Tesla to recall more than 46,000 Cybertrucks due to exterior panel issue

I still can't believe people continue to pay a premium to a brand that has (one of?) the highest recall rates in the industry.

What I find funny is that, historically, the Tesla fans would laugh at every other car company's recalls, when Tesla only had a relatively small number of cars on the road. Now they recall just like everyone else.

For example, panels can be screwed in, welded, glued, riveted, snugly fitted, attached with some kind of retaining bolt... And so on. When assembling IKEA furniture, someone clearly though some bits require dowels, other screws or nails, other still those weird round spirally things that, when twisted, pull the metal bit in.

I guess car panels obviously (???) need to be removable for repairs, but still. In an alternative universe, I'd love to be an engineer and understand some of those things.

Edit: For non car peeps, Lotus build essentially track day cars with a light chassis and as many parts from popular manufacturers as possible to keep maintenance cheap. They see a lot of abuse.

Tesla is using customer as guinea pigs. They don't care if you die, the paperwork says they are not liable for whatever happens. Rest assured they'll learn from your demise and they'll update their software with another experiment that might be less lethal this time, who knows!

Many modern cars use the body panels as structural members because it is weight efficient, but trucks were probably the last category of automobile to adopt this trend. It is not necessarily bad design to have a separate frame, you just pay a weight penalty. Engineers may choose to do this because they have other design priorities than weight.

Tl;dr: Glue is an okay design choice. Non-structural panels are an okay design choice. The Tesla engineers just didn’t get the details right.

If you look at, say, https://www.paintedcarpanels.co.uk/ford%2Dfocus%2D2008%2D201... - left of photo you can see a "tab" extending from the panel with bolt holes, and top you can see a semi-circular pair of prongs. The panels are bolted on, and the bolts hide inside the engine bay or under other bits of trim.

The Cybertruck deliberately uses flat panels for its "aesthetic", and I believe their material is harder to bend for purposes of making these little fixing points. Combine that with the polygonal structure and there's probably no other way to do it other than welding mounts to the back.

Still a bizarre decision, though: what happens when you need to change a panel? How do you get them unglued only at the right time? How heat-sensitive is it?

This informed the whole design, it would lead to a lightweight, low cost truck that could be delivered with the battery tech available at the time. They highlighted not painting it as a cost saving move at the reveal.

Then they gave up on that idea as unworkable, but kept the look, so it's like designing a bit of furniture around some fancy solid wood steam bending technique then trying to fake it with wood laminate.

It was also delayed so long that other truck manufacturers just used the cheaper batteries available by then to make competitive trucks based don standard truck bodies.

Gluing makes things harder to fix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_EJ3DyiiA&t=1110s

But still it came off a lot easier than I would have expected.

I kind of hate linking to this channel because in some ways I think it's the worst of YouTube.

He does that a lot.

Don’t just listen to the haters, there are a bunch of us that actually enjoy our cybertrucks :)

I suspect it includes all the unsold ones sitting in storage lots, but who knows.

/s