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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

Tesla literally didn't realize the steel comes in coils and it naturally wants to warp back into that state. Massive panel gap problems. As usual. The only thing other car makers are learning is what a joke their design operation is.

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SpaceX was using stainless steel for Starship since at least 2019, so pretty sure you are demonstrably wrong here.

Its fun to say space man bad, but don't equate complex production cycles to teams of competent engineers not knowing basics.

Look at the differences between production & preproduction models and you'll see way less issues.

I’m sure folks knew it came in rolled form, but aren’t SpaceX and Tesla two separate companies?

Both run by Musk and they have a lot of folks who have swapped between the two. In general they have very close connections.

I would be interested to learn how this works in practice. In many companies separate divisions barely collaborate or take learnings from each other. 2 separate companies sharing learnings is unique.

I work in one company and the divisions there hardly interact cuz it costs a lot in overhead.

I am pretty sure the guy is making shit up.

Musk does this routinely, also with the Boring Company or with Twitter - upon his acquisition, he took a lot of Tesla staff with him to Twitter HQ [1] to help out.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...

That was a specific case where he didn’t trust Twitter employees. And it was absolutely a galaxy brain move, given that Tesla employees had almost no domain expertise.

Separate divisions barely collaborating is not the case at Tesla either (or SpaceX). One of their mantras is "everybody is a chief engineer." They're all supposed to know enough about everything so they don't design parts that make trouble for other parts of the car, or for manufacturing. It's the reason they moved the new production line for the next-gen vehicle to Austin, so the engineers would be there for it.

I don't think it's that unusual for companies to collaborate with each other on projects. And some of the sharing happens by default when you just encourage employees to migrate between the companies and take their knowledge with them.

I'm sure that the lower regulatory environment in Texas was much more of a factor. Musk has complained for a long time about California's regulations.

The original plan was to put the first production line in Mexico. Then Musk realized his engineers wouldn't be commuting or moving to Mexico, and he wanted them to spend time on the factory floor so they could see what was hard to make.

(Source: Isaacson's Musk bio)

1. Isaacson's Musk biography was so poorly written and fawning I couldn't finish it. I take nothing in it as fact, mostly PR and hagiography.

2. Musk has had lots of plans. Plans that he dumps the minute he changes his mind.

I thought it portrayed Musk's flaws pretty vividly, but I guess if you started out convinced that Musk is a terrible human being with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, it would seem like fawning hagiography by comparison.

In any case, it was widely believed in the investor community that the Mexico plant was where the next-gen vehicle would be produced. I don't think California was ever really considered.

Well, the "investor community" wasn't really well informed. Tesla wanted to pull out of California due to regulations, and was only considering Texas and Oklahoma for the CyberFridge. Texas was selected the year after the initial CyberFridge announcement.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/22/21334860/tesla-cybertruck...

Ok but what I said above was "the reason they moved the new production line for the next-gen vehicle to Austin." The next-gen vehicle isn't Cybertruck, it's the forthcoming $25K car. That's what people expected would be built in Mexico.

(But based on "Cyberfridge" I can see this conversation isn't going to go anywhere productive, so I'll just wish you a nice weekend. Throw in a last word if you want.)

> Tesla literally didn't realize the steel comes in coils and it naturally wants to warp back into that state

Steel comes in many shapes. Are you saying they used hot versus cold-rolled steel?

stainless has a very strong tendency to want to walk back from forming operations.

Maybe they need to machine it from a block of metal, like apple's laptops.

It also has to be much thicker, or needs to be bonded to a backing frame for rigidity.

Some of the top selling vehicles in America are made by companies with atrocious build quality like Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

The Bronco and Wrangler being utter pieces of shit doesn’t make them unpopular.

Sure guy.

"We dug our own grave."

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