Oil-Canning
livingstingy.blogspot.com
livingstingy.blogspot.com
The author is basically arguing "large, completely flat metal panels that join in long, angular seams is a fatal design flaw that is unfixable." I.e. they say this design will lead to major problems ("oil-canning", seam gaps, and making repairs even more of a non-starter), and the possible fixes will either be gargantuanly expensive or have other problems (lots of added weight). Can someone versed in this area comment on this? At first glance he does appear to make great points, so I'd like to know if there is something I'm missing.
I think automakers are really going to have to come to terms with repairability costs or else people will start balking at insane insurance costs. There have been a bunch of articles on HN recently about how minor impacts on EVs are leading to crazy repair bills, like the 41k Rivian repair. If it costs 15k to fix a minor door ding on a Cybertruck, I can't fathom what insurers will charge for comprehensive or collision coverage.
(Personally, I think this is quite "regressive", in that the poor have to pay to cover potential damage to cars much more expensive than their own. It would work better if insurance was completely optional and only paid for damage to your own car, whether caused by yourself or others. That way you would have a lot more control over how much you want to pay and how much risk you want to take on).
Liability insurance’s purpose is to pay for damage caused by you and your car to other people’s bodies and property due to your negligence. Cars damage other things beyond simply other cars.
> Personally, I think this is quite "regressive", in that the poor have to pay to cover potential damage to cars much more expensive than their own.
Only damage that they have been found responsible for having caused. People of any income level who make a habit of causing extensive damage to expensive cars belonging to other drivers probably should pay increased insurance rates to cover the damages they cause (or become functionally uninsurable).
> It would work better if insurance was completely optional and only paid for damage to your own car, whether caused by yourself or others. That way you would have a lot more control over how much you want to pay and how much risk you want to take on).
Again, that does nothing to cover the damage your car does to, for example, pedestrians, passengers in other vehicles, signs, mailboxes, or any of the other variety of things cars can damage.
That is, if I decide to drive a car where the bumper is made of Fabergé eggs, and someone dings my bumper, why should they have to pay me a couple million to replace my couple broken Fabergé eggs? Obviously that's a fake example, but is that really much different from having to pay extreme amounts to fix someone's Lamborghini or Bugatti? It seems more rational to me to conclude that people driving insanely expensive cars on public roads are taking ill-advised risks and should need to shoulder more of that risk.
Especially when you discover that many super cars are actually using commodity components but then literally just charging 10x for them (I recall someone showing Lamborghini or Ferrari parts that literally had other brands stamped on them).
But many people have insurance for their vehicles to cover damage done where the culprit is uninsured, under insured, or simply can’t be found. Third party insurance leaves you out of pocket in those cases, and even if you do find the culprit if they have no assets either you can’t even use a lawsuit to reclaim the damages.
1. Cybertruck is hella late. Lapped even by other makers
2. Cybertrucks don’t look great. The videos of them driving around just don’t quite live up to the hype. If the excitement for the car will be less after launch, why launch it ?
Some Tesla/Musk fans replied that it probably didn't even help them get to market faster, and now that Tesla was FINALLY using their own design for the Cybertruck they could really create a vehicle that was fully met the electric vehicle and Tesla's potential.
I kind of bookmarked that discussion in my mind, the notion that the Cybertruck represents a new design process, a kind of unleashing of the process, and perhaps represents a fully Elon Musk version of Tesla.
The result has not disappointed! Without using conventional body designs as the basis of this new vehicle they've instead made bizarre and cringy choices that can't be justified aesthetically or functionally. I honestly thought the original Cybertruck design was just going to be a placeholder to attract attention before they made something reasonable... and without Musk maybe it would have been.
Everyone else didn't come upon the conventional designs by accident; there's a lot of hubris in making such a big change, especially since it's not a meaningful part of Tesla's unique value.
You are probably right that Cybertruck is Elon's personal project to revolutionize car design. It will probably go about as well as most attempts to revolutionize car design.
Ugh, are we still doing this?
This isn't likely to happen, but we could learn to just not care. We have bigger problems than worrying about our car's cosmetics. A lot of a car's cost is due to the high cost of perfect finishes. I'd love a car that was cheap to repair, even if it meant leaving some obvious welding showing up on the surface; especially if it was more socially acceptable.
Reminds me of the NHL goalie Gerry Cheevers* who painted stitches on his face mask every time it got damaged by a puck that would have damaged his face instead. Maybe we should celebrate our car's service dings, instead of spending the money to hide them.
My aunt lived in the city. Her car would get dinged all the time.
She made peace with it by putting two crossed bandaids on a ding.
In this other case I have a mark of me being an idiot backing into a telephone pole or another lower car I didn’t see or getting keyed by neighbors.
The author, in an admittedly ranty way, levels basic criticisms that are hard to individually disqualify. With the truck, it seems like Elon did Elon things, and his team is struggling to make his vision real in a mass-producible design with acceptable quality.
I don't see anything ludicrous in the author's article, even if it sneers at times. Though unquestionably successful overall, since Elon has a history of bad technical or PR/appearance-driven moves, I'm not sure what's wrong with mocking him for some of those things. He is successful despite doing some idiotic things, it's not that everything he does is brilliant and correct.
The article doesn't provide any internal Tesla evidence as to whether Elon considered it and disregarded oil canning (for whatever reason), or if people on his team told him about this likely issue and he blew them off, thinking he could just keep demanding his team bring him solutions instead of telling him about problems with his vision. Under the circumstances, either could validly be criticized as idiotic, in which case mocking him seems like fair game. This would hardly be the first such issue ("Falcon Wing" doors, display screens on the Model S, the incredibly ill-advised 'Full Self-Driving' labeling, etc.).