Tesla Cybertruck deliveries halted for 7 days
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1. Make the requirements less dumb: "All designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong." - Musk
2. Try and delete parts (that seem unnecessary): "If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted." - Musk
3. Simplify or optimize: "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist." - Musk
4. Accelerate cycle time: "You're moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first." - Musk
5. Automate. "I've made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps." - Musk
Evidently this issue with the accelerator pedal was caused by principle #2: The Cybertruck team at Tesla questioned the requirement to securely tighten the metal plate covering the accelerator pedal, and somehow concluded it seemed unnecessary. Now they have to add it back!
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Source: https://evannex.com/blogs/news/elon-musk-reveals-his-5-step-...
In the real world, stuck accelerators are a common (but very dangerous) failure mode in all vehicles (just google "stuck accelerator"), and this isn't even the first vehicle to be dinged with such a problem at the design level. Which of those principles did Toyota violate when they had an almost identical issue in 2009?
Not to say this isn't bad, or shouldn't be fixed, or that there won't be a legitimate root cause analysis produced that tells us something interesting. But what you wrote seems poorly grounded.
None.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-found-not-at-fault-in...
The conspiracy theorist in me says this came at a time when the US auto market wasn't great and it was amplified to get people to buy American cars.
In fact the evidence looks just like this situation with the Cybertruck. So getting back to the confirmation of priors point: it's telling that you view one as a "conspiracy" and the other as The Truth.
I don't see Porsche's, Hellcat's, and BMW's having issues with something that has been a resolved non-issue for decades at this point.
Looks like they've recalled almost 1 million vehicles and have tried multiple times to address the issue.
https://bimmers.com/blog/pcv-valve-heater-recall-explained/
I don't know enough if that meets your requirement of "something that has been a resolved non-issue for decades at this point" but it's something that BMW has apparently been trying and failing to fix for awhile now.
I have higher expectations for my poorly made death machines.
I too "find it within the realm of acceptable that a $30,000 car would have issues that should absolutely not be present on a $100,000 car". If, say, a plastic piece on the dashboard tends to develop an unsightly crack over time, that's more ok for a $30k car than for a $100k car.
But some design issues should be present on no car; not a $30k car, not a $100k car, not a $5k car. "The car sometimes accelerates on its own" is one of these.
And I will preface this by saying that Audi isn't without fault either, but my also $100Kish RS 5 has in two years had two issues: a battery failure (determined to be a battery fault, not a vehicle fault), and improper drainage in one of the doors, leading to an accumulation of water, that had a tech advisory to add an additional drainage hole.
The floor mats were blamed, but in at least a couple of these cases, it was found that the occupant claimed to have hit the brakes, but actually hit the accelerator.
There is also a staggering number of “two foot drivers” out there.
Incidentally, my sunfire also had the issue of the pedal getting stuck on the floor mat, and more than once I had to press in the clutch cause the pedal got stuck.
The focus on toyota those years always stood out as a hit job to me (and that was a time when I generally disliked Japanese cars cause I was young and impressionable).
You're saying that it may not have been the cause of an accident. Which may be true, but (1) isn't evidence that there wasn't a clear design flaw and (2) is also true of the Cybertruck, which hasn't had any reported mishaps at all.
Yet to you the Toyota thing was a "hit job" where this isn't? It's 100% symmetric, so why the difference in interpretation? I mean, we know why. But "because Elon" makes for poor logic.
The mats were a hit job because most of the cases were not actually the mats, and one company was getting a hard focus for this issue when it was prevalent in many different brands.
The cybertruck is not a hit job because this is just another in the laughing stock line of quality control and design issues from a company known for it.
In my car from the mid 90s' the solution to a stuck accelerator is pretty trivial.
You can physically shift the transmission, which is a mechanical connection, into neutral. Worst case you can turn the key which electrically disconnects the ignition. And stuck accelerators were rarely a problem because the throttle was a physical cable.
It doesn't matter how trivial it is to override a stuck pedal, it's still a serious hazard, because even if you have the option to shift into neutral a driver may not think of that or may not react in time.
It's also trivial to override it in the Cybertruck: just press the brake pedal. Braking is hard-coded to cut off the accelerator, so if both pedals are pressed the brake wins and the accelerator is ignored. Still a big problem though.
Our current vehicles are a manual transmission Civic and a PHEV Pacifica. The Civic is easy—just press in the clutch—but the Pacifica would be more tricky; I guess I'd start with the brakes, then the shifter (which is just an input to the computer, of course), then hold down the power button, and then look for a place to ditch.
on APCI computers, the power button is software-controlled, i.e. it sends a signal to the OS, if the OS is currently frozen (or is configured to ignore it), pressing the power button does nothing. But to override this, if you hold it for about four seconds, a hardware shutdown still happens (is it done by the motherboard?). There are also other functions, like holding the power button for 30 seconds to enter into recovery mode on iPhones.
I wonder if holding the power button on a running EV car does anything similar...
The problem is that by the time you've reacted to the sudden unexpected acceleration and found a way to get the vehicle to stop, you may have already crashed or run something over or something. This is true on your car with a physical transmission as well.
This is all assuming that the brake overrides the accelerator (which it really really should, especially on an electric car where it's all computerized).
I think you mean an automatic physical transmission. My manual transmission car has a clutch that I can always disengage in a fraction of a second.
We probably had a couple of seconds before multiple people were gonna be dead-dead.
People don’t always think, or act, in the most sensible way in an emergency. In this case, the driver overshot neutral and threw the vehicle into reverse. We spun out and needed up in the ditch.
FWIW my 3-pedal daily driver is impervious to this failure mode. If the engine starts doing anything I don't expect my instinctive reaction is to push in the clutch pedal, which I am always prepared to do in a split second because I keep my left foot resting lightly on it. In the extremely unlikely situation where the clutch pedal also doesn't work I can still yank the shifter into neutral. The only way to get to get it into reverse is to pull up on a collar on the shaft of the stick and then shift into the "first gear" position, which I'm definitely not going to do while panicking.
- it’s not something that happens regularly so drivers are not prepared for it
- it can cause disaster in literal seconds (or even a single second)
It doesn’t matter how easy it is to mitigate if there is going to be a delay in most drivers deploying that mitigation.
That's what happens when your CEO spends a lot of time publicly engaged in culture war politics.
Man that's so true, and something incredibly frustrating about the discourse around Tesla (and Elon Musk more generally). The discussion is dominated by people who either worship the ground Elon walks on, or who think he's a cartoon villain. Neither is true, of course. But most of the time, those are the framings which dominate. I really hate it.
Or Audi in 1984?
Hopefully someone who knows what I'm talking about will chime in, but there was a CEO of a small consumer electronics company who was infamous for walking around the labs and randomly removing parts from designs on the breadboard. If the device still worked, well that's one less part that was needed. Makes for a cheap, if extremely fragile device.
Wish I could remember the guy's name though.
https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/industrial/boa...
What a truly awful approach to saving money. Just mislead the customer and have them pay the price associated with that. Good thing we have consumer protection laws now.
Muntz no. Should be filed in the same can as Sinclair. Rumour has it that the vast majority of really defective transistors (rather than just the moderately defective ones he shipped) were used as hard core under Sinclair's drive
Mission failed successfully.
1. Simplify requirements.
2. Reduce widget usage and determine limits.
3. Omit work where possible.
4. Time is of the essence.
5. Remove manual labor.
1. Optimize
If it's an important part and it's being added back after shipping a physical product to customers, that's a different story altogether.
Take everything out of the race car, then if something breaks add the last thing you took out back in. I imagine he'd get frustrated at a car still running on the victory lap.... "Darn, the wheels are still on we made the wheel hubs too strong."
The problem here is safety. Making a race car that disintegrates as it crosses the finish line is best for winning a race, but probably isn't terribly robust in an accident.
I don't think Musk is trying to make "barely safe enough" cars, but he is exploring a bunch of design limits. I think the CT specifically is an engineering sample or beta program for the model 2, designed to have low uptake and validate a bunch of _really_ big changes to "normal car" architecture. When some of those gambles turn out to be bad after 2 years, they'll have to fix thousands of dud trucks not millions of model 2s.
These new cars are 100% drive by wire; they're all in on their dry cell battery tech, it's 100% 48v for the "normal" electronics like power steering and HVAC and instrument cluster, etc.
They want to sell the CT to the weirdos who're willing to put up with whatever the heck the truck dishes out. They want paying beta testers to put miles on these things, get them more tested than they can with an internal testing program.
Only once the tech is more proven will it be "safe" to mass produce a "normal" car with all the same tech. The goal is to catch all the "nissan leaf lizard chemistry" or "bolt self immolation" bugs on the people willing to buy a CT.
this is a meme car for a person that effectively doesn't exist: a survivalist tech bro.
not saying that person can't be found -somewhere-, possibly in a Neil Stephenson book, but even at the insanely inflated prices of the Cybertruck that's not enough to stake a multi-year production effort.
Musk is playing games he doesn't understand, and wagering other people's lives to do it. He should at minimum understand that he has many, many fans who trust that he knows what he's doing, and will not expect Tesla's products to be cutting corners on safety and testing because "simpler is better" and "move fast and break things."
There are ways to find optimizations without removing a bunch of stuff and just shipping it like that to the general public: it's called engineering.
If Musk really wants to find ways to optimize the concept of a car further, he'll have to give up on point #4 and accept that it's going to take a lot of test cycles to figure out what works and what doesn't. Rushing out half-baked concepts that are likely missing key safety features because "let's see what happens" is exactly the kind of braindead approach to engineering management that is keeping me approximately 10,000 miles from anything Musk is in charge of.
Are people good at reliably determining which experiments are life-threatening? Especially when those people are under pressure to move fast?
Safety is the new snakeoil. Add just a drop and a sprinkle of "think of the children" and you can sell your BS to anyone.
Or, you know, the other thing.
USA is poorly regulated to keep operators safe. Designing for European mark means you can market safer than the competition in USA and sell in Europe at the same time. This also remove the need to build in safety guards or use light curtains.
Which one would you or your family members like to use day-in day-out, the 1600 newton limb remover built on USA standards or the one built around safety for Europe?
If there's no cost to the safety factor then sure, put it in. However there's almost always a cost. We all pay with a portion of our life every time we stand in an airport security line and every time we click accept to one of those EU cookie popups in a futile attempt to keep our data safe. With each click, billions of humans have a precious few moments severed from their short time on earth, moments that could be spent with loved ones.
Time is money, but you can't get a finger back. And neither can your employees who work for you, who the EU regulations are, rightly, more concerned with than your bottom line.
IE
"if it's possible to make a winning car win by having the wheels fall off of it as it crosses the finish lines" -- that's okay
VS
"If it's possible to make a winning car win by having the wheels fall off of it as it crosses the finish line, then it bursts into flame and kills the driver" -- that's probably no okay.
But there's a lot of grey area between the two, and that's where winning teams won (and occasionally lost drivers / spectators). Old time car racing was blood sport.
https://petrolicious.com/articles/lotus-f1-cars-were-so-frag...
They were death traps, racing drivers were way more cautious back in those days because any slightly severe accident was likely to result in death or severe injuries. Reliability was garbage too so basically just crossing the finish line was a great result.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/08/secondworldwar...
Of course a lot of that is because of the cars. 50s to 60s cars had basically no downforce and would be undriveable on modern tracks amongst other things.
I'm certainly not implying that modern drivers are less risk-averse these days, just that the risks were massively higher and drivers generally took that into account.
1. A racing car has only ONE objective: to WIN motor races. If it does not do this it is nothing but a waste of time, money, and effort.
This may sound obvious but remember it does not matter how clever it is, or how inexpensive, or how easy to maintain, or even how safe, if it does not consistantly win it is NOTHING!
2. Having established this what do we have to do to make it win:
(i) Simply stated it must firstly be capable of lapping a racing circuit quicker than any other car, with the least possible skill from the driver, and doing it long enough to finish the race.
(ii) After this, and only after this, and with absolutely no compromising of objective (2)(i) one has to consider how expensive it is, how simple, how safe, & how easy to maintain, etc. NONE of these aspects must detract one iota from (2)(i). “Good enough” is just NOT good enough to win and keep winning.[1]
[1]: https://jalopnik.com/colin-chapman-s-simple-and-chilling-def...
I think the worst accident was the 1955 Le Mans Accident that killed 85 spectators.[1]
It looks like the years (between 1952-1980) of 1956, 1963, 1965, 1972, 1976 and 1979 are noteworthy because those are the 6 of 28 years when a driver wasn't killed[2]...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_fatalities
F1 tracks, cars, suits and helmets today are so safe that even on violent crashes at >45G[1] or flaming infernos[2] of gasoline and lithium, the driver can walk out of the wreck with a just a broken rib or a burned hand, whereas in the past that would have meant certain death or at least being crippled for life.
I think the late Robert Dewar (of AdaCore fame) made a similar comment about fighter jets: Is it really a domain for safety-critical engineering if the only thing that prevents the plane from disintegrating mid-air is a continuously running computer program?
A decorative brake pedal faceplate? I'm pretty certain that there's decades of design and engineering precedence that has already coalesced on a basic fastener design that is low cost, durable, and safe.
the door handle, physical controls, having lane indicators on their respective sides, a glove box handle, rear view mirrors
As solved things. Removing the door handle on Teslas is not innovative, it’s to stroke Elon’s ego. These changes aren’t innovative, they’re changes for the sake of changes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/ruzp4p/co...
If you punch in reasonable numbers for the EQS here[1] (2585 kg, 2.51m^2 frontal area, 0.20 cd) you get 420 meters on top of your 522km range at 100km/h assuming perfect efficiency.
108kwh/(206.641 Wh/km) - 108kwh/(206.806 Wh/km) = 420m
Do you have any numbers to back up that claim?
Is it really a significant margin that makes a measurable difference in range, or an insignificant one in the grand scheme of things that can be ofset if the driver has a bigger lunch? Because then it's just a design flex, not a engineering win.
My gut feeling based on a few years working in automotive is that you're talking bull. No offence.
As for studies, yes they have been done, I do not have a subscription to pull the numbers:
Ok, so you have no numbers, you just pasted here the first thing that showed up on Google without even being able to read it, just to cover your ass, while a sibling comment provides numbers from Mercedes that show the gains from door handles are negligible.
Boooo! If you wanna post a source, at least post one that you can at least read before using it as crutch for your argument, otherwise you're digging yourself further into your own hole.
The holdup here are government regulations, but the minute those are changed, side mirrors are gone.
Try to put your hands on stainless steel. Any trace of skin oil will left a mess of fingerprints all around the place. Door handles in the cyber-truck would be like rubbing your car while covered in meringue each time that you need to use it.
Text article: https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-wi...
Sample story told:
And I asked the, the battery safety team, 'cause I was like, what are these mats for?
I said are they for fire protection or something? They said, "No, they are for noise and vibration. "So you don't get that." And I said, "But you're the battery department."
And I asked a NVA noise vibration analysis team, what's it for, they said fire safety.
So literally it was like being in a Goldberg cartoon. It was like actually, I feel like I'm in a Goldberg cartoon quite frequently.The Cybertruck is doomed. I'll be surprised if it still being made in 3 years.
From my POV outside of the Musk cult of personality it was painfully obvious that the thing was a dud from day one.
(Additionally I always have to play the fun "how do I open this door from the outside again?" game. But maybe my driver was right and it's "really obvious." ...)
That doesn't correlate to inherent software quality, though.
It's been basically impossible to disguise poor quality in cars here for a long time, so the failure of shiny chrome is the least of the Cybertruck's problems.
lol, very good
Potentially, but I think the big factor for most people who buy $100k cars is wealth and status-seeking, not interest in conponent details.
Downvoters need to explain why they are downvoting my post pointing out that a cheaper Lexus doesn't have this issue.
Most vehicles are not luxury or sports models so my statement is still accurate.
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EDIT: Looking up replacement parts, Toyota and Lexus uses a "stud" style pedal that's bolted into the accelerator at the floor. In this case a "cover" isn't really applicable.
Many vehicle use a style similar to Ford's: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/engine/other-engine-parts/...
This is essentially a metal arm with a small cover attached to it.
EDIT 2: Just grabbing a bit of ancedata to support my internal data.
* GM uses a pedal with a plate in the Escalade: https://www.gmpartsdirect.com/oem-parts/gm-accelerator-pedal... I also know I've had this style on many other GM vehicles I and my family have owned.
* Hyundai use the arm with a cover: https://www.partshyundai.com/oem-parts/hyundai-sport-pedals-...
* BMW uses a floor based pedal with a cover: https://www.bimmerworld.com/BMW-Interior/BMW-Pedals/Accelera...
* Mercedes uses a similar floor based pedal with cover: https://www.bimmerworld.com/BMW-Interior/BMW-Pedals/Accelera...
* Chrysler uses an arm with a cover on many vehicles: https://store.mopar.com/oem-parts/mopar-pedal-kit-82211154ab
* Honda uses an arm with a cover on many vehicles: https://www.hondapartsnow.com/genuine/honda~pedal~set~sport~...
In fact, I think you might have the only manufacturer that actually doesn't use a cover. Likely in response to their pedal scandal as older Toyota models use an arm with a cover.
The 2017 RX (and even the latest RX) is about a decade behind in technology compared to Tesla & the German manufacturers. When you invest very little into R&D, you can afford to add shiny metal bits.
They don't meet their reported towing spec, they haul about as much as a cargo bike, they can't off-road.
The only reason to own one is to participate in the culture war. That sort of thing tends to cycle quickly.
On mine I had unintended braking randomly in the middle of the motorway. I think that's less fucked than unintended acceleration at least. Maybe not for the guy behind me.
I now don't own a car. It was the most money I've lost in one go and the worst vehicle I've ever driven.
Why do you think this person meant that this single deficiency is the reason it's doomed? Have you thought that way in the past about things?
The culture that leads to cheap glue holding on a piece that can jam the pedal down likely cut corners in 100 other places.
my prius isn't made of chrome but the plastic and rubber is made to hold up to a decade of abuse
i guess with self driving cars the expectation is you don't need to bother with the gas pedal as much.
> the gas pedal
Tesla is electric, so they got confused about how to build a gas pedal.
Also puts in question what is actually happening on Tesla's engineering org, one just needs to have a moderate amount of reasoning power to think about the scenario "what happens in case this piece gets loose?" on a critical feature of a car, not even an engineering-related study nor a big brain, it's just a reasonable thought to have, so how could this piece pass all the engineering process review?
But in a society of the spectacle, people find their meaning in relation to the larger show. Just listen to the satisfaction in the voice of the video above: He feels good because he was able to rectify the situation. He was also able to relate to a larger audience because of it. The Tesla's failure gave him meaning.
Now other people will want to be like him and buy a cybertruck and find and fix issues and demonstrate them to a global audience...
I remember reading about the removal of the turn-signal stalk, (moving it to buttons on the steering wheel itself) and IMO it's just bonkers.
How the heck is someone already in some squiggly turns or a roundabout supposed to identify and touch the correct spot without taking their eyes off the twisting road or compromising their grip on the wheel that wants to return to the neutral position?
“.. should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.”
Alternative explanation of this is if they have a vision to move users to a self driving future, it makes sense to start slowly transitioning users by eliminating things that don't make sense in that paradigm. If you can save some cost then its a bonus. (Their cars supposedly get ~30% margins so idk if cost was even really a primary rather than a secondary consideration).
LiDAR similarly augments camera vision to beyond-human capacity.
Toyota’s recall didn’t include it, but we had a ‘92 Camry whose accelerator pedal would stick. Possibly a one off, but effectively the same result.
0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_veh...
Reading the title, I thought that at long last electrical SUA had been demonstrated.
It did it to me at least one more time in a similar situation. I am very glad not to have been driving in traffic when it happened.
The trouble went away after some of the recall work was done, but we never fully trusted that vehicle again. For what it's worth, we still drive a pair of Toyotas.
I put off the engine, and it has never occurred again as far as I can tell, but no one can convince me that that was not a case of unexplained acceleration due to some internal bug.
What's the big deal? They could just fix a problem like that with software. Just patch in an emergency acceleration shutdown button in a sub-menu on the touchscreen (e.g. hit truck, "Controls", select a new "disable jammed accelerator", click confirm).
For what it’s worth, at least some Tesla models turn off acceleration when the brake is pressed more than a little bit.
There's some corner cases where using both can be beneficial (like heel-toe downshifts with manual gearboxes, or changing the way torque is steered on AWD), but they're generally pretty far removed from the way that driving is usually taught or performed.
But starting on a hill in a conventional automatic with a torque converter also involves either rolling back a bit or pressing the accelerator a bit before releasing the brake.
Felt deeply in San Francisco. I think newer cars rollback less than older cars. Either way, it is unnerving when driving in Lombard street.
You can't pay me enough to drive in SFO in a stick shift.
Sometimes necessary for tricky hill starts, I won't fully remove the brake until I feel the accelerator moving the car forward, but that should fit within the GP's 'little bit'. EVs should be easier on hill starts because there's potential for less latency between input and power delivery, but I dunno; I don't care for driving east across downtown Seattle regardless of if I'm in an all gas or a PHEV.
Hell, my 1987 Toyota pickup had one. You could put it in 1st gear, let the clutch out and then turn the key to start, if you were on a very steep hill. Comes in handy offroad.
My 2014 PHEV does have a button, but I don't use it, because when I'm in the situation that needs it, there's usually cars behind me, and that's not a good time to test and see how it works.
I also imagine that two-foot drivers would prefer for the effect of pressing the brake to be smooth, and having the slightest touch instantly reduce motor torque to zero could be jarring.
I've done it a few times to make people following too closely back off of my rear bumper.
I discovered this by chance. And it seems to be subtly mentioned in the manual.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3....
But yeah it’s weird to have to do that as half the time Auto doesn’t pick the “right” speed in the rain. Either too fast or too slow.
When my 6,500 pound cybertruck starts unexpectedly accelerating at a rate that can reach 100MPH in ~7 seconds, the very first thing I am going to be doing is scanning the dashboard for an abort button that has never been there before.
Do you trust Space Karen enough to make that assumption?
Tesla vehicles have a lot of software onboard, and they build it like a regular SV tech company. That is frightening to me.
(Haven't tried it on a new Tesla)
Me too. I don't trust Tesla to get that right.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/tesla-cybertruck-hit-with-stop-sale-bec...
my gripe with touchscreens is they're no good in an emergency, you want an interface that reacts well to being grabbed :)
does the cybertruck even have a proper "off" button or does it just read your mind to anticipate when you want to put it in standby mode? :p
Edit: just out of curiosity I went to look at photos of the Cybertruck interior. No levers on the steering column. WTF. That alone would be a deal breaker for me.
When you finish driving and shift into Park, simply exit the vehicle. When you leave Cybertruck with your phone key, it powers off automatically, turning off the touchscreen.
Cybertruck also powers off automatically after being in Park for 30 minutes, even if you are sitting in the driver's seat.
Although usually not needed, you can power off Cybertruck while sitting in the driver's seat, provided the vehicle is not moving. Touch Controls > Safety > Power Off. Cybertruck automatically powers back on after a short period if you press the brake pedal or touch the touchscreen.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/cybertruck/en_us/Owners_M...
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/15/tesla-layoffs-workers-sale...
This post has 226 points, 234 comments, posted ~2 hours ago, and went from the front page to >#100 between two refreshes.
The most popular layoff post had 143 points, 220 comments, posted 5 hours ago and I can't even find it outside of search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038549
I've turned off the flags on this one since the discussion seems more substantive than usual, although it's not clear how significant the story is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038549 Tesla to lay off more than 10% of its staff (reuters.com)
8 hours ago, 250+ comments
Article: "Tesla has stopped all Cybertruck deliveries"
It's a minor distinction but these are not the same thing.
Chances are they _really_ want to make a fix that can be done at service centers, so that they don't need to ship all the CT awaiting delivery back to the factory for the fix.
Starship is the largest rocket to launch to orbit, it didn't land again, but neither has any other non SpaceX rocket
> Reuse is also meaningless without a public audit of what is done to turn them round.
Do you think SpaceX makes money out of thin air and thus can launch rockets using made up money?
However Space X offer cheaper flights than everyone else, so unless they're losing money, it's not expensive to reuse them.
It didn't reach orbit on purpose, it can with 1% more thrust.
Who said it failed, it's the largest rocket ever to reach orbit (unless you're super picky, in which case wait 2 months)
It's built by the same people who did Falcon, so it's likely to be as good.
Also they're specifically designing it to not be over engineered, because Rocket Equation.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-roc...
Talk about being ahead..
Excited to see what Tesla's vehicles will look like when they start standing. Unsure on the timeline for them to start doing real engineering.
Please enlighten us how they are designing the rockets wrongly.
Some US$ 18 billion came from tax payer though.
They all receive government contracts/investment/subsidies (or whatever you want to call it). Why is this specific company being singled out?
US government paid SpaceX for services rendered. It's economy 101.
The SpaceX team has a choice, and they choose "fail fast". There's a gradient that SpaceX can sit on for their development, and for a suite of companies owned by Musk, people would like to see less fail fast and often.
Of course there's also environmental harm from exploded rockets, and the potential to never find success before running out of money, but as long as they succeed in getting it working perfectly before they've spent as much as it would cost to be confident of it working on the first launch, they'll be happy.
Starship/Super Heavy "only" cost 5 billion as a program and also has 1 successful flight (and two Earth-shattering kabooms). So far, they're the economical ones by quite some margin.
It's not like Northrop Grumman and Boeing are known for being parsimonious with their money.
But the engineers and even the managers at SpaceX really have done something very special.
And the engineers at NASA too, for that matter - nailing it on the first go is bloody hard and a great technical feat. It's also extremely expensive, but the spec is the spec.
I'm not going to say that the SpaceX approach doesn't have disadvantages or that everyone should use it because I don't believe that, but it works for them, even if you get to see more failures (and I understand that many have a fear of public failure, but not everyone is like that).
Their money comes from the same sources as the other space companies: public and private investment/contracts. If a different company takes twice as long and charges twice as much for the service and SpaceX does it faster while charging less for the same service, then if I was a tax payer, I wouldn't care much about the way they develop and test their rockets.
It's important to not allow our views about Musk to cloud our view about what some of his companies are doing. Cybertruck seems to be a bad product. Falcon 9, Starlink, etc, are good products. It is what it is.
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[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/ula-continues-invest...
Such as?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/04/tesla-stops-cybertruck-...
https://twitter.com/gauravphoenix/status/1776285356146729185
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/1b6ru8u/2024_m...
Not halted in general.
Ford only sold 72000 EVs in 2023, they're just a hobby
Like, sure, it's not good. But the top-rated comments acting like this is a sign of some larger issue with Tesla's engineering culture or saying things like "The Cybertruck is doomed" are farcical in this context. I get recall notices for similar issues in my non-Tesla vehicles on a regular (~once every few years) basis. Its very clear such comments are motivated by factors unrelated to the article itself.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/09/toyota_recal...
Manufacturers don’t get a bye from safety just because they haven’t sold many units yet.
Are we supposed to stop caring about acceleration problems because Toyota had one?
Should journalists have decided not to write about this at all?
A tech company failing to deliver for some reason is of interest. Tesla stopping deliveries is as interesting as cloudflare dropping traffic or aws down time.
Editorializing a title is frowned upon for a good reason!
Other publications used an almost-identical title: https://jalopnik.com/tesla-cybertruck-hit-with-stop-sale-bec...
The fact of the matter is that no-one has ever been able to demonstrate an actual software/hardware failure that would cause unintended acceleration (of the kind that would not stop if you pushed the brake pedal to the floor); nor show that Toyota floor mats were particularly likely to jam the pedals.
This was (almost to a moral certainty) a media-induced hysteria, with most cases being traceable to the usual cause of unintended acceleration - foot on the wrong pedal. ref https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153815/
For those who are unaware: all reasonably modern brake/throttle-by-wire cars have software that will disable fueling when the brake pedal is being pressed (that's why you need a special line-lock mode to spin the rears in your Mustang). Also, unless you're driving some kind of monstrously powerful performance special, your brakes can overpower your engine.
Please do not test safety systems, especially in a Toyota. They only work in specific conditions and usually too late for you to react if it doesn't trigger.
I've seen a few combinations of engine power and breaking power of car, and if I remember correctly, the breaking power was around 5x to 10x that of the engine.
It kinda makes sense, if you accelerate to 100km in 6s, you certainly don't want the breaking process to take the same time, but significantly less. 0.6s to 1.2s sound more reasonable to me.
If anybody has good data that compares these two powers in common vehicles, I'd like to see it, a quick search didn't find much useful.
The guy calculates the brakes of a late-model Corolla as almost 1000hp: if you stomp the brakes, you are coming to a stop. People in the UA cases are stomping the pedal; just the wrong one.
Stopping times vs. accelerating times are not even telling the whole story - the brake system is often not the limiting factor in stopping, it's frequently the friction of the tires on the road.
I’m not sure if the Toyota recall dealt with a similar issue or not, but when it seemed so similar to the issue we dealt with that I figured it was more wide spread than just our car.
Was there hysteria? Probably. Did some Toyotas have sticky accelerator pedals? Certainly.
It always disappointed me that toyota ended up paying out so much money for a 'software fault' which nobody could ever demonstrate/find, despite a lot of experts from both sides inspecting all the code.
The court deciding there probably was a bug despite nobody being able to find it seems... wrong. I understand courts doing that in cases where there is no evidence/the evidence was destroyed - but in the toyota case, the full source code/hardware was available, yet still no fault could be demonstrated.
A recent relevant example can be found at [1].
They probably should have know better, but this seems like a fairly innocent mistake to me... I thought it could be an issue with the car's computers which in my eyes would be more concerning than a relatively simple mechanical issue. Interestingly the cover of my car's pedal fell of this weekend, although I can't see how this would cause the pedal to stick in my car (it's a Fiat).
I have a Kia now with the opposite problem. In the afternoon the sun will trigger the collision avoidance system and abruptly break. This has happened probably half a dozen times on a particular turn on a nearby freeway that is angled in a way the sensor must be vulnerable to. When going 65-70 on a freeway with no car immediately in front, but possibly cars on either side) and having the car violently break is frightening and requires fast reflexes to ensure the car stays in its lane.
Similarly we have a Toyota hybrid where the feel of the break changes completely when the regenerative breaking is released. I’ll be slowing to a stop light and it’s almost as if the breaks give out and I need to apply more pressure to achieve the same deceleration.
While I don’t doubt that there is human error involved in the vast majority of crashes, when you encounter a flaw like this it is obvious how it could result in an accident.
I don't think this is too much of a problem. But there's another failure mode that will startle you unless you're monitoring the battery charge on long downhill slopes. If the battery gets too full, the regenerative braking cuts out abruptly.
If you're dealing with this kind of terrain regularly, you might want to get familiar with the engine braking mode. (B or S on the shifter)
That's not unintended acceleration, that's a sticky throttle cable that needed to be replaced. Or possibly a weak return spring on the throttle mechanism. I'm curious why you didn't take it to a mechanic and get it fixed (any mechanic could have fixed this, not just Toyota techs).
*–Stock cheap cover clipped onto acceleration pedal which causes the accelerator to jam
It's a bit abnormal for tesla. Most of the time their "recalls" are software only. I had far more disruptive recalls for my honda minivan.
According to multiple accounts on the Cybertruck Owner’s Club forum and on X on Friday, Tesla has sent a message notifying customers with delivery appointments that it would need to cancel their appointments. Some users in the forum said the issue was due to a problem with the accelerator lubricant, causing the pedal to slip, while Omar of Whole Mars Blog noted that the delivery pause would take place over the next seven days.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-pausing-cybertruck-deliverie...