Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> Fisker also did not set aside money to cover warranty repairs, according to the employees – marking another departure from a standard industry practice.

Fisker sounds like an amateur operation through and through. On top of the spare parts reserves, one of the things manufacturers often do for a hardware product, especially something as expensive as a car, is find a warranty insurance underwriter. Their underwriter would have easily helped them avoid most of these problems as they've got a lot of experience auditing manufacturing lines and products for serviceability.

> Many were told at the time to tackle the backlog of unprocessed title and registration paperwork, which had left hundreds of customers without permanent license plates.

> The company had already scrambled to perform an internal audit to track down the missing $16 million in customer payments.

Is there a phrase that means the opposite of "attention to detail?" Every little detail is a shitshow

The problem is that "move fast and break things" kind of people are terrible at that kind of work.

I was in car sales and was top 0.1% nationwide at it. Eventually I moved into management. And while sales for the dealership as a whole went up considerably, paperwork became a nightmare. The office lady's were at their breaking point after 6 months and wrote to the owner that in their 30 years of managing the dealership back office, they had never seen such bad paperwork processes.

Sometimes the people good at driving things forward are terrible at cleaning up after themselves.

Peter principle?

In a way, sure. In reality it's just joining of two jobs that shouldn't be joined.

I was great at sales, and became a sales manager thus sales for the whole team went up considerably. I had guys twice my age coming to me thanking me for helping them earn more than they ever had in their sales career.

Why someone thought it made sense to task me with managing the sale of 150 cars a month, helping 10+ salespeople close deals AND random bs dealer paperwork not at all related to sales I will never understand. But that's what the industry does. Usually average sales people are promoted to sales manager, so they don't focus on helping salespeople that much, and instead enjoy the random paperwork associated with the position.

I wasn't willing to hurt sales of the team in order to have time to do paperwork, so I let all the paperwork slip. Other people let the sales slip so paperwork stayed correct.

I think the word you're looking for is negligence. Or maybe if you're being charitable you could say carelessness.

You're assuming they could get someone to underwrite them. The underwriters probably looked at the disaster that was the Karma, correctly concluded the company was a shitshow, and said "nope" or quoted a premium Fisker couldn't afford.

Sounds like Fisker was pinching pennies everywhere they could, so even if they were quoted something they could afford, they probably passed.

Fisker sure fucked the pooch, but even the 'big boys' have royally fucked things up when they really have no excuse given their engineering, design, manufacturing, etc. The Chevy Bolt had tons of problems with its infotainment system, the seats were horrible to sit in, and then the battery defects came to light.

The Ford Mach E is a shitshow in terms of thermal management, overheating at the drop of a hat. The "performance" model is actually slower to accelerate to highway speeds because it overheats faster and throttles back its power.

The BMW i3 was an unreliable lemon that depreciated like a rock once they started coming off lease.

The VW ID3 was full of incredibly shitty UX design decisions and an infotainment system that was so slow it was almost useless - and the system was how you controlled almost everything in the car.

Read forums from when these models came out and you'll often see similar problems to Fisker's. Cars that have a system fail, the dealership struggles to diagnose it because there's poor service training and documentation, and the customer waits for weeks for parts to show up. Software glitches up the ass, etc.

Fisker we can all understand; it's easy to see the problems like terrible leadership and incompetence throughout the org. But at BMW, Ford, GM, VW - it's actually much worse, because on paper they should be the best equipped. They have massive abilities and experience in terms of research, development, design, manufacturing, parts distribution, service, etc - not to mention very deep pockets.

There's really no excuse for the foibles these companies have had, because aside from the drivetrain, everything else can be the same - and the car is massively simpler to boot, with a lower part and system count. There's no exhaust, no emissions control, no fuel, no oil (well, save gear case/diff oil), no hydraulics, cooling needs are much lower, etc.

I think what it came down to is that early EVs are not profitable, so oddly enough, there was probably the same pressure to cut every cost possible, from staffing to component selection to design. Why else, for example, would the ID3 have an infotainment system with a SoC clearly not capable of handling the software it was tasked to run?

>Why else, for example, would the ID3 have an infotainment system with a SoC clearly not capable of handling the software it was tasked to run?

That definitely wasn't about penny pinching, obviously the increase in quality of a better chip would completely outweigh the costs.

Issues like these exist because of a very large and diffuse organization which develops cars over many years. At some early point in time a chip is choosen (by the time the car is built it is already outpaced by cheaper chips) and resources on that chip are allocated to different development groups, which then have to fight one another and themselves to get their software done within the resources allocated them.

The problem is that the moment any of the initial assumptions about the engineering are violated, the chip becomes insufficient and UX suffers. At that point in time changing the chip would actually delay when the car can be produced, so the internal politics increases to figure out how to make it work.

The ID3 was also especially bad since it was the first car of a new Platform and obviously in the planning of the E/E for that platform the need for processing power for the Infotainment system was severely underestimated. And while that decision certainly concerned money, it definitely wouldn't have been made if the consequences had been visible at that point in time.

> Is there a phrase that means the opposite of "attention to detail?" Every little detail is a shitshow

I've used "fractally fucked" before, which I think is nicely evocative of how something is messed up at every level of detail.

I don't really get the criticism of spare parts availability. Obviously that's incredibly frustrating for people who need service, but it seems unrealistic to expect a vehicle manufacturer who is producing only hundreds of cars per year to keep a surplus of spare parts around for every possible part. Each part they keep in surplus is potentially one less car out the door. It's one of the risks of being an early adopter.

They should be keeping a surplus of components for supply chain disruption reasons, bulk discount reasons, on top of the 100% necessary customer replacement parts reasons.

If the manufacturer doesn’t have spare parts to repair vehicles, customers can trigger state lemon laws. In California that means either refunding the full purchase price or replacing the car entirely.

That’s what the lemon lawsuits mentioned in TFA are about. Without spare parts, entire sales get nullified and the refunded cars can’t be resold as new.

Yeah, in CA at least the post-buyback title has the lemon status on it (can’t be removed), greatly reducing the value.

Because it is under warranty. As in, they are legally required to repair, replace, or, failing that, refund in full if there are any defects. A lack of spare parts to fulfill their legal obligation to provide a functioning product means they must either manufacture new spare parts at spot-price, provide a complete vehicle replacement, or issue a full refund. Each of these is massively more expensive than producing adequate spare parts up-front at bulk pricing.

I'm not arguing that they never manufacture parts for replacement. I'm saying that it's reasonable to expect a longer delay for parts when a company is producing 300 vehicles per year rather than hundreds of thousands. They can still assign parts to be used as replacements as they come off the line based on demand. It's just a slower process than having them waiting in shops or warehouses around the country for quick replacement.

That shouldn’t be the customers expectation - they have paid $40,000 for a car, they should expect it to be fixed as quickly as any other $40,000 car if it breaks.

If anything, as a smaller company you should be able to offer better customer service (‘do things that can’t scale’). I.E. at fiskers scale you could do this with a couple of shelving units and one person looking after the ‘spares’ department who also communicates directly to the customer.

The fact that they aren’t all over this does show either a lack of detail, a lack of cash, a lack of resource, or a combination of all three.

>but it seems unrealistic to expect a vehicle manufacturer who is producing only hundreds of cars per year

Fisker wanted to sell hundreds of thousands of cars.

If you want to sell a car, that is one of the things you, as a manufacturer, just have to do in order to get people to trust you.

A manufacturer who's cars can not be repaired isn't worth anyone's money. Also for every car there are a few specific parts which experience high wear and absolutely should be ordered in quantities to keep up with demand for repairs.

I would argue the warranty is not being honored if the manufacturer who sold it to me has made direct choices that prevent it from being honored.

Keeping spare parts to service cars is a pretty basic and fundamental part of being a car manufacturer.

It's a basic and fundamental part of being an anything manufacturer, unless your product is so disposable they send you a new one in case of failure. Maybe the parent poster thought he would get a new replacement car if the power window switch failed.

> expect a vehicle manufacturer who is producing only hundreds of cars per year to keep a surplus of spare parts around for every possible part

That's why the article calls this "standard industry practice", not sure why you didn't get that.

This sounds crazy to me. I’ve seen products with a first year or more shipping target of far less than 100 work through a comprehensive spares strategy - at multiple companies. It’s entirely manageable.

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