Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the Cybertruck's unique design means the company faces immense challenges in scaling production.
Elon Musk says 'we dug our own grave' with the Cybertruck as he warns Tesla faces enormous production challenges::Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the Cybertruck's unique design means the company faces immense challenges in scaling production.
He's very likely the one who pushed the engineers to try to make it work in the first place. They probably tried to warn him of the challenges it was going to face at every step, and he just used the power of arrogance, bullying, & positive-thinking to ignore it and just go full steam ahead with it. He would've just fired anybody that directly challenged him on it and told him what an idiot he is.
That's weird, I could have sworn he said that they nearly had all the issues sorted out and that it was coming next month.. Trying to remember when he said that.. 2021?
"When you've got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you're trying to solve at scale," he added.
does it have new technology? i thought it was just like, shockingly ugly?
48v power electronics instead of 12v, which is fairly new to everyone and the supply chain isn't as robust as the 12v one, but long term it's good for industry. (Edit I've heard talk of how they connect everything is going to be very different too, but nothing I've seen confirmed)
Folding the stainless steel at scale
9000T press, biggest one made
The wheels that can turn on front and back
New assembly method (excluding stainless steel part)
I'm sure there's more they didn't tell us.
It went from being a weird vehicle (love or hate it) to a new technology platform.
First you have to mass produce a lot of cannon balls, hire people and train them to throw the cannon ball perfectly so the broken window looks perfect.
So that's 0.13mm tolerances to my printed-circuit board. Or 130 microns.
Current leading theory is that Elon Musk is such an ignorant dumbass that he doesn't know the difference between mils and microns, despite running a car company / manufacturing firm. Give that a thought. Even then, 10-mils tolerance is near this PCB design, an object that's only a few inches in size. Cars are much larger and normally should be built to much wider tolerances than a fucking PCB board.
It's almost like Elon Musk is a complete fucking moron and not an Engineer. The wanker has never actually designed a thing in his life. He just tells other people to design something, or buys an existing company, then struts around like he thinks he's the smartest thing around.
If he said <10 mils, I'd might have bought the explanation that Elon actually meant millimetres. Micron is a very specific metric-based unit which to Elon might have been trying to use like a buzzword.
The moral of the story is don't say stupid engineering stuff if you don't want engineers to laugh at you.
I recently listened to a podcast about musk which was more on the anti side. The podcast had some parts about spacex and musks own work ethics, which told more of a story that he actually has some insights and knowledge and was a insane workoholic. Which shifted my perception of him. He isn't dumb, he is a really good conman.
The thermal coefficient of expansion of say... Aluminum is 23.
That means that when a 1 meter piece of Aluminum rises from 20C to 21C, just one degree Celsius, it grows by 23 microns.
Your 3D printer is not a temperature controlled precision instrument. Your tolerances are no where close to 10 microns let alone 1 micron.
There are micron-level precise instruments in the engineering world. They all come with temperature characteristics because thermal expansion is a bitch. 3D printers that literally heat up hundred degrees and cools down regularly literally can't be this precise, the heat alone wrecks your precision.
You'd think the guy claiming to "know more about manufacturing than anyone else on Earth" would have anticipated such issues at the start of the design process.
And GM, the epitome of "slow and bloated legacy dinosaur", who in the time since Tesla announced the cYbErTrUcK, managed to design AND RELEASE a truck before Tesla even had prototypes. At this rate, I think they'll technically have 3 different trucks out before a single cYbErTrUcK is sold.
The automotive giants always could have outpaced Tesla, they just didn’t want to because until it was viable with enough consumer interest (and competition), it was cheaper to only produce fossil fuel vehicles (and lobby against electric vehicles at every turn)
I remember watching this live, happy that my wife chose not to join me once they rolled it out, and ESPECIALLY after the window demo. Ugh. Cringiest night of my life.
Given that I had dumbass coworkers at work who gleefully dropped $500 to "reserve" one of each trim, despite not even being able to even afford the cheapest trim (which will never even come close to existing with the listed price+specs), I'm not betting that it's probably 1/4 of that, and about 1/4 of those will ever actually translate to purchases.
Who could have known that traditional manufacturers who have been building cars for decades have reasons to do it the way they did?
Surely not the man who reinvented the subway (but shitty) reinvented content moderation (but shitty) and reinvented the car (but shitty).
How come "normal" Teslas with traditional coachwork are selling, well not great, but good and every time Musk thinks he's the genius who'll singlehandedly completely reinvent a very competitive product he just creates a worse version?
I cannot believe it, this coming from the man who knows more about production and manufacturing than anyone alive!
For sure the Genius of Musk will find a solution to overcome this.
Like when he demanded 10um tolerance for the assembly of the cybershmuck nobody understood and they said it's impossible. But he realised, he realised early on that the mail will leak and idiots will take it as an argument of quality and performance and be motivated to throw money at him. Conmen need money inflow to keep the scheme going.
Elon Musk said that Tesla "dug its own grave" with the Cybertruck, as he warned that it would take years for the company to ramp up production of the electric pickup.
And special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market to reach volume, to be prosperous," he added.
"When you've got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you're trying to solve at scale," he added.
First announced in 2019, the futuristic pickup truck was expected to ship in 2021, but has experienced several delays as Tesla grappled with the vehicle's unique design and the complexity of producing it at scale.
According to CNBC, Elon Musk sent an email to Tesla employees in August saying that the Cybertruck should be as precisely designed as a Lego brick, with measurements that could not vary by more than 10 microns.
Earlier versions of the pickup seen in the wild have been called out for scratching and finish issues by prospective buyers, as well as being fingerprint magnets because of their stainless steel body.
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warned that it would take years for the company to ramp up production
Still learned no engineering? ;-)
Ok he has been in Germany for only two years now, and he is offering such a bad work environment that people are running out of the doors there as fast as he hires them ...
He actually said it would take around 18 months like any new vehicle platform.
I listened to the earnings call, and one analyst asked why it was going to take 3 years (2023, 2024, 2025) and Elon had to explain how 18 months spans 3 years, it doesn't mean it's 3 years.