the motors, electronics/wiring and body I would consider Tesla ahead. The battery packs currently made in Berlin I would still consider state of the art but nothing that special. The packs made in Texas are actually significantly ahead (for High-Nickel cells at least).
In terms of final assembly and and interiors they are somewhat behind.
Process is very similar; stamping, welding, painting, wiring, assembling, shipping.
When I visit I often do runs around the factory which gives a good impression of the size of the area: Its a 10k run.
They did some landscaping around the factory to offset the alterations, the factory also has 3 large wind turbines and a battery storage farm made from used EV batteries.
Like the Tesla video, the secret sauce is omitted, (composite frame layup) but much attention lavished on commodity items. (motor coil winding)
If you visit any Mercedes or BMW or Audi plant, you'll see the same big orange robots, too. They are KUKA arms, probably implemented by the same system integrators.
High assembly efficacy is mainly due to large front and read aluminum castings, new battery format 4680, and unique structural battery pack onto which, floor, seats and console are mounted and later integrated, in one go, into the chassis through the bottom of the vehicle.[0]
[0]https://twitter.com/live_munro/status/1512215223268216833
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/vw-ceo-te...
VW has already announced a next generation platform where they are copying many aspects of Tesla architecture.
that's "nonsense that that results in higher service costs" to Tesla?
We don't have actual comparative data on issue. You can't just look at social media and distill facts from that. Have we really not learned this yet?
Other car makers have dealers that take the cars first. We don't know how often people go back to those dealers or how many issues get fixed at the dealer. So we don't know if manufacturing mistakes are more common with Tesla.
Service cost has not been holding back Tesla and its already turning profitable despite the majority of cars being under warranty. If it was as bad as you have made it up in your imagination this would not be happening.
In fact having complete control over service and having to cover the cost of that makes sure Tesla has financial intensive to not build broken cars, arguably more so then OEMs with a dealership model. And in fact, in the major categories like motors, batteries, electronics and software have done very, very well in terms of quality, fare better then other EV.
Tesla Mobile service can fix many issues without the owner ever having to interact with Tesla Service. This is an experience that is actually better then the majority of cars and it massively reduces the cost of fixing small and medium issues.
But I am sure Diess will take 10 extra hours in production to check the panel gaps.
There's a gazillion "how cars are made" videos on YT but they are all full of irritating voiceovers and interviews. This one is a lot more just fun to watch.
Most of what makes the Tesla video interesting is the FPV perspective negotiating all the close calls. The factory and vehicle assembly shown otherwise didn't strike me as particularly interesting, but I'm probably not the target audience.