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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

100% explainable by Tesla's five principles of manufacturing:

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!

---

Source: https://evannex.com/blogs/news/elon-musk-reveals-his-5-step-...

View on HN

Colin Chapman, "guy who made lotus" had the maxim "Simplify, then add lightness" had similar guidance.

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.

This seems like a misunderstanding of Chapman's quote. I don't think he implied a compromise on safety or reliability, just speed and handling.

Colin Champman's own words:

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...

This is a good point because if a race car accelerates into a wall and destroys itself and kills its driver it can still win a race

Old time car races were really dangerous.

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

Yep, but car racing today is orders of magnitude safer than it was decades ago, especially in F1. An insane amount of money, research and regulations has been poured into increasing safety by the FIA.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x45fLUTHCuk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ7_En2xEm4

Early race cars were not paragons of safety. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that Chapman intentionally made his cars less safe to make them faster, but I also don't know that he'd have spent any weight budget to make them safer than the regulations required.

"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

"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...

> Early race cars were not paragons of safety

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.

I can assure you that they weren't more cautious back then, but rather they just knew the dangers and accepted them.

I think having recently been through WW2 where "reasonable things" included tasks like "hey let's disarm this unexploded bomb by chilling it in liquid oxygen." fundamentally altered people's risk calculus for a generation or two.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/08/secondworldwar...

I mainly talking about driving styles, modern F1 drivers pull all kinds of maneuvers and drive so close to the limit that would be totally suicidal back in those days (especially for overtaking, you aren't going to fight as hard when you know that any crash might result in death or severe injury)

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.

For a professional race car, I don't think safety is an overriding concern, given its intended use case.

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?

Cars are not software, and it's ethically and morally wrong to test them in production.

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.

#4 is the feedback loop that enables rapid improvement. Long as the experiments aren't life-threatening, are you really proposing that they only test new ideas in fake limited artificial environments, rather than in real-world environments where they can encounter the full scope of possible failure modes?

> Long as the experiments aren't life-threatening, are you really proposing that they only test new ideas in fake limited artificial environments, rather than in real-world environments where they can encounter the full scope of possible failure modes?

Are people good at reliably determining which experiments are life-threatening? Especially when those people are under pressure to move fast?

When it comes to multi-ton death machines, selling something you don't know is safe is the same thing as selling something you know isn't safe.

No one knows what is safe, those that purport to know exactly what is safe are the most dangerous.

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.

Number of European countries require safety to be engineered into the product. Example, where I work, a machine in automation had a risk assessment that it produced 1600 newtons of clamping force, same biting force of an adult panda, could take off limbs. This machine could be sold in the USA and not the Europe. Re-engineered to be safe and sold in Europe, machine cannot even take off a finger.

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?

Depends, I might opt for the limb remover if it is simpler and works more reliably. Time is money and I'm confident I could use either properly so I'd likely waste more of my limited lifespan fixing the safe but more complex and more unreliable machine.

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.

I've been around a lot of people who say that sort of thing and it's why in my neck of the woods we note that "I never get distracted, I'm never tired, I always work perfectly" is the mantra of a woodworker who has eight fingers. (He didn't learn the first time.)

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.

You can get a finger back but only if your medical science is sufficiently advanced. Full fingers have been re-attachable since the 1960s, and soon we will be able to grow new fingers like a newt. The key is to continue the progress quickly rather than slow things in the name of onerous safety.

This is deeply antisocial and I hope you're not allowed near decisions that can impact other people.

I hope you don't take part in any modern medicine because almost every modern procedure was built upon a long history of extremely risky experiments that probably should have never been allowed.

It is perfectly fine to sell a dangerous product as long as the people exposed to it have consented in an informed way.

I would hereby like to revoke consent for Tesla fans "Fully Self Driving" their deathtraps on public roads that I use.

You are probably a worse driver than Tesla FSD, I'd like to revoke consent for you to use the public road.

I took a test, which I passed, and I haven't been wirelessly updated since that test. I also haven't had a phantom braking incident yet.

Yeah! How could you know anything really, you know? It's just impossible to know that you should securely affix, and test the security of, the cover of an accelerator pedal on a motor vehicle. There's no prior art to accelerator pedals and no examples of what happens when you make a bad one.

Or, you know, the other thing.

So why do we sell cars at all? They are the 3rd leading cause of death since before Elon Musk and yourself were born.

There's a difference between selling a multi-ton vehicle that has crumple zones and curved lines and selling a multi-ton vehicle that is designed to tenderize pedestrian rib cages. This comment also applies to today's pickups and SUVs; but while those vehicles are pretty nightmarish for the safety pedestrians and other drivers the CT is a further escalation of matters through both design and build quality.

I don't understand the motivation behind such a question. We sell cars because the benefits to motor transportation outweigh the safety risks in aggregate. That aggregate tradeoff is nonresponsive to the singular case of YOLOing avoidable risks on a Tesla.

Hagerty has a video on Bugatti and mentions Bugatti buying Lotus. At the time they just made the EB110 two years earlier that weighed 4,100 pounds. Talk about a difference! Colin Chapman was rolling in his grave. It's worth a watch just for the sheer bonkers life of Ettore Bugatti.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2sUknP5Pg&t=964s

I have no intention whatsoever of spending 6 figures on a car or truck to be Musk's guinea pig and I cannot fathom who would.

With FSD being tested on public roads you're his guinea pig whether you want to or not.

I’ve never seen a car get the same amount of attention at this price point. There is certainly a slice of the population who is excited by the idea of people stopping and taking a picture of their car. The slice is not big, but it’s enough to satisfy Tesla.

I think it's more likely that it's enough to satisfy Musk. Tesla as a company is probably hurt much more by selling the Cybertruck than if they hadn't made it and had focused on a normal car.

The CT's weirdness isn't just the silly exterior. I suspect they don't want to sell a lot of them because each one they sell is a potential liability.

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.

clearly not, if they're shutting down production of the car and cutting 10% of staff

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.

Was thinking the same thing, and it's one thing to be a guinea pig yourself, and another to bring these things into the road and risk everyone's lives too.

Musk also enjoyed success in spacex context, which is similar to high performance race, and not very long term uncontrolled conditions as mainstream cars.

This approach makes sense when designing something novel. You just don't yet know what's necessary and what is excess when dealing with novelty.

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.

Normal car manufacturers look at things like:

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.

Removing the door handle is the most logical decision in all the design.

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.

To be clear: removing the door handle or making one that retracts on the outside makes a ton of sense and I'm in complete support of. It significantly improves aerodynamics. Removing them from the inside: idiotic, I hated it in my old corvette which at least had an obvious physical button to push, I hate it more in Tesla's with their capacitive button that literally nobody can figure out opens the door without instructions.

The only objective claim I've seen about this was a Mercedes engineer saying flush door handles on the EQS only saves 0.0005 Cd and that their inclusion wasn't primarily an aerodynamic decision. I'd be interested to see more thorough analysis if anyone has done it.

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

[1] http://www.enginuitysystems.com/EVCalculator.htm

Like many Tesla design decisions, it makes sense if you live in California. Elsewhere, you have to look up ways[1] to get the doorhandle unstuck when it's frozen over.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Rpns0v1LM

Also you have to look up how to open it (regardless of where you live) if you haven’t encountered one before. Truly, truly bizarre design.

Removing the one on the outside makes no sense whatsoever when it ices over and you can't open the door.

Normal handles can ice over, too, they're just easier to free up from ice. I'm not defending Musk here, but even a broken clock is ~right~ wrong in the same was as others twice a day.

Yes, normal handles are easier to free up from ice, I agree.

You can open the door just fine with the app that acts as your key as well.

Exterior handles provide leverage to free up iced doors. Does the app do that?

>It significantly improves aerodynamics

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.

"Significant" was the wrong term, "measurable" was the correct one. Had I realized people were going to jump on it I would've taken more time to pick a better word. The point was: flush handles are at least partially justified, lack of interior handles are not.

As for studies, yes they have been done, I do not have a subscription to pull the numbers:

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2014-2013

>As for studies, yes they have been done, I do not have a subscription to pull the numbers: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2014-2013

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.

Holy cow, take a deep breath. You’re violating multiple rules of this place with the baseless and unnecessary attacks. I have seen multiple reports of a measurable gain in efficiency. Am I willing to spend 2 hours digging up data? No, because again it was literally not the point of the comment and completely missing the point.

if removing door handles can bring about that much efficiency gain (I doubt unless you show data) then imagine removing side mirrors and replacing them by small camera bumps would bring, that i'd support. door handles thing is just Musk BS. same thing with many inside controls, thats just cost optimization. I'd go to the lengths of saying even the falcon wing doors are a poorly thought out design decision.

Removing side mirrors is in full swing - this is why Teslas have the side repeater cameras that display on the screen whenever the turn signals are used. Audi has had the same thing for years.

The holdup here are government regulations, but the minute those are changed, side mirrors are gone.

Sounds more a problem of NOT following #2. The metal plate is unnecessary, after all.

I suspect that making their cars look stylish is extremely important to every car company's bottom line.

Especially if you make a meme car that many like to see made, but far fewer would actually drive.

You know, if applied within reason all of those make for really great engineering principles. I'm not sure you are fairly interpreting them.

Yeah, all of these sound like goals that engineering should work towards, basically anywhere. You can reword them into modest principles.

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.

Number 4 is grossly misinterpreted by the OP, and you inherited it. It doesn't mean "assemble it faster" at all, it means "make more prototypes".

Let's go a step further:

1. Optimize

You have to have actual strategies to do this, or you reduce meaningful interpretation.

Yeah, it's really a question of timing. If the "parts being added back in" is happening at design time, or early validation testing, then fine.

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.

> 2. Try and delete parts

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

Could have been Earl Muntz, who was in the TV manufacturing business, learned about this from one of Bob Pease’ columns.

https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/industrial/boa...

>And for those further out, where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and not Muntz's.

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.

Every Tesla owner I know is constantly taking their car for maintenance and "small fixes".

Pease the bandgap tzar, one of my professional heroes.

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

Thanks. Pease Porridge is also where I first heard of it.

Fragile device that drives half million miles with no service and has highest safety ratings.

Mission failed successfully.

* with multiple drive unit and battery swaps

This reads like Elon is a real life Chaos Monkey?

The 5 Principles: I think it is worth watching the original Everyday Astronaut (which evannex.com cites). Here is Musk listing and explaining each: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=800

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.

Smells like Tesla is car Boeing.

Not at all. Boeing required their parts manufacturers to design and build parts for a given budget and Boeing just sat there and glued it together. Sometimes they didn't even do that. They just used their position to bully the smaller component companies into skimping on high quality parts while denying they had involvement. Tesla does most stuff in house

What do you mean? The parts are all made in China.

I think he missed #1 on the whole cybertruck design.

Seems like a convenient way to spin any deadly oversight into a result of sticking by their "principles"

Not sure why they’d want to spin it that way

Meh. Like everything else with Tesla this is mostly an exercise in Who Can Best Express the Situation as a Confirmation of Priors.

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.

> Who Can Best Express the Situation as a Confirmation of Priors.

That's what happens when your CEO spends a lot of time publicly engaged in culture war politics.

Yes, it happens, but lots of stupid things happen all the time. It's still for us to let other people's stupidity cloud our judgement. Even if one of those stupid people is the CEO of the company involved...

You're not wrong, but it's rare that people believe their judgement is clouded, in fact, they likely feel their judgement is highly informed by what they view as stupidity or genius.

> In the real world, stuck accelerators are a common

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.

As someone who was a passenger in a vehicle that had a stuck accelerator, going at highway speed, approaching a busy intersection, I suggest that you are dramatically trivializing the problem.

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.

> In this case, the driver overshot neutral and threw the vehicle into reverse.

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.

pretty trivial

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.

I had this exact situation happen a number of years ago when I was driving our '97 Ford Taurus (it had undergone a number of repairs at that point, including an engine overhaul, so it probably wasn't due to an OEM defect). My first reaction was to stomp on the brakes, but it was immediately clear that the engine was winning that battle; so, I quickly shifted into neutral and pulled into the turning lane. My wife was in the car with me and remarked that she didn't think she would have known what to do, especially to react that quickly.

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.

> then hold down the power button

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...

There is no power button, but you can probably shift into neutral

It isn’t ever trivial for two simple reasons:

- 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.

Uh, the problem with stuck accelerators isn't that you can't get the car to slow down. I'm sure that's possible in the Tesla too.

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).

Unfortunately, this is true. By the time the average person debugs why the car is rushing full speed ahead, it's too late. Hopefully the brakes are strong enough to stop the engine torque, though.

> This is true on your car with a physical transmission as well.

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.

I meant what I said. The entire point of my comment is that it's the human reaction time that's gonna be the limiting factor.

Apologies, although in this case you are wrong. Human reaction time to disengage the engine in a 3-pedal car is split-second.

Driving a death trap shitbox isn’t a flex you think it is

> almost identical issue in 2009?

Or Audi in 1984?

>Which of those principles did Toyota violate when they had an almost identical issue in 2009?

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.

That was one case that didn't find evidence for fault. The ability to stick a Toyota accelerator with the floor mats due to design issues was very well documented, all over youtube, and the recall was very real.

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.

You should look up more on this time.

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).

Again, though, the evidence that you could get a Toyota accelerator to stick was clear and obvious and available via copious video on the internet. That part wasn't made up.

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.

After watching the video, it looks like a very serious design or QC issue, for a company widely known for QC issues.

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.

I may not be part of the collective here, but I 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.

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.

You're demonstrating the problem with speaking overly generally.

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.

You're absolutely right, it is unacceptable for any car to unintentionally accelerate. But one of these issues being "our cheap floor mats move" when compared to "our $100,000 truck's fake pedal covers are made so cheaply that they break" showcases this disparity a helluva lot more.

It's certainly more embarrassing for the $100k car than for the $30k car, but neither is "within the realm of acceptable".

True, I misspoke regarding "within the realm of acceptable". That's on me

I have a hellcat redeye, approximately one of your $100k cars. I've thoroughly enjoyed the car in the nearly 2 years I've owned it. But, I'm barely over 6,000 miles, and I've killed 2 batteries and just had the starter replaced and a loose ground (fixed/replaced under warranty). The loose ground may not have been a factory defect: I had to have the wiring harness replaced after some rodents chewed through some of the wiring...

Dodge probably also isn't a paragon of quality.

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.

BMW has recently had a lot of issues over years with some PCV valve setups.

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.

A valve for emissions is a fuck up, but not kind of fuck that that's the poorly made fake metal accelerator covers in a $100,000+ car can fall off and unintentionally accelerate the vehicle (which can go 0-60 in 3.9s) to a top speed on 112MPH, that's also made out of stainless steel that will destroy anything it hits, including you.

I have higher expectations for my poorly made death machines.

I think there's a floor for what should be acceptable at any price point. Rapid and unintended acceleration is below said floor.

why does the truck not just use the same accelerator as the (proven) car?

Agile car. The accelerator was made in a different sprint.

> Like everything else with Tesla this is mostly an exercise in Who Can Best Express the Situation as a Confirmation of Priors.

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.

I think most rational people see him as a grown up bratty rich kid. Except now he has the power to control the outcome of wars. So now cartoon villain isn’t too far off.

He's just a dude. He does some smart things, he does some stupid things. He's nowhere near a cartoon villain.

2. seems literal, but I've heard him use it more generally as a statement toward leaning out a delivery process. Don't add complexity unless the complexity is worth the dysfunction it addresses.

Except that reasoning also "explains" non-events such as the halting of the Tesla S, 3, X, and Y models.

While these principles are interesting, there's no need to add “Musk” as if you were quoting the scriptures. Plus they aren't particularly original as half of them are basically the tenets of “Toyotism”, which is the mainstream way of running car manufacturing since the eighties.

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