Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, That's not good enough. In the car world you can recruit car engineers to fix simple car production problems. Objectively most of Tesla's issues are due to the poor fit and finish of the cabin and general fitment of things together. IF you ignore the whole electric engine and just treat it like and ice vehicle, Telsa should just be building on the knowledge of others and hiring Toyota engineers to help the nail things like delivery a simple service schedule. Making sure that cars roll of the line with everything tight and having spares ready for consumable parts.

It's not an acceptable excuse to shrug your shoulders and say that they're new at this. The concept of delivering a vehicle isn't new and Telsa has a TON of money.

Change the genre of product to Tech / software engineering. If Telsa was a software company shipping a crap product that broke all the time and then suddenly you found out that they didn't do XYZ of industry standard you'd hold them to account for not taking standard approaches to standard problems.

Tesla produced the same number of cars in 2022 as they did in all years combined from 2012-2020. If you think it's easy to just stand up that level of production capacity, and that they are actually they are just ignoring simple production problems, then you are underestimating the challenge.

Things like panel gaps are not necessarily easy fixes - i.e. what if you know the solution to a 1mm improvement, but can't easily fix it without taking the production line down for x weeks because you need to change the robot arm and conveyor system?

Other manufacturers like Toyota would actually shut the production line down to fix such problems instead of shipping defective products.

I guarantee they wouldn’t shut down the line while they wait for a fix for within-tolerance panel gap improvements - they would work on designing a fix that would be implementable on the line while continuing manufacture. Designing, Testing and Commissioning an improvement will often take many months.

The zero defect thing is fixing issues early rather than fixing them at the end - not shutting down the whole line if you identify that a tolerance can be improved and waiting for the fix.

As I understand it, the parent post is talking about defects that cause actual issues. If that's the case, then it sounds to me like the gaps aren't within tolerance.

The parent post is talking about fit and finish.

As long as it isn't the Daihatsu unit, apparently:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/20/toyotas-daihatsu-to-halt-veh...

Then you take it down and not make a sub-par product. I'm not sure why we all need to ascribe some sort of Messianic vibe to a car company. I'm also not sure I want to bow to the altar of "whip your well-paid employees to sacrifice the best years of their lives to push out meh vehicles" either.

1000% behind the electric push, but dang y'all, it is car company

That's a sure-fire way to NOT run a business. Corners need to be cut sometimes.

You’re describing priorities, not impossibilities.

There is a concept in manufacturing called the andon cord (a button / pull that activates a claxon and stops the line). Once the line stops, everyone swarms the problem and works on a fix. Toyota in the 80s pioneered its use and then beat the big 3 at manufacturing quality.

They aren't pulling the andon cord because the panel gap's are within tolerance but could be improved.

Parent post is talking about general fit and finish (i.e. tolerances being wide), try being a production line operative and pulling the andon because you think panel gaps could be decreased.

You are supposed to be pulling it if you notice the wiring loom is broken or something like that, not just fit and finish.

Besides, people are talking in this thread like lean / six sigma are new concepts that won't be already be fully embedded in the existing Tesla plants - this stuff is basic manufacturing which will already be fully embedded, but is just misunderstood by most people.

It seems that one basic misunderstanding is the idea that you could just jump into the deep end and start producing six sigma quality at scale. You can’t. Each sigma represents an order of magnitude of additional work at refining the production process, and that does not happen overnight.

Totally agree - you don't put an andon cord on your production line or 'do six sigma' and suddenly get perfect car quality - it's a slow and incremental process.

If I remember correctly the andon cord was first introduced in the USA by Toyota on the same factory many Teslas are build.

People don’t realize that even corporations have budgets and have to choose what to invest in. It’s not as if TSLA is paying dividends. All of the money that comes in goes to somewhere.

They chose to invest in certain things (sales, manufacturing ramp up, pickup and semi development, charger network, driverless development etc.) and not in others (panel gaps, fit and finish, etc.)

Easy to decide you disagree but it is working for them.

> > Easy to decide you disagree but it is working for them.

Corporations wins are customers losses.

In Tesla case even more considering they are literally re-inventing the wheel for political purposes so the whole effort is even more ridiculous.

That’s a zero-sum way of looking at a non-zero-sum situation.

I don't think the TÜV in Germany cares about panel gaps.

> > If you think

Consumers pay money in order not to think. The thinking has to be done by the organization who takes their money.

In Tesla's case particularly given that there is some Stockholm sydrome, Heaven's Gate type thing going on between Tesla and their customers.

>In the car world you can recruit car engineers to fix simple car production problems.

I'm no "car engineer", but I doubt most of Tesla's production issues are "simple".

>Change the genre of product to Tech / software engineering. If Telsa was a software company shipping a crap product that broke all the time and then suddenly you found out that they didn't do XYZ of industry standard you'd hold them to account for not taking standard approaches to standard problems.

Software is the last comparison I would have made. First of all Tesla is a software company. Secondly, the software industry is notorious for terrible products gaining massive market share. cough Google Docs/Sheets/Slides.

I don't know why you think Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are terrible products, I personally think they're great and much better than the alternatives that came before them, particularly in the problems they wanted to solve: fully Web-based document creation, editing and storage, and collaboration.

There is an entire iterative engineering process called The Toyota Way based in strong cultural practice called Kaizen.

It’s easy to poach engineers. It’s impossible to poach a business culture.

He merely asked why it’s considered a startup. Startup companies take employees from established competitors all the time. Startups can also make products poorly too.

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