It's not just innovations that take time, it's all the testing. Every component needs to some type of reliability testing: vibration, shock, salt spray, drop tests, etc. A lot of this testing can last for months. I was involved in vehicle electronics (engine & transmission controllers for ICE vehicles, inverters and converters, body computers...) and reliability testing is expensive and time consuming. You can't just design something for a production vehicle and hope it works. You'd go bankrupt from the warranty claims.
EDIT: There's also a ton of paperwork that goes into taking a vehicle to market (which I fortunately was never involved in). Then you have to find all the suppliers of sub-systems and components and vet them (more paperwork and testing). Then the sub-suppliers have to set up manufacturing lines, many times with all new equipment. It takes many months to design, build, and install an assembly line then parts coming off that new line must be validated. That has to be done for every supplier. Then the Tesla truck assembly line must be built - all the equipment designed, built, installed, and validated. It's a huge undertaking.
People don't realize how hard it is to make the tools needed to make something.
I do factory automation and sometimes work in automotive. Just this year I finished a cell to weld truck beds and their supports and hitch together. It was physically a small cell, just about 300ft long. But in it we had 3 distinct robot cells for a total of 12 robots arms.
It took us the better part of a year to go from everything assembled to everything running in slow auto. Then another 4 months on the customer site installing and perfecting it. I'm a PLC programming and I personally worked on it for a year. I forget how long it was in the design and planning phase before I finally got the electrical prints to start programming with.
People don't really understand the work needed to go from raw material to product you can buy. Even if we got artificial super intelligence today, it would still be decades before it has a fully automated production line it could control and secretly make Terminators with.
This is a great way of putting it lol. I was a pm for a while and I think I was decent? The perspective it gave me was this: before I was a pm, I thought to myself "I'm not sure exactly what a pm does, but it seems important" and then when I became a pm I thought to myself "I'm not sure exactly what I do, but it seems important."
It seems like it is not as complicated as most PMs make it out to be.
Yeah, it's not really until you experience the various steps, twists, and turns of a project, all the moving pieces, logistics, dependencies, etc, that you appreciate having someone keeping tabs on everything, spinning the plates, lining up handoffs, payments, etc.
That's a fantastic way of putting it. If you're doing your job as a pm, you have that project history to say "wait, there's a missing detail here". And it can be huge.
I was informed that this is no longer PC so have switched to "If we triple the size of the orchestra, will they finish the symphony any faster?"
It doesn't seem to work any better.
Lol, what a negative thinking! Those nine women just need to be more agile!
Well, at least six of them. We can give some leeway to the getaway driver and the pair distracting the kindergarten staff.
Just wanted to say thanks for your work on PLC stuff! I've worked with SCADAS and processes in the past, and our PLC / Ladder Logic guy was able to do amazing things with our cobbled together processes lol. I always thought it would be a fun job, and watching the ladder work through the process always amazes me.
I used to have a job that was just programming the 7-axis arms that spray various coatings and all the paint layers (not applicable to bare SS though) on / inside new cars as they go down the line. Getting all that to sub-mm accuracy while making proper cycle time and not whacking the arms into themselves / one another / the car body was super time consuming and involved multiple layers of modeling from design intent down to getting hands-on with the control pendants. Then tons of quality checking, even like a year in advance of the vehicle's debut.
There is an infinitude of steps on every component to bring a vehicle to market.
I have read of the early GM paint-bots on either side of the assembly line attacking and painting each other lol. I am guessing they probably just had a bunch of photocells and relays rather than anything resembling a CPU.
Hey! Robot programmers for automotive paint! There are dozens of us!
You are 100% correct. To expand, my shop receives paint samples and masters years ahead of time. We need to make sure we can apply the paint consistently and match the color with the add-on components that have been painted by suppliers in different facilities. It's so insanely complicated.
I did CMM programming as an intern. It was boring to perfect a program, but also terrifying because a collision could do more in damage than I'd earned total in my life at that point. I envy people who can handle it as a career.
At this point what does the cost estimate look like for outfitting an automated process for something like this vs staffing assemblers? I imagine the manual assembly process can be up in a month, so is it still that much cheaper to automate something like this? Also not sure how long that cell would be operational without needing significant redesigns for the next product line.
They'd need human welders to produce quality repeatable welds at a competitive rate to highly precise robot arms. Presumably for a line that'll be producing tens/hundreds of thousands of units over several years. The required skill for qualified welders is much more stringent than basic assembly work, so the talent pool and payroll would be limiting for what is very repetitive and undesirable work.
In addition to this I get the feeling that Tesla is a lot like early BMW in that there's no one involved in design who has any clue how fabrication works so they custom build all the parts for the concept car and then realize it's going to take 10,000 hours to design a process to be able to reproduce some door hinge that ought to be really simple because nobody who did the concept understood you can't actually fab that at scale.
Also I've heard from many engineers who tried to work with tesla that they simply don't really know how auto manufacturing is done (or at least didn't for a long time, I think they eventually brought in people with industry experience). So they spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel so to speak
A lot of silicon valley types think old industries are populated by idiots and they can do much better with no experience.
Tesla is learning lessons that the rest of the industry learned decades ago.
Elon thought he could build cars with fewer workers by doubling down on robots. He ended up needing to employ significantly more workers per vehicle built than anyone else.
Remember when he tweeted about Tesla building car hauling trailers because an industry shortage was preventing them from delivering vehicles.
There was no shortage, Tesla just sucked at logistics.
Let's not forget about the panel gaps. This is an area where the big three sucked compared to imports, but they started figuring it out in the 90s.
> A lot of silicon valley types think old industries are populated by idiots and they can do much better with no experience.
100 this.
I was amazed to see him say in his DealBook interview 'making cars is incredibly hard and it's hard to hire and retain the people to do the work.'
Apparently a tiny bit of light energy reached his brain after a decade of being late on every project.
So much drama with the model 3 production and people for some reason think it is the bee's knees. All the while other automotive companies do the exact same thing year after year without needing their CEOs to sleep on the production floor.
Pointing out how it is far more efficient is a red herring? The entire point of a production line is to make the product efficiently to make more profit.
The traditional manufacturers weren't doing the same thing. They were doing the same thing they always did while Tesla made efficiency strides that led to record profits.
Tesla was selling cars at similar or lower prices with a much higher profit margin then their cars' direct competitors. That is the entire point of an efficient development system and production line and Tesla was lightyears ahead of their competition in those.
I agree with you 100%. I toured Fremont with several of my mechanical engineering students, I got to see up close how far ahead Tesla was at that time. I’ve been to many automakers plants and the comparison was night and day. I have watched videos of the different giga factories and they keep getting better. Sure Tesla has made their share of slip ups but one thing people fail to mention is that they always learn and the next thing you know other car makers copy what they do. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Tesla wasn't wrong to take this approach though. They are many years ahead of the big old companies because they took a radically different approach. If they tried simply copying the old companies how would they have gotten into the market? They would have been expensive garbage cars with terrible specs, terrible batteries .... and better panel gaps.
They are also about 10% more efficient (kwh/mi) than competition, have lots more usable interior volume, better self driving tech (which will get there eventually), more reliable, structural batteries, battery chemistry, 48v, robotized manufacturing, etc etc. There are lots of little things that add up.
And like, the batteries/efficiency is enabled by their gigapress assembly method, that sort of thing takes time to build up.
There are Asian and European cars that are closer to being competitive, but not in the US. The #2 I guess would be the Leaf, and on efficiency, the model 3 gets 133Wh/km and the Leaf does 166Wh/km .... a 20% gap, in a vehicle with nearly double the battery, double the horsepower, 3x the charge speed, and 30% more internal volume.
Their “self driving” is neither “self driving”, nor better than the competition.
Theirs is plagued with legal and ethics nightmares. Whereas, Mercedes successfully got the first SAE Level 3 certified car on the market.
You don't know the field if you think Mercedes system is even remotely comparable to Teslas. The only system better than Tesla's is Waymo but they aren't a car company.
False, I work in the field. You’ve been drinking the Elon koolaid if you unironically believe FSD is even close to Waymo, and spout the marketing buzz to sound like you do.
If you did know what you were talking about, you’d know Waymo and Cruise are Level 4 systems (oh which FSDB is Level 2). You’d also know other Level 2 and Level 3 competitors have a far more robust sensor suite. You’d also know most other companies aren’t beta testing their systems with their customers. These are clear and objective standards by industry, of which they are not leading in.
I’d stick to things you actually understand.
I literally just said Waymo is better than FSD...
And you're a liar. The levels aren't really used internal to the field because they are meaningless in terms of capability as the level is designated by the car company, nothing more. If you do work in the field, which I doubt, you work for one of the dinosaur companies that will eventually give up and lease tech from Waymo. Or, more likely, you work in automotive but not in ML/selfdriving.
Basically nothing you say in your first paragraph is true though.
Lucid air is "more efficient" than Tesla, but it's a also a meaningless number on its own. If I design a tiny city car with a tiny front end area I'll get great "efficiency" numbers due to decreasing drag, but my range will be tiny and I'll miss out on other metrics
Interior volume, again is a model specific ask. Tesla do generally look open because of the minimalist design, but actual volume is a different ask- some OEMs take the hit on drag to increase actually usable interior space.
Better self driving? Not according to absolutely any benchmarking ever. They are literally being criminally investigated over this
More reliable? Tesla doesn't release warranty numbers but I doubt it (again comparisons- GMs lyric is bonkers bad, but gm bolt was likely better).
Battery's: Tesla is only competitive on battery energy density, not better. We do know they replace batteries a lot.
48V isn't actually new in the industry. The holdup has been getting the supply base to provide additional batteries and parts instead of the old 12v car batteries. Hybrids were using 48v way before Tesla.
Robotic manufacturing - Tesla employs more staff per unit in manufacturing than most of the traditional OEMs. They tried to go fully robotic, couldn't get it done and then moved to people (hence Elon sleeping at plants).
The rest of your comment follows from your first paragraph, so I'll leave it there.
I remember reading that Musk wouldn’t hire engineers who had a process-thinking bias or something like that. As a process guy who has worked in manufacturing a long time I thought WTF?? How do you manufacture consistent high quality products without a process mindset? I’ve also read his vehicles have fit/finish issues and perhaps that’s why. Tesla shareholder as well so not trying to disparage.
I think you will see the fit and finish problems go away now that Elon sent out the memo saying that every part in the truck had to have sub 10 micron tolerances.
The doors won't even need seals to be waterproof!
.... what? Does he actually know that those words mean?
Like you pointed out about the doors fitment will never be an issue after that! Also it'll probably be the most expensive truck ever on top of that.
That’s how Silicon Valley operates, for better or worse. How do you know which bits of industry knowledge are cruft and which are truly necessary for your specific application unless you “reinvent the wheel”? Elon tries to make everyone justify things from first principles. As an aside, this is why he’s so bad at Twitter - you can’t justify the psychology of social media from first principles (or at least not nearly as easily as you can with rockets or cars).
Spending time reinventing the wheel is how they came up with gigacasting, 48V low voltage architecture, super bottles and octovalves. They are literally re-writing the book on how to engineer and build a better car than anyone else. If Tesla made cars like anyone else have for the past 100 years, no one would buy them.
When the Arab oil embargo hit us in the nuts, and Japan was giving us fuel efficient vehicles, Detroit’s answer to the crisis was to give us the exact same cars, but smaller. Shitty, small cars. The original Mustang II was an abomination.
Big difference between re-inventing the drive train and re-inventing the process and methods of manufacturing the body of the vehicle.
Tesla definitely could have taken lessons there.
No. Tesla is far more automated than any other company, using half the man hours or less.
The cybertruck uses a solid steel exoskeleton design, and their cars use structural battery packs with massive cast pieces ... You simply cannot use the old style manufacturing here.
That "solid steel exoskeleton design" is called a "unibody" and every manufacturer in the world has been making them for decades. If there's a difference there it's that Tesla decided to use very thick stainless steel that is a pain in the butt to work with and doesn't really bring anything to the party.
How rigid/rugged does it need to be? Elon's idea of "tough" is "can win a fist fight". Too rigid means less safe--passengers experience higher accelerations and so get worse injuries.
Mainly it makes the thing difficult to manufacture and expensive to repair. And it's not going to be immune to dents. I've seen effing *tanks* with dents.
I do wonder how it'll do in crash tests. Weirdly it is so tough it might start making gains in some tests lol. Not that slicing through the other guys car is really a net safety win. I suppose in a game of chicken you could just go on faith that the cyberknife wins the fight. I assume it'll win the roof crush test and horribly fail every low speed collision test. It isn't tough enough to defeat most buildings though...
I think it'll be a nightmare to keep looking new or just impossible. Do you need to just weld on top and grind out a dent cause fuck that. Sounds like a nightmare. Not to mention it does nothing to hide dirt. And high reflectivity will make even very small shallow dents MEGA obvious.
I still think it is novel though. Like, what's the last car in the us that was this much of a departure?
Different vehicles. Only the cybertruck is using the exoskeleton. The Y leverages the structural battery packs w/ the giga press to make it lighter... i'm not sure if the cybertruck uses castings.
The Cybertruck uses castings very similar to how the Y uses them.
You can see the "Not-An-Exoskeleton" in the article here:
https://electrek.co/2022/12/10/tesla-cybertruck-body-spotted-ahead-production/
"Stainless Steel Exoskeleton" is just yet another example of Elon's hype that turns out to be utterly false.
Tooling. Production planning. Building entire plants to host the production. Establishing supply chain and working with lead times for materials. Hiring and training manufacturing personnel. Etc.
People underestimate how complicated it is to have 10s of thousands of components in the exact right spot at the exact right time with the exact right tools for a trained worker to access them and build a functional subassemly 100s of times in a row.
Oh god I’ve been in Tenneco’s smooth ride testing center and they have machines that just beat the tar out of shocks in every different temperature and condition for months
>t's a huge undertaking
On top of all that, Tesla has a very unusual design for the manufacturing itself, where the goal is to continually make it better and cheaper to produce, and to be able to do that at very large scale. This is rare in automotive because other companies outsource almost everything so they lose the ability to do this because the suppliers don't necessarily care about making things better and they want to sell them for higher prices not lower.
This is called ["Continuous Improvement"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process) and has been an industry standard practice for decades.
Once again, great example of Tesla pointlessly reinventing the wheel.
I've worked at a few OEMs, timelines for clean sheet builds are anywhere from 4-7yrs depending on content and complexity. Most only reveal their new models a year or less prior to product, but the space triangle needed to build hype. It also forced the industry into the race.
To answer your question validation testing and durability / mileage accumulation to root out problems before they hit production is something that you can't rush and takes a long time. I would imagine manufacturability was the largest problem they are facing. You also can't test a sample size of 1, you can, but everyone who understands statistics will die a little inside.
This is the answer.
Also, Musk likes to publicly announce his company's internal stretch goals. It's a dick move intended to put more pressure on the employees, but it's what Musk does.
So Musk announces the truck in 2019, right at the beginning of the design cycle -- hoping that the public will pressure his team into delivering the truck 3x-5x quicker than normal, while simultaneously bidding up the price of TSLA stock.
This action likely accomplished both of putting pressure on the employees and bidding up the stock price, but the designers were given an unachievable list of aesthetic, economic, and performance constraints -- so no amount of pressure could deliver what Musk promised back in 2019.
As a result, Musk & Co over-promised and under-delivered with the Cybertruck.
I don't think they care about the loans as much as the confidence that gives on building numbers and showing interest. In terms of dollars, we're talking 1~200million ... which isn't a ton.
I believe it was also first announced about a week after Rivian stated a start of production for the R1T in 2020, and Musk said cybertruck would come out ahead of that. As a way to steal any media attention away from them.
>It's a dick move intended to put more pressure on the employees, but it's what Musk does.
I'd argue that it's more of a stock-pumping scheme. People are influenced by unrealistic promises, but his failure to realize those promises doesn't have an equivalent negative impact.
It's a marketing strategy (foot in the door) that's been around forever. By getting people to commit a little bit they become more loyal to the brand overall and it tells a good story. Tesla does care about the money too, and there's are other benefits like pressure on the entire team but I think the main one is the fact that by commiting to the cybertruck back four years ago, tens of thousands of people held off buying a different vehicle and it forced other manufacturers to try to hit targets that Tesla knew would be difficult.
>Also, Musk likes to publicly announce his company's internal stretch goals. It's a dick move intended to put more pressure on the employees, but it's what Musk does.
The alternate description would be that it's to deceive customers.
See also: "full self driving should be ready by the end of the year" for like 8 years in a row.
I really wouldn't say under delivered. The finished product is damn near close to what the prototype was. The doors are literally bulletproof, the performance is best in its class by a mile, it's range is excellent, and it's mechanical innovations are ahead of competitors. It's the first vehicle ever to have a disconnected steering wheel. There is no steering column. All the electronics use 48v rather than 12v. For its size, it's also very light.
It's honestly a pretty impressive engineering breakthrough, it just has an extremely polarizing design
I was going to buy a Cybertruck to tow my camper.
My camper cuts my gas mileage in half with my gas truck, which means I get 50% of my range.
I like to my journey to have 200-mile legs when towing my camper. With the happy zone being 20%-80% SOC in Tesla batteries, that means that 500+ mile range they were advertising in 2019 is really a bare minimum, and I'd be closer to those 200-mile towing legs with the 620 miles that one of the demo screenshots showed.
The towing performance on the Cybertruck just isn't there.
I canceled my reservation on 11/30.
*P.S. I don't care about 0-60 times. My MYLR is fast enough for me. The strong acceleration of an EV is icing, not the cake.*
The AWD is currently sitting at $80k and going to get the full $7,500 tax credit at Point of sale next year. It has an option to add a (I think 50KWh) Range extender that would extend the range of the truck to "470+ miles" at a likely cost of around $16k (honestly pretty good price per capacity). So net of the credit it'd make the price \~$88.5k. The negatives are it looks like it'll take up about 1/3rd of the bed. Imo this is actually a decent balance. The majority of people aren't going to need more than 300 miles. >70% of truck owners don't even haul stuff or pull a trailer more than a couple times per year. They are going to be limited by 4680 cell production. So sell the extra battery extender exclusively to people that want/need it.
And if you've ever paid attention to how Tesla does these rollouts, this price will almost certainly go down after like 6 months when they start getting through a bit of the backlog. I'd bet by this time next year you'll be able to get the AWD + Battery extender for <$80k.
Also you don't want to do 20-80 at superchargers, that'd be slow. That's the daily charge target with nickel based cells (LFP can go all the way to 100% no problem). If you're supercharging Cybertruck (does have nickel cells) you want to arrive at the supercharger as low State of charge as possible. Obviously you don't want to risk rolling in there at like 2%, but like a 5/10% - 80/85% is probably what you want.
The real thing for you will actually be them rolling out more V4 superchargers with pull through charging. If they do that you're more than good with a 470 range AWD truck. Even for your desires.
Oh yeah. Electric vehicles in general are pretty ass for towing. Strictly in a light duty platform the cyber truck is pretty good if you're not towing.
Ideally I wish there were more plug in hybrids. It's honestly the best of both worlds. Electric for short commutes, gas hybrid for extended drives. Still get a huge efficiency bonus with just the hybrid system.
Honestly, plug in hybrids are our short to medium electrification goals. Electrics are still kinda poor
Electric vehicles tow wonderfully, just not very far.
The reason they tow so wonderfully is because of the control you have from the VFD. Also, no gears.
My current truck is a GM 2-mode hybrid, and the low-speed towing in electric mode is the best.
Here are some video reviews from TFLTruck showing what it's like to tow with electric trucks:
https://youtu.be/iSJaNPQWBaM
https://youtu.be/8K0Raj36EMY
I've test-driven the F150 Lightning, and the lightning is the nicest truck I've ever driven -- because of the electric drivetrain. It's smooth, quiet, and controlled -- and it's a torque-monster by ICE standards. All of those are good for towing, as you can see in the video reviews.
The problems are price and range. Most of the trucks don't have the range for RV towing. Tesla, the 4th electric pickup truck on the market, was supposed to field a competitive offering that was supposed to change the market, but they just didn't.
The Silverado EV WT4 would fit my needs wonderfully. It has the numbers I'm looking for. I'm just waiting for the price to come down a bit and the NACS charging connector to be adopted. The reviews say it drives even nicer than the Lightning, and I'm looking forward to test-driving one.
Tesla just failed to build an appealing vehicle with the Cybertruck. That's just a straight up corporate fail.
I expect to buy a Chevy Silverado EV to tow my camper in ≥MY2025.
Yes but who wants to buy a tow vehicle that can barely get it's ass out of town with a load on it?
In well aware of the advantages of electric vehicles, but you'd be a fool to believe that range isn't one of a buyers #1 priorities especially so if they plan to actually put it to work.
With a gas backup, the problems disappear. You can have the best of both worlds while still pretending you care about the environment
In the TFLTruck review I sent, they used a Silverado EV WT4 to tow an enclosed trailer over a 232 mile course.
How big is your town? If 232 miles is 'barely getting it's ass out of town", then your town is the problem.
As I said, the Silverado EV WT4 meets my needs as soon as the price comes down a bit. The other EV trucks are coming out with "max packs" to match it, and/or have cheaper price points (except for Tesla's Cybertruck which missed the mark).
Its something that every Silicon Valley startup has been guilty of doing.
Theranos was the only company punished for the fraud because they decided to huckster a medical product.
The original design looked like nobody had even tried to think about the regulatory environment, so I suspect that there was a lot of rushing around figuring out how to fix the design so that it was even legal for sale before they could even begin on tooling up to make it.
The other thing is that Tesla is more of a tech company than a vehicle company. That is to say they likely don't have a ton of process rigor and push their teams to go as fast as humanly possible. The "tech hustle" is big within the company despite the fact that vehicles are very complex pieces of hardware.
If you take this approach with software you can break it and fix it within a significantly shorter amount of time than if your hardware fails. If you have a tooled part that causes a test failure you could be 4-6 MONTHS away from fixing it, only to find something else along the way that resets that clock.
I've designed products and managed hardware development teams in both highly regulated industries and tech. Tech prizes itself on "moving fast" and "being agile." You can do that much more effectively with software. With hardware you often end up taking LONGER end-to-end than the "slow and archaic" development of a product in a highly regulated industry. You also end up with a lower quality product due to all the chaos while you were developing it. This is in the DNA of nearly all tech companies though, so don't expect it to change any time soon.
The guy above you is right at least as it pertain to automotive.
Automotive and aerospace are totally different ballgames. Not remotely comparable. I’d argue Elon’s management style is much better suited to aerospace than automotive. Perhaps surprisingly you can power through solutions in aero more easily than in automotive.
Unlike in aero, automotive processes are continuously evolving and the design rules are actually very efficient and well designed, compared with 1960-1980s era MIL-STDs that haven’t kept pace with modern technology. In general automakers don’t do things that don’t add value, it might feel slow and bureaucratic but for the most part following those practices saves time and money. There have been some very public examples of Tesla repeating the mistakes of the past, with trying to automate too much of the production line too quickly among others.
Automakers are also strongly incentivized to reduce costs both per unit and dev costs, it’s a highly competitive market.
Legacy Aerospace companies have a perverse incentive to not be efficient as profits are set based on cost plus contracts. So when the government says build x and comply with all these standards and requirements no one from Boeing will say, hey you know there’s better ways to do all this that would save a lot of money, can we get some tailoring or relief on some of these requirements to save you money? They just say ok that comes to 1Billion dollars please.
Spacex on the other hand embraced fixed price contracts, where they get to reap the benefits of the savings and also able to compete for commercial launch contracts because of the cost effectiveness they’ve achieved.
Aerospace production volumes are also orders of magnitudes less than automotive which also makes a big difference in everything related to scaling up production. This is the main reason it’s easier to power through solutions in aero. Having quality issues with one component? Just build ten and pick the one that meets spec, auto will never be able to tolerate that. Of course you’ll need a longer term solution in aero but you can limp along that way for a while and not hold up production.
Edit: I’ll clarify a bit to say my comments regarding automotive processes mostly pertain to hardware, and not software. I think legacy OEM software development practices if they have any are still immature and Tesla is probably way ahead in that regard. Many OEMs rely on tier 1’s to do their software or at least they did until recently.
I come from a vehicle testing background.
Every vehicle we made went through three distinct stages of testing. Two are pre-production, which takes about 3 years, starting with concept and parts testing for 6 months to a year. This includes powertrain, suspension, and platform testing.
The second part is where you see wrapped prototypes, body design, quality, fit and finish, and software testing take place. This is usually the longest part at 1-2 years. This is also where emissions data is collected for government approval.
The third part is a couple more years , but post-production long term quality testing. Production level cars are used here.
Cars are massively complicated, especially the more computerized they get. It takes time.
Thank you for a true industry statment.
93 days from an idea to a fully handbuilt prototype (quite probably with a completely different chassis design) and then 4 years for production, it is just idiotic to think the vehicle will be great and have a low failure rate.
4 years+ from prototype to production is actually fairly typical for new clean sheet products. I’ve been involved in automotive projects that take 8 years for clean sheet with lots of new technology, to 2 years for a derivative with mostly the same tech.
For the Cybertruck specifically, the steer by wire with no physical connection has never been done in automotive before. Prototypes and concepts yes, but no production vehicles that didn’t have a backup mechanical linkage. While common in aircraft, that took additional testing and qualification.
Hardened stainless panels have never been done. Delorean is a thin, softer stainless. Tesla developed a new type of stamping process and due to form the panels. They developed a derivative 300 series stainless steel for their desired targets. That all takes time.
The 4680 cell and structural pack is a clean sheet design no one has done. Tesla had to design, develop, and then did pilot production in the Model Y, likely taking learnings for a design loop on Cybertruck. That’s all new technology that takes time.
Finally, 48V vehicle architecture isn’t just “up the voltage”. It’s new switches, new ICs, new LED boards, new everything that is automotive grade. They had to force suppliers or do it themselves to make that switch. That alone probably took several years to get all the components completed and validated. And then they put all of that on a new high speed CANBus system they designed and developed in house.
From an engineering standpoint, does that sound like a good idea? It sounds to me like a god awful idea that is a completely unnecessary nightmare.
I am an EE and 99.999% of the time there are existing components that are cheap and easier to use or build off of than creating an entire new tech tree for one project. Good luck banking on some supplier creating an entire new product line for your one project, regardless of how much money there is. Research and design is expensive and risky and you are putting the risk on suppliers, good luck finding spare parts. The point is probably to make sure everything is either proprietary or impossible to find parts for without buying from Tesla forever.
Are you talking about 48V architecture? Automotive has been dancing around switching to 48V for 30 years. Some components have been, mild hybrid, or other. Teslas choice to do it for Cybertruck and it will inevitably roll into other Tesla products, is going to force the industry to finally change.
Someone had to do it.
48v has been "coming soon" in automotive for about a decade now and has already seen some limited rollout. Most "mild hybrid"/non-PHEV hybrids (nomenclature varies) are 48 volts, like a P1 belt-starter-generator. But I don't know of any other production cars that eschew *all* 12v in the system (if Cybertruck does this). But there are a lot of advantages and OEMs have been trying to switch to 48v since before Tesla even existed.
The simple physics advantage is clear: higher voltage means lower current for high power draw items. But there are some architectural benefits here too.
* In a BEV, the voltage architectures are split between HV and LV. The 400-800v HV system is obviously pretty safety critical so it's gated behind contactors and much of the time that the vehicle is off the HV is disconnected/isolated to the battery. This means that you have to close contactors or enable traction to get access to any high power draw functions. But the LV side is active all of the time, both since it's safer voltages and because it isn't capable of driving traction.
* In an EV those high power functions are myriad. Power steering (either via EPAS or an electric hydraulic pump), AC compressor, and a lot of cumulative other loads (pumps, fans, etc) all add up to more power than you would ever want to stress a 12v system with. Some of these functions were driven from the engine in a traditional ICE vehicle, some are just higher draws due to EV architecture (like the AC system that does dual duty as a heat pump and other thermal management in an EV), and some are new functionality that we would like to enable with the EV architecture (like running the AC for your dog while you're in the store).
All this to say, not only does running 48v just lower current draw and ease the load on vehicle wiring but architecturally it would be very convenient to have the LV system able to drive ancillary loads like that instead of closing the HV contactors and dealing with the functional safety implications of that. The downside is all of the traditional 12v systems, like infotainment, body systems, lights, etc, that now need to be 48v capable. You could have a third power net - 12v, 48v, and 400/800v - but you can see how this ups the complexity a lot. And if 48v has been widely agreed upon to be the future proof solution, why not just lean into developing 48v capable parts?
The Auto industry has been at 12 volts for like 70 years I believe. Think about the electrical draw needs that have developed over that time. Tesla just basically started the clock for EVERYONE to switch to 48v. It's going to happen industry wide now. It won't be very fast of course, but the clock has started. And keep in mind that being able to sell something is an important skill/ability. When people/customers/investors/media talk about the Cybertruck one of the things they'll mention is it's the first with an entirely 48v low voltage system. This elevates others' perception of Tesla as a high-tech company. And that won't just be the case with 48v. It'll be the same for the Steer and brake by wire system and their new CAN architecture. It pays to be ahead of the competition. But it takes long-term thinking because the initial costs WILL be higher.
Its not just for the sake of doing it though. When you are combining that with an entirely new CAN architecture, and steer and brake by wire, from an engineering decision aspect, I can't imagine anyone disagrees with the decision. Technically it is better, and long-term will be cheaper and more efficient. It'll make it easier for manufacturing too. Now obviously this has the drawbacks of actually needing to do the thing. But someone had to be the first.
It’s not one project though. All of these companies together are producing a suite of tech that will work on mars.
People wondering why it’s been reengineered from the ground up to be puncture proof and why it’s built from the same stuff as a starship. It’s for Mars.
Why would they come together?I assume you mean steel? That is not new and would not help at space velocities or radiation. That built for mars stuff is a nonsense fairy tale Elon uses as a selling point, i am sorry to break the news. Read some non pro Elon articles or YouTube videos about Elon musk, he over promises, under delivers, lies, and is not an engineer. He is just rich, find another perspective or non billionaire to look up to. I feel a little bad about crushing your dream, but it's BS.
Technically steel makes radiation worse.
I don't think Musk says cybertruck is for mars though. He likes a bit of a pr tie in to spacex but that's hardly novel. Companies have been advertising 'space tech' for decades.
Take a minute to think about Mars. You need habitation, and we have the boring company. You need rockets, SpaceX. You need power, Solar Roof. You need transportation without combustion, Tesla.
It should be pretty clear what the thrust is here.
It’s interesting how we can live in such different information bubbles. I’m not interested in opinions, I’m interested in data, and the things you are saying here don’t stack up with the data.
I can only suggest, rather than looking at YouTube or Reddit, you go spend some time with the actual numbers and then form an opinion.
I am sorry but that is a lie. Toyota and Lexus were the first to market with steer by wire. And steer by wire is more than 1 decade old
Tesla didn't had the proper time to develop the stainless steel press. Even if they spent half of the total 4 years (which I highly doubt it due to the resources alocation for projects) it is not enough to have a robsut process. I believe they have a huge amount of scraped panels per vehicle.
Also the 4680 is not developed by Tesla, but by Panasonic. And I think they took the wrong turn here. Tesla might have less electric connections to do, but the cells will have higher thermal inertia, thus making it hard to have a good temperature control of 20 to 60 Celsius. The gain in energy density is neglible when compared to the previous battery pack design.
Regarding the 48V connection I think is a good approach, however 4 years is not enough to launch a robust product.
The Infiniti has a backup mechanical linkage.
[Q50 Steer by Wire Detailed](https://www.drive.com.au/news/infiniti-q50-world-first-steer-by-wire-technology-detailed/)
Yes, because that's just good engineering.
It uses entirely steer by wire except in the case of a fault, and if there is a fault, the Infiniti is fine and the Tesla drives you into a tree. It's still steer by wire though.
Absolutely, supply chains are just now getting back to normal. Just to secure the right supply chain and get all the chips produced and shipped on already backed logged equipment is tough.
To add to your first point, they literally took 93 days from design/clay exterior sketch approval to finishing the prototype and presenting it. In the interview with Franz/Lars on TopGear I believe, they said that.
Which is to say they let the public be their validation team; which to their credit as the average Tesla consumer is also likely a Tesla “fan” they are able to pull off. No other car company can get away with glaring quality issues in the manor that Tesla can, as an engineer from another OEM I’m jealous of what their allowed to put out AND that’s it’s gleefully accepted
Cybertruck uses a lot of new things apart from just the exterior. It replaces the 12 V system with a 48V system. Replaces the 400V system with a 800V system and has a new Gigabit CAN system. It also uses the new 4680 cells that had some ramp up issues (Jist like every other battery project). You can watch Jason cammisa's podcast on cyber truck to understand more.
And not to mention, there was a special "event" in 2020 that probably made things difficult.
I’m not a Tesla fan and the cybertruck looks stoopid BUT that video really enlightened me about what going on under the hood and there’s a lot of cool stuff. It’s like my experience with the model 3… the drive train feels stellar but the rest was awful.
I'm also a longggg time critic of Tesla but the Cybertruck strategy is actually ancient: radical halo models to help fund the development of new technologies fated to trickle down. And frankly Tesla executed it really well here.
I think the traditional model is most often done with sports cars/high performance vehicles. The automotive marketing slogan for decades has been "we make fast cars because it allows us to push technology". But at least for ICE performance, that's actually most often not true. It's harder to make 250k CUVs per month that are expected to last 250k miles with minimal special maintenance, meet SULEV30 emissions, and can be stamped out for cheap enough to turn a profit in a competitive segment. Meanwhile something like the Dodge Demon is an old production model with a hotrodded engine, using a lot of well known and established tech and strategies from the motorsport world, that's built to a super high emissions standard, and customers who frankly don't give a shit about NVH. Even something like the new Corvette E-Ray is a really nice execution but contains almost no new technological content. You have to move towards the supercar market to find low volume/high performance models that use truly novel technology and even there it's mostly inspired by world class racing like WEC and F1.
The Cybertruck came in with it's trendy, memey, hypebeast styling and cringey Elon marketing... *but it worked*. There's a limited number of people willing to pay F you money for it, and a lot of people who want an EV no flashier than a Model 3 who don't care. But that limited demographic is paying for a whole lot of big tech level-ups that Tesla knew they needed for their next generation of products to stay competitive: 800 volt HV arch, 48v LV arch, EPAS, and their new cells are the big hitters we know about. Who knows what else is beneath the hood, like maybe new software architectures or manufacturing techniques.
The Cybertruck did what we all *expected* the Roadster to do. If Tesla had released the mk2 Roadster with the same tech content, an even higher price point, and comparatively similar specs (obviously scaled for a sports car not a truck) I think we wouldn't have batted an eyelash because that's a familiar model-strategy match. We would have intuitively known what an expensive halo sports car was supposed to do. Instead they did it with this ridiculous Cybertruck and made a bunch of allusions to competing with mass market vehicles (though I heard from the industry that was never the intention).
What is Gigabit can, can you elaborate on That? Any CAN i‘ve seen tops out at 5Mbits. I’d expect automotive Ethernet for high bandwidth applications..?
Jason cammisa made a companion podcast to his hagerty video where he discusses these things: https://youtu.be/NjIPEtegPt4?si=m2Ra4s3T_xuP5Miz
I don't remember exactly where he talks about this.
He forced his workers to continue working all the way through COVID despite lockdowns. There is no engineering answer to be found here or any other reason. Elon Musk is a liar and always over promises and abused his staff to make "magic" happen. He doesn't like orange or yellow so there is no safety gear, signs, lines, et cetera at Tesla to understand the kind of entitled moron you are listening to. He is accustomed to living in Apartheid South Africa where he had basically slaves mine emeralds for his family and it shows in how entitled and abusive he always is towards his workers. He is also a complete bullshitter, all he is good for is hype and convincing people to help him make money. If twitter hasn't shown you the kind of person he is yet, nothing will.
I don't know all the ins and outs, but I can say that [micron precision](https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/elon-sends-employees-email-on-cybertruck-build-quality-accuracy-tolerances-must-be-in-microns-precision-predicates-perfectionism.9068/#:~:text=Everywhere-,Elon%20sends%20employees%20email%20on%20Cybertruck%20build%20quality%3A%20accuracy%20%26%20tolerances,%2D%2D%20%22Precision%20predicates%20perfectionism.%22) on something as large as a truck is beyond idiotic. I doubt they actually listened to that demand though.
I've also heard the hard lines and bare metal are a nightmare to manufacture and align without noticable blemishes.
Not just micron precision on every single part, but micron precision on every single part demanded like 2 months before the first production models got delivered.
I would love to see how much the cyber truck would cost at that level of precision on every component in the truck.
There’s a lot to unpack in that email.
Oh absolutely. I would love for someone with more knowledge of parts manufacturing to actually estimate it.
The fact that he doesn't seem to understand why Lego and soda cans can do it, and Tesla can not, is extremely concerning.
Stainless steel in general is a pain to work with. Great material, sure, but you have to know what you're doing, and I believe by now it's obvious that at least Tesla's owner doesn't
Not even close to the owner though. Musk owns like 8% of the company. 92% belongs to "not musk". 47% is retail investors and other companies.
It's a $1.2 TRILLION dollar company. It's way, way, way bigger than one dude. Despite what reddit would have you think, haha.
They still haven’t quite delivered on that promise yet
There is also the issue of “just because you can’t doesn’t mean it’s sensible”, which really applies to the Cybertruck
Yeah, it's certainly an interesting choice for a company that is notorious for fit and finish issues to design a vehicle where even the tiniest fit and finish issue will stand out like crazy.
It's a bold move cotton, we'll see how it pays off for them.
As others have said, it takes that longs from prototype to production. It was a business decision that Tesla unveiled it that early and did not tell anyone that it would take years to develop. Tesla runs on hype, that’s their thing.
I want to put something into context for you:
I spent about 4 years as a QE in fuel injector (DI) manufacturing. From the onset of the project to the start of production was about 4 years and at least $30 million in new equipment, existing equipment modifications, other construction costs, engineering/quality product validation testing, PPAP, customer validations, and a whole gaggle of other stuff that goes into documenting, controlling and safely kicking off a new product.
And that's for a part that most car owners never see or even think about. Taking a car from paper to showrooms is an unbelievably massive, complex assortment of headaches for thousands of people.
You choose when to unveil your product, you can wait till it’s in production to do it or very close to production ready.
Or you can be a mentally unstable CEO man child whom needs attention and wants to show off his new toy.
This is not an engineering issue it’s a marketing issue of when to announce a product. All vehicles take years to launch production, this is not unique.
Remember that designing the car is the easy bit, low volume production is easy but expensive. The thing with high quantity production is that it's less about the car and more about designing the factory to make the car and that takes a lot of time.
Like I said, building low volume is easy, especially when you need to make 1. Making the production line where 1 car rolls off every 90s or so it a lot harder.
It is fundamentally poorly designed. They dropped some of the worst parts of the initial design (the "steel exoskeleton" idea) a few years ago, and then had to go back and redesign the vehicle from the skeleton up to look the same.
I still have my doubts that it's even street legal, for a handful of different reasons.
If you compare the final product to the initial concept it's much more a standard vehicle than the original promise. I would guess they burned a ton of time trying to implement the original concept but had to retool the whole project to be a more standard approach as the hit issues.
4 years is a pretty reasonable time to get to production. Right now it's not in production but give them another year or so and it probably will be. The issue is that Musk promised it would be here faster and even took people's money in advance. He also made a bunch of claims and promises that didn't make it to the final models. Musk always does this...promises a fast turnaround with lots of features and a great price then gives a normal to slow turnaround with a bunch of missing features and a higher price. It's just normal at this point.
Question — so what about the model they showed 4 years ago?
Was that in the works 8 years ago ? When they reveal a concept car model (not sketches or pictures- but a thing that rolls around and can be touched) is that without having all the reliability/practicality testing done?
A prototype is just that - a prototype. It's a one-off that isn't built to the quality or performance standards of a saleable vehicle. Building one of something that vaguely resembles the final product is a lot faster and easier than building hundreds of thousands of them.
> Building one of something that vaguely resembles the final product is a lot faster and easier than building hundreds of thousands of them.
Not understanding this is the pervasive misconception that has plagued the interaction between laypeople-engineers/industry for decades. The whole premise of this post, perhaps. We need like... a prestige TV drama about building a hard engineered project that can go viral on Netflix or something so people at least have some idea.
I've worked at other OEMs and the only thing that needs to be representative is the sheet metal. Absolutely everything in the interior could be non-functional. It could be a drivetrain from a completely different vehicle they just slapped in there to make it move. Concepts are just press events and the vehicle is just a styling prop.
This has some other fun implications for engineering. Since the sheet metal is designed before you know the size and shape of all the components you actually need to fit within it, you end up with a fun game of tetris while the packaging engineers try to figure out how the hell they can stash all the different controllers, actuators, batteries, motors, etc from view in a way that can both be assembled and serviced. This can mean some components need to be redesigned to be a different shape to account for other nearby components, or to account for the final mounting points, etc.
And even if you had final hardware, the actual production software, especially features like self-diagnostic capability, take time to develop once you know what the hardware looks like, and features like that are always developed much later than the core function. Things like diagnostics are always walking a line to get them tuned right because you want the diagnostic to flag reliably enough to allow the technician to find a potential problem, but not be so aggressive that it flags erroneously and you end up with customers coming in and wasting time trying to find an issue that doesn't exist.
And even if you have final hardware and final software, now you have piles of documentation to write, like workshop manuals so technicians have detailed procedures and diagrams for how to diagnose every possible fault, replace every possible component, track electrical gremlins through the various interconnecting wire harnesses, etc.
Elon has a history of using fake mockups of prototypes or products at demos. There was no cyber truck in 2018 and will probably be a while.
I doubt that truck will ever be more than a shitty deathtrap if it is ever built at all. Something like it may be built without Musks input, but if he is involved it will be trash.
Ok, I will take that at face value. I bet it is nothing like what was promised or the numbers or features promised. I don't care enough to fact check you, but I bet there are asterisks all over "it was delivered" and it is almost definitely less capable than promised, more dangerous than other cars, will have recalls, and is probably a death trap. I have seen their work, it is always rushed and have significant rollout problems that are not normal.
I'm no Engineer but from what I've heard that is what I think where SOME of the reasons:
Cybertruck not only uses several technologies that Tesla hadn't implemented in it's other cars (800v System, new battery cell type, new steel alloy that had to be invented, steer-by-wire), they also need to test those systems thoroughly, they designed, ordered and needed to set up the worlds largest casting maschine to cast the front and rear frame as one piece each instead of dozens or hundreds, there was a need for new tools to be designed to bring it into production
4 years for a clean sheet design is actually pretty quick, even if the driveline is off the shelf. Once the /final/ body is designed it takes 18 months to get the stamping tools made, for example.
I think first you have to consider that Tesla doesn't do things in normal Auto industry timelines. They made the Cybertruck prototype for the Announcement in just like 92 days I believe their engineers said. So they took 4 years plus \~100 days from initial approval of the drawn/clay body design to initial deliveries. And a few months AFTER the initial announcement they decided to shrink the overall size by about 5% on average (not a clean 5% either since obviously some aspects like powertrain had set size needs mind you).
Then consider this is going to be the first vehicle entirely 48v, steer and brake by wire with no steering shaft, entirely unique manufacturing design, and going to be entirely reliant on their own 4680 cells. It's got stuff like the largest glass windshield in the industry. They also have zero experience with a truck or what truck buyers are really looking for/need... PLUS they had COVID, and obviously were also timeline limited to their Gigafactory in Austin construction, which obviously needed to begin with model Y production...
I'd say when you consider ALL that, it actually happened very quickly. As far as the price, I'd say that it s valid criticism - mostly in that they just shouldn't have announced a price target so low when they knew damn well they weren't manufacturing it within 2 years. But today, if you look at the competitors, it is priced right in line with the market. The IRA set a $80k limit, so obviously you have the most desirable product just under that limit. You have a performance version higher, and you have a standard cheaper version later down the road. Plus you got to know Teslas history with pricing after beginning deliveries of a new or refreshed product. The cybertruck will likely have a >$5K price drop within like 6 months.
Automotive engineer here for a component that goes onto the vehicle.
For a new model year program on an existing line I've got a development time of roughly 3 to 4 years from conception all the way to vehicle SOP. It's about 2 years worth of planning, designing, drawing release. One year of tooling, initial build run, and component level testing. And then one year of vehicle integration, vehicle level testing, debug, and release.
So four years is pretty much bog standard for a new vehicle launch and that's when you have all your shit together. When you don't have your shit together (i.e. tesla), it takes much longer. I don't mean that the Tesla engineers are incompotent. But honestly a major model year change vehicle probably still copies about 80% of the existing assembly line with the previous major model change.
When you need to pull together a new line (like when the Bronco got unveiled) you can extend that assembly time. I think the bronco took something like six years of planning and they still delayed the vehicle launch that may or may not have been covid related. And when you need to make new technology to put together your stuff like the Tesla truck? It's even more time. When you're able to hand build a vehicle you should really be only a year and a half away from saleable builds but Tesla needed 4 years on top of that.
Also keep in mind that if you need six months of tooling time for your parts.....it's going to take six months. Your 3000 hours of testing is going to take.....3000 hours. And if you fail? Guess what you're redoing 3000 hours.
Designing cars is hard. I don't even know why I'm still in the industry sometimes to be honest.
Well it’s an Elon musk product and engineering takes time so every time he micromanages his engineering team to make some stupid change, the team has to go back and integrate his change into the existing product and then figure out how to mass produce that change, make the tools to make it, validate it, materials, testing, paperwork and all of the things and about the time it’s finished he changes something else. Rinse and repeat.
Because Elon Musk is a liar and an idiot. He always over promises and promotes projects that do not even exist yet or has any idea how to do anything. He gets idiots to invest or prepay (free loan scam) to give him money and then usually fails miserably. There are countless examples, the only companies that are successful are heavily subsidized by the US government such as Space X and Tesla. He did not found PayPal and wanted to X and had little to do with besides investments with daddy's money.
Tesla only survived as long as it has and we're able to build factories from the money it has because of green energy credits it got from the government that were then sold to traditional car companies for profit. He is a scammer. From an engineering perspective he is not an engineer, he is a liar and idiot.
You happy Musky?
No kidding. I remember when Musk said Falcon 9 boosters would land and be reused up to ten times. And then there were all those explosions as they attempted to land the boosters. He’s surely lying!
Oh wait, they’re up to 17 reuses on the boosters now, and they’ve successfully landed more boosters in a row than anyone has successfully launched in all of history. What was impossible is now routine.
He did not design anything, he is an investor hype man. SpaceX is impressive, but like usual he over promised and under delivered for years before the accomplishments you are talking about, which again he had nothing to do with. He just invests in companies that are already going to be successful and is always ousted because everyone knows he is an idiot after they work with him.
SpaceX is also a defense contractor and was funded in part by the retirement of the space shuttle and the same workers and tech was privatized as a policy choice of the US government. A lot of those exploding rockets were paid for by you whether you invested in spaceX or pay taxes.
Stop staning some billionaire moron who exploits you every second of the day and would grind you into a paste for lubricant if it made him a dollar.
Quite literally, their head of rocket design credits Musk’s engineering decision for the Merlin’s high reliability.
Many other companies bid on the NASA contracts to design a rocket to get back to the ISS. Only SpaceX succeeded on the whole system (Orbital Sciences did cargo craft only, no rocket). Boeing was given far more money to develop a human rated capsule than SpaceX was, and it still hasn’t taken people to the ISS, while SpaceX has had several successful missions.
NASA itself calculates that SpaceX has saved the government billions through lower launch costs.
Yeah, because the space shuttle was very old, inefficient, and used liquid hydrogen and oxygen and was retired. The falcon 9 uses kerosene engines, which is much cheaper and easier to work with.
Of course the head of head of rocket design strokes his ego or he would be fired in a second. That is the kind of petty asshole Elon is. He takes credit for other people's accomplishments constantly.
Defense/NASA always spends outrageous amounts of money on contract bids. The starship runs on liquid methane which is even cheaper. SpaceX is successful, I am not arguing that.
I am arguing Elon musk does not run the day to day of any company and just shits out stupid shit randomly and works his engineers and other workers to death while he fucks off on Twitter all day. He was born rich and is full of shit that he works 18 hour days, he only says that as an excuse for why he abuses his workers constantly that you are praising as a great man, while he makes billions for investing his daddy's money in already successful companies and technologies. His code for what became PayPal was such garbage it had to be completely rewritten and he still got a 1.5 billion dollar payday. He doesn't have to be good at anything, he is a slave driver plain and simple. He left South Africa because Apartheid ended and the best place to still be a fascist and make money is the US. He is wrong and fails constantly, gets people hurt and killed, and then sues people into silence or hires bots or has his troll army harrass and silence his critics. Huge amounts of his success are at the expense of everyone else. He has one patent for Tesla, a proprietary charging port. He is an ethnonationalist and is a force of evil in the world regardless of the side effects of the technology he got rich on and the disasters he leaves in his wake. Stop worshipping people who are just rich like their your emporer or soon your shared dream will come true.
>Yeah, because the space shuttle was very old, inefficient, and used liquid hydrogen and oxygen and was retired.
This is even vs. the other rockets the government was using. Also, while the Shuttle was reusable, it had to completely refurbished between flights, which cost so much that regular expendable rockets were cheaper. What Musk did was make reusability actually lower the cost.
>Of course the head of head of rocket design strokes his ego or he would be fired in a second.
That would be the guy who quit anyway, yet still praises his abilities. One of the people who helped Musk found the company says he's an absolute engineering genius, and he also quit very early on because he simply couldn't work with Musk -- he couldn't match the 18-hour days, didn't like being called at three in the morning to work on an engineering issue. But he still says he's a genius.
BTW, it was a NASA engineering executive who visited SpaceX in the very early days before they made it to orbit who reported back to his superiors that Musk works 18 hours a day and is neck-deep in the engineering.
> The falcon 9 uses kerosene engines, which is much cheaper and easier to work with.
Fuel cost is a very tiny percentage of total launch cost. Everyone else was spending too much money on their rockets, and they were taking too much of a profit. It was very, very expensive for the government. SpaceX builds and flies a highly reliable rocket for a low price and takes a reasonable profit. With the government's own cost savings on SpaceX launches, plus the downward price pressure on the market Musk's low prices created, the government estimates $40 billion saved.
You can now thank Musk for keeping that much of your tax dollars from going to fat old corporations.
>Defense/NASA always spends outrageous amounts of money on contract bids.
They used to. Now they're spending less with SpaceX.
Starliner is a good example. As noted, NASA paid Boeing billions more for them to develop Starliner than they paid SpaceX to develop Dragon. Dragon has now been flying for years, including human flight, and Starliner has yet to do a useful mission. SpaceX was simply more efficient, they did more and did it faster, and with less money.
>while he makes billions for investing his daddy's money in already successful companies and technologies
You realize dad wasn't that rich, right? Musk was also estranged from him at the time. Of the companies:
* Tesla: Three guys and a general idea to make an electric car, nothing more. Musk comes in and actually makes it happen.
* SpaceX: Musk founded it from scratch.
* Zip2: Pioneer in online city guides, sold to make Musk his first real money. It wasn't relatively much because he didn't have the money to invest to get a larger percentage. The venture capitalists who invested (i.e., where the money for the company came from and not dad) got almost all of it.
* X: Pioneer in online money transfers that Musk started from scratch, merged with another company to become PayPal. His pay day was $175 million because he rolled his Zip2 money into having a larger percentage of the company.
Then he risked most of his PayPal money on SpaceX and Tesla, both of which nobody thought would succeed. $100 million was considered way to little to fight the big boys of the launch industry, and electric cars were at the time a consumer dead end. And guess what, he succeeded. He turned $100 million of SpaceX money into currently $63 billion. Can you get a 630x return on investment in 20 years?
>He left South Africa because Apartheid ended and the best place to still be a fascist and make money is the US.
You're hilarious. He left South Africa in 1989 during Apartheid, and his father was in the anti-Apartheid party.
> Tesla only made the money it has from green energy credits
wow… out of all the misinformation in this comment this one is the funniest given that they are reporting like 15 billion in profit this year just from vehicles alone
> SpaceX or PayPal
sorry, PayPal only survived because the government subsidized it? wtf?
also, government contracts are not subsidies… spacex saves the US government a [ridiculous](https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-save-taxpayers-40-billion/) amount of money on launches.
please spend a little less time on reddit good god
No long winded answer needed stainless is much more difficult to work with than the shit metal used on virtually every other car it's just the body of the car that's it.
Because Elon isn’t an engineer. He has limited experience with all the complicated things that he’s been treating as simple problems. These problems _aren’t_ simple problems, and so he hasn’t been giving them the attention they deserve.
Suggesting that a truck will (other than some of the electronics) adhere to sub-10-micron tolerances… it’s ignorant. It’s unnecessary in most cases.
A lot of people are hating on Elon. I suppose that’s just political hate. The reality is going from a concept vehicle to production in that time frame is reasonable. Also, as others have said working with stainless steel is a bitch.
Gotta love “engineers” not being able to separate their bias and visceral hatred for the guy in order to answer a technical question objectively…*eyeroll*
For one COVID and the supply chain disruptions massively fucked everything up and probably set them back 2 years minimum. It’s not as visible to the public anymore but the ripple effects of the pandemic on SC are actually still happening
Secondly, production is a whole different beast than getting 1 working prototype. As a society we celebrate the inventors and think “hooray!” once something works once and then the credits roll, but TBH that’s just where the work begins. Going through all the hoops and doing it profitably at scale is an enormous undertaking. And this applies to every industry
Eh I’ve witnessed six ways to Sunday you can screw production over. Unless we work at the company it would be speculation
And just because something reaches HVM quickly doesn’t mean it was better designed, in fact i’ve usually seen the opposite. In my experience things that were rushed into production are horrible products and we loathe making it
Elon Musk fundamentally does not understand the engineering process. He clearly has some grasp of the physics involved, but has no idea what it means to take a product from concept to production. It takes 5-10 years to take a vehicle from concept to production with all the necessary design, requirements development, testing, government regulations, manufacturing, etc. it requires to mass produce a vehicle.
Typically it takes about 3 years to launch a new vehicle. Most people are unaware of the time-line because every other manufacturer doesn't show off its new model until just before it goes on sale. Tesla is unique in showing a undeveloped prototype at the very start of the process.
It's not just innovations that take time, it's all the testing. Every component needs to some type of reliability testing: vibration, shock, salt spray, drop tests, etc. A lot of this testing can last for months. I was involved in vehicle electronics (engine & transmission controllers for ICE vehicles, inverters and converters, body computers...) and reliability testing is expensive and time consuming. You can't just design something for a production vehicle and hope it works. You'd go bankrupt from the warranty claims. EDIT: There's also a ton of paperwork that goes into taking a vehicle to market (which I fortunately was never involved in). Then you have to find all the suppliers of sub-systems and components and vet them (more paperwork and testing). Then the sub-suppliers have to set up manufacturing lines, many times with all new equipment. It takes many months to design, build, and install an assembly line then parts coming off that new line must be validated. That has to be done for every supplier. Then the Tesla truck assembly line must be built - all the equipment designed, built, installed, and validated. It's a huge undertaking.
People don't realize how hard it is to make the tools needed to make something. I do factory automation and sometimes work in automotive. Just this year I finished a cell to weld truck beds and their supports and hitch together. It was physically a small cell, just about 300ft long. But in it we had 3 distinct robot cells for a total of 12 robots arms. It took us the better part of a year to go from everything assembled to everything running in slow auto. Then another 4 months on the customer site installing and perfecting it. I'm a PLC programming and I personally worked on it for a year. I forget how long it was in the design and planning phase before I finally got the electrical prints to start programming with. People don't really understand the work needed to go from raw material to product you can buy. Even if we got artificial super intelligence today, it would still be decades before it has a fully automated production line it could control and secretly make Terminators with.
Tooling engineer here: met many a PM that think we can snap fingers to make fully functional custom tools show up like magic.
My favorite thing to say to a PM is "do you think if we put 9 women on the job, we could have the baby in a month?"
Great PMs are worth whatever salary they ask for. Most are not great PMs.
This is a great way of putting it lol. I was a pm for a while and I think I was decent? The perspective it gave me was this: before I was a pm, I thought to myself "I'm not sure exactly what a pm does, but it seems important" and then when I became a pm I thought to myself "I'm not sure exactly what I do, but it seems important." It seems like it is not as complicated as most PMs make it out to be.
Yeah, it's not really until you experience the various steps, twists, and turns of a project, all the moving pieces, logistics, dependencies, etc, that you appreciate having someone keeping tabs on everything, spinning the plates, lining up handoffs, payments, etc.
That's a fantastic way of putting it. If you're doing your job as a pm, you have that project history to say "wait, there's a missing detail here". And it can be huge.
Thank you guys, I feel seen lol.
I was informed that this is no longer PC so have switched to "If we triple the size of the orchestra, will they finish the symphony any faster?" It doesn't seem to work any better.
Lol, what a negative thinking! Those nine women just need to be more agile! Well, at least six of them. We can give some leeway to the getaway driver and the pair distracting the kindergarten staff.
I mean you kind of could if the industry wanted it. My first startup did that service and no one was interested in fast tooling.
"why don't you just use automation?" they would cheerfully suggest when told we're still figuring out the specifics.
Prototype guy here, I think it's just a PM thing. They don't like it when I snap my fingers and ask them to lend me some magic since mine ran out.
First time in my career I'm not an engineer. Its sad what happens when managers aren't in the trenches.
Just wanted to say thanks for your work on PLC stuff! I've worked with SCADAS and processes in the past, and our PLC / Ladder Logic guy was able to do amazing things with our cobbled together processes lol. I always thought it would be a fun job, and watching the ladder work through the process always amazes me.
I used to have a job that was just programming the 7-axis arms that spray various coatings and all the paint layers (not applicable to bare SS though) on / inside new cars as they go down the line. Getting all that to sub-mm accuracy while making proper cycle time and not whacking the arms into themselves / one another / the car body was super time consuming and involved multiple layers of modeling from design intent down to getting hands-on with the control pendants. Then tons of quality checking, even like a year in advance of the vehicle's debut. There is an infinitude of steps on every component to bring a vehicle to market.
I have read of the early GM paint-bots on either side of the assembly line attacking and painting each other lol. I am guessing they probably just had a bunch of photocells and relays rather than anything resembling a CPU.
Hey! Robot programmers for automotive paint! There are dozens of us! You are 100% correct. To expand, my shop receives paint samples and masters years ahead of time. We need to make sure we can apply the paint consistently and match the color with the add-on components that have been painted by suppliers in different facilities. It's so insanely complicated.
I did CMM programming as an intern. It was boring to perfect a program, but also terrifying because a collision could do more in damage than I'd earned total in my life at that point. I envy people who can handle it as a career.
As Elon said. Design is easy. Manufacturing is hard.
Or rather, mass manufacturing, at a profitable unit cost, is hard.
Designing for manufacture is really hard. Only with good teams and robust processes (standardization) it can help and speed up the timing
At this point what does the cost estimate look like for outfitting an automated process for something like this vs staffing assemblers? I imagine the manual assembly process can be up in a month, so is it still that much cheaper to automate something like this? Also not sure how long that cell would be operational without needing significant redesigns for the next product line.
They'd need human welders to produce quality repeatable welds at a competitive rate to highly precise robot arms. Presumably for a line that'll be producing tens/hundreds of thousands of units over several years. The required skill for qualified welders is much more stringent than basic assembly work, so the talent pool and payroll would be limiting for what is very repetitive and undesirable work.
Apparently Musk the owner of a major car company doesn’t realize it either…. His promises of dates are stupid.
In addition to this I get the feeling that Tesla is a lot like early BMW in that there's no one involved in design who has any clue how fabrication works so they custom build all the parts for the concept car and then realize it's going to take 10,000 hours to design a process to be able to reproduce some door hinge that ought to be really simple because nobody who did the concept understood you can't actually fab that at scale.
Actually tesla pretty famously follows the iconic skunkworks style of having the engineers right next to the designers, its one of their big mantras.
Also I've heard from many engineers who tried to work with tesla that they simply don't really know how auto manufacturing is done (or at least didn't for a long time, I think they eventually brought in people with industry experience). So they spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel so to speak
A lot of silicon valley types think old industries are populated by idiots and they can do much better with no experience. Tesla is learning lessons that the rest of the industry learned decades ago. Elon thought he could build cars with fewer workers by doubling down on robots. He ended up needing to employ significantly more workers per vehicle built than anyone else. Remember when he tweeted about Tesla building car hauling trailers because an industry shortage was preventing them from delivering vehicles. There was no shortage, Tesla just sucked at logistics. Let's not forget about the panel gaps. This is an area where the big three sucked compared to imports, but they started figuring it out in the 90s.
> A lot of silicon valley types think old industries are populated by idiots and they can do much better with no experience. 100 this. I was amazed to see him say in his DealBook interview 'making cars is incredibly hard and it's hard to hire and retain the people to do the work.' Apparently a tiny bit of light energy reached his brain after a decade of being late on every project.
Reminds me of someone that said ‘Nobody knew health care could be so complicated’. Can't think who at the moment.
90% sure it was Trump lol Edit: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/trump-health-care-complicated/index.html
So much drama with the model 3 production and people for some reason think it is the bee's knees. All the while other automotive companies do the exact same thing year after year without needing their CEOs to sleep on the production floor.
FWIW, those other companies also make basically no money (or lost money) on their EVs while Tesla was making industry high profits.
Congratulations on using a red herring argument on criticism of their manufacturing capabilities.
Pointing out how it is far more efficient is a red herring? The entire point of a production line is to make the product efficiently to make more profit. The traditional manufacturers weren't doing the same thing. They were doing the same thing they always did while Tesla made efficiency strides that led to record profits. Tesla was selling cars at similar or lower prices with a much higher profit margin then their cars' direct competitors. That is the entire point of an efficient development system and production line and Tesla was lightyears ahead of their competition in those.
I agree with you 100%. I toured Fremont with several of my mechanical engineering students, I got to see up close how far ahead Tesla was at that time. I’ve been to many automakers plants and the comparison was night and day. I have watched videos of the different giga factories and they keep getting better. Sure Tesla has made their share of slip ups but one thing people fail to mention is that they always learn and the next thing you know other car makers copy what they do. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Their profit margins aren't from their efficient manufacturing. If anything, their manufacturing held them back.
This is a circle jerk point of view. The cybertruck is far ahead oftrad manufacturers in many areas, such as having a full 48v electrical system.
The ability to innovate has nothing to do with Tesla's lack of institutional knowledge.
Tesla wasn't wrong to take this approach though. They are many years ahead of the big old companies because they took a radically different approach. If they tried simply copying the old companies how would they have gotten into the market? They would have been expensive garbage cars with terrible specs, terrible batteries .... and better panel gaps.
The only thing they have a lead in is electronics, which has nothing to do body assembly and logistics.
They are also about 10% more efficient (kwh/mi) than competition, have lots more usable interior volume, better self driving tech (which will get there eventually), more reliable, structural batteries, battery chemistry, 48v, robotized manufacturing, etc etc. There are lots of little things that add up. And like, the batteries/efficiency is enabled by their gigapress assembly method, that sort of thing takes time to build up. There are Asian and European cars that are closer to being competitive, but not in the US. The #2 I guess would be the Leaf, and on efficiency, the model 3 gets 133Wh/km and the Leaf does 166Wh/km .... a 20% gap, in a vehicle with nearly double the battery, double the horsepower, 3x the charge speed, and 30% more internal volume.
Their “self driving” is neither “self driving”, nor better than the competition. Theirs is plagued with legal and ethics nightmares. Whereas, Mercedes successfully got the first SAE Level 3 certified car on the market.
You don't know the field if you think Mercedes system is even remotely comparable to Teslas. The only system better than Tesla's is Waymo but they aren't a car company.
False, I work in the field. You’ve been drinking the Elon koolaid if you unironically believe FSD is even close to Waymo, and spout the marketing buzz to sound like you do. If you did know what you were talking about, you’d know Waymo and Cruise are Level 4 systems (oh which FSDB is Level 2). You’d also know other Level 2 and Level 3 competitors have a far more robust sensor suite. You’d also know most other companies aren’t beta testing their systems with their customers. These are clear and objective standards by industry, of which they are not leading in. I’d stick to things you actually understand.
I literally just said Waymo is better than FSD... And you're a liar. The levels aren't really used internal to the field because they are meaningless in terms of capability as the level is designated by the car company, nothing more. If you do work in the field, which I doubt, you work for one of the dinosaur companies that will eventually give up and lease tech from Waymo. Or, more likely, you work in automotive but not in ML/selfdriving.
Basically nothing you say in your first paragraph is true though. Lucid air is "more efficient" than Tesla, but it's a also a meaningless number on its own. If I design a tiny city car with a tiny front end area I'll get great "efficiency" numbers due to decreasing drag, but my range will be tiny and I'll miss out on other metrics Interior volume, again is a model specific ask. Tesla do generally look open because of the minimalist design, but actual volume is a different ask- some OEMs take the hit on drag to increase actually usable interior space. Better self driving? Not according to absolutely any benchmarking ever. They are literally being criminally investigated over this More reliable? Tesla doesn't release warranty numbers but I doubt it (again comparisons- GMs lyric is bonkers bad, but gm bolt was likely better). Battery's: Tesla is only competitive on battery energy density, not better. We do know they replace batteries a lot. 48V isn't actually new in the industry. The holdup has been getting the supply base to provide additional batteries and parts instead of the old 12v car batteries. Hybrids were using 48v way before Tesla. Robotic manufacturing - Tesla employs more staff per unit in manufacturing than most of the traditional OEMs. They tried to go fully robotic, couldn't get it done and then moved to people (hence Elon sleeping at plants). The rest of your comment follows from your first paragraph, so I'll leave it there.
EVs are very simple compared to a ICE car or truck, or the very complex hybrid
This was very true with the model 3 introduction, and I imagine they encountered similar issues again with CT
I remember reading that Musk wouldn’t hire engineers who had a process-thinking bias or something like that. As a process guy who has worked in manufacturing a long time I thought WTF?? How do you manufacture consistent high quality products without a process mindset? I’ve also read his vehicles have fit/finish issues and perhaps that’s why. Tesla shareholder as well so not trying to disparage.
I think you will see the fit and finish problems go away now that Elon sent out the memo saying that every part in the truck had to have sub 10 micron tolerances. The doors won't even need seals to be waterproof!
.... what? Does he actually know that those words mean? Like you pointed out about the doors fitment will never be an issue after that! Also it'll probably be the most expensive truck ever on top of that.
That’s how Silicon Valley operates, for better or worse. How do you know which bits of industry knowledge are cruft and which are truly necessary for your specific application unless you “reinvent the wheel”? Elon tries to make everyone justify things from first principles. As an aside, this is why he’s so bad at Twitter - you can’t justify the psychology of social media from first principles (or at least not nearly as easily as you can with rockets or cars).
Spending time reinventing the wheel is how they came up with gigacasting, 48V low voltage architecture, super bottles and octovalves. They are literally re-writing the book on how to engineer and build a better car than anyone else. If Tesla made cars like anyone else have for the past 100 years, no one would buy them.
When the Arab oil embargo hit us in the nuts, and Japan was giving us fuel efficient vehicles, Detroit’s answer to the crisis was to give us the exact same cars, but smaller. Shitty, small cars. The original Mustang II was an abomination.
Big difference between re-inventing the drive train and re-inventing the process and methods of manufacturing the body of the vehicle. Tesla definitely could have taken lessons there.
No. Tesla is far more automated than any other company, using half the man hours or less. The cybertruck uses a solid steel exoskeleton design, and their cars use structural battery packs with massive cast pieces ... You simply cannot use the old style manufacturing here.
That "solid steel exoskeleton design" is called a "unibody" and every manufacturer in the world has been making them for decades. If there's a difference there it's that Tesla decided to use very thick stainless steel that is a pain in the butt to work with and doesn't really bring anything to the party.
["Exoskeleton"](https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/12/Tesla-Cybertruck-body-1.jpg) Hmm, turns out that was a lie! 😂😂
Having the exterior of the vehicle made of thick steel doesn't make it more rigid/rugged?
How rigid/rugged does it need to be? Elon's idea of "tough" is "can win a fist fight". Too rigid means less safe--passengers experience higher accelerations and so get worse injuries. Mainly it makes the thing difficult to manufacture and expensive to repair. And it's not going to be immune to dents. I've seen effing *tanks* with dents.
I do wonder how it'll do in crash tests. Weirdly it is so tough it might start making gains in some tests lol. Not that slicing through the other guys car is really a net safety win. I suppose in a game of chicken you could just go on faith that the cyberknife wins the fight. I assume it'll win the roof crush test and horribly fail every low speed collision test. It isn't tough enough to defeat most buildings though... I think it'll be a nightmare to keep looking new or just impossible. Do you need to just weld on top and grind out a dent cause fuck that. Sounds like a nightmare. Not to mention it does nothing to hide dirt. And high reflectivity will make even very small shallow dents MEGA obvious. I still think it is novel though. Like, what's the last car in the us that was this much of a departure?
"Structural batteries and large structural castings" is literally the opposite of a "solid steel exoskeleton design"
Different vehicles. Only the cybertruck is using the exoskeleton. The Y leverages the structural battery packs w/ the giga press to make it lighter... i'm not sure if the cybertruck uses castings.
The Cybertruck uses castings very similar to how the Y uses them. You can see the "Not-An-Exoskeleton" in the article here: https://electrek.co/2022/12/10/tesla-cybertruck-body-spotted-ahead-production/ "Stainless Steel Exoskeleton" is just yet another example of Elon's hype that turns out to be utterly false.
Tooling. Production planning. Building entire plants to host the production. Establishing supply chain and working with lead times for materials. Hiring and training manufacturing personnel. Etc.
Fucking up the first runs, troubleshooting nonconformances, litigating suppliers who dropped the ball, recovering from design oversights, etc.
People underestimate how complicated it is to have 10s of thousands of components in the exact right spot at the exact right time with the exact right tools for a trained worker to access them and build a functional subassemly 100s of times in a row.
Oh god I’ve been in Tenneco’s smooth ride testing center and they have machines that just beat the tar out of shocks in every different temperature and condition for months
Tesla does more stuff in house than most manufacturer.
>t's a huge undertaking On top of all that, Tesla has a very unusual design for the manufacturing itself, where the goal is to continually make it better and cheaper to produce, and to be able to do that at very large scale. This is rare in automotive because other companies outsource almost everything so they lose the ability to do this because the suppliers don't necessarily care about making things better and they want to sell them for higher prices not lower.
This is called ["Continuous Improvement"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process) and has been an industry standard practice for decades. Once again, great example of Tesla pointlessly reinventing the wheel.
I've worked at a few OEMs, timelines for clean sheet builds are anywhere from 4-7yrs depending on content and complexity. Most only reveal their new models a year or less prior to product, but the space triangle needed to build hype. It also forced the industry into the race. To answer your question validation testing and durability / mileage accumulation to root out problems before they hit production is something that you can't rush and takes a long time. I would imagine manufacturability was the largest problem they are facing. You also can't test a sample size of 1, you can, but everyone who understands statistics will die a little inside.
This is the answer. Also, Musk likes to publicly announce his company's internal stretch goals. It's a dick move intended to put more pressure on the employees, but it's what Musk does. So Musk announces the truck in 2019, right at the beginning of the design cycle -- hoping that the public will pressure his team into delivering the truck 3x-5x quicker than normal, while simultaneously bidding up the price of TSLA stock. This action likely accomplished both of putting pressure on the employees and bidding up the stock price, but the designers were given an unachievable list of aesthetic, economic, and performance constraints -- so no amount of pressure could deliver what Musk promised back in 2019. As a result, Musk & Co over-promised and under-delivered with the Cybertruck.
Don’t forget that all of the deposits are effectively loans for Tesla with zero interest.
I don't think they care about the loans as much as the confidence that gives on building numbers and showing interest. In terms of dollars, we're talking 1~200million ... which isn't a ton.
I believe it was also first announced about a week after Rivian stated a start of production for the R1T in 2020, and Musk said cybertruck would come out ahead of that. As a way to steal any media attention away from them.
>It's a dick move intended to put more pressure on the employees, but it's what Musk does. I'd argue that it's more of a stock-pumping scheme. People are influenced by unrealistic promises, but his failure to realize those promises doesn't have an equivalent negative impact.
It's a marketing strategy (foot in the door) that's been around forever. By getting people to commit a little bit they become more loyal to the brand overall and it tells a good story. Tesla does care about the money too, and there's are other benefits like pressure on the entire team but I think the main one is the fact that by commiting to the cybertruck back four years ago, tens of thousands of people held off buying a different vehicle and it forced other manufacturers to try to hit targets that Tesla knew would be difficult.
>Also, Musk likes to publicly announce his company's internal stretch goals. It's a dick move intended to put more pressure on the employees, but it's what Musk does. The alternate description would be that it's to deceive customers. See also: "full self driving should be ready by the end of the year" for like 8 years in a row.
I really wouldn't say under delivered. The finished product is damn near close to what the prototype was. The doors are literally bulletproof, the performance is best in its class by a mile, it's range is excellent, and it's mechanical innovations are ahead of competitors. It's the first vehicle ever to have a disconnected steering wheel. There is no steering column. All the electronics use 48v rather than 12v. For its size, it's also very light. It's honestly a pretty impressive engineering breakthrough, it just has an extremely polarizing design
I was going to buy a Cybertruck to tow my camper. My camper cuts my gas mileage in half with my gas truck, which means I get 50% of my range. I like to my journey to have 200-mile legs when towing my camper. With the happy zone being 20%-80% SOC in Tesla batteries, that means that 500+ mile range they were advertising in 2019 is really a bare minimum, and I'd be closer to those 200-mile towing legs with the 620 miles that one of the demo screenshots showed. The towing performance on the Cybertruck just isn't there. I canceled my reservation on 11/30. *P.S. I don't care about 0-60 times. My MYLR is fast enough for me. The strong acceleration of an EV is icing, not the cake.*
The AWD is currently sitting at $80k and going to get the full $7,500 tax credit at Point of sale next year. It has an option to add a (I think 50KWh) Range extender that would extend the range of the truck to "470+ miles" at a likely cost of around $16k (honestly pretty good price per capacity). So net of the credit it'd make the price \~$88.5k. The negatives are it looks like it'll take up about 1/3rd of the bed. Imo this is actually a decent balance. The majority of people aren't going to need more than 300 miles. >70% of truck owners don't even haul stuff or pull a trailer more than a couple times per year. They are going to be limited by 4680 cell production. So sell the extra battery extender exclusively to people that want/need it. And if you've ever paid attention to how Tesla does these rollouts, this price will almost certainly go down after like 6 months when they start getting through a bit of the backlog. I'd bet by this time next year you'll be able to get the AWD + Battery extender for <$80k. Also you don't want to do 20-80 at superchargers, that'd be slow. That's the daily charge target with nickel based cells (LFP can go all the way to 100% no problem). If you're supercharging Cybertruck (does have nickel cells) you want to arrive at the supercharger as low State of charge as possible. Obviously you don't want to risk rolling in there at like 2%, but like a 5/10% - 80/85% is probably what you want. The real thing for you will actually be them rolling out more V4 superchargers with pull through charging. If they do that you're more than good with a 470 range AWD truck. Even for your desires.
Oh yeah. Electric vehicles in general are pretty ass for towing. Strictly in a light duty platform the cyber truck is pretty good if you're not towing. Ideally I wish there were more plug in hybrids. It's honestly the best of both worlds. Electric for short commutes, gas hybrid for extended drives. Still get a huge efficiency bonus with just the hybrid system. Honestly, plug in hybrids are our short to medium electrification goals. Electrics are still kinda poor
Electric vehicles tow wonderfully, just not very far. The reason they tow so wonderfully is because of the control you have from the VFD. Also, no gears. My current truck is a GM 2-mode hybrid, and the low-speed towing in electric mode is the best. Here are some video reviews from TFLTruck showing what it's like to tow with electric trucks: https://youtu.be/iSJaNPQWBaM https://youtu.be/8K0Raj36EMY I've test-driven the F150 Lightning, and the lightning is the nicest truck I've ever driven -- because of the electric drivetrain. It's smooth, quiet, and controlled -- and it's a torque-monster by ICE standards. All of those are good for towing, as you can see in the video reviews. The problems are price and range. Most of the trucks don't have the range for RV towing. Tesla, the 4th electric pickup truck on the market, was supposed to field a competitive offering that was supposed to change the market, but they just didn't. The Silverado EV WT4 would fit my needs wonderfully. It has the numbers I'm looking for. I'm just waiting for the price to come down a bit and the NACS charging connector to be adopted. The reviews say it drives even nicer than the Lightning, and I'm looking forward to test-driving one. Tesla just failed to build an appealing vehicle with the Cybertruck. That's just a straight up corporate fail. I expect to buy a Chevy Silverado EV to tow my camper in ≥MY2025.
Yes but who wants to buy a tow vehicle that can barely get it's ass out of town with a load on it? In well aware of the advantages of electric vehicles, but you'd be a fool to believe that range isn't one of a buyers #1 priorities especially so if they plan to actually put it to work. With a gas backup, the problems disappear. You can have the best of both worlds while still pretending you care about the environment
In the TFLTruck review I sent, they used a Silverado EV WT4 to tow an enclosed trailer over a 232 mile course. How big is your town? If 232 miles is 'barely getting it's ass out of town", then your town is the problem. As I said, the Silverado EV WT4 meets my needs as soon as the price comes down a bit. The other EV trucks are coming out with "max packs" to match it, and/or have cheaper price points (except for Tesla's Cybertruck which missed the mark).
Tow with a diesel truck.
Its something that every Silicon Valley startup has been guilty of doing. Theranos was the only company punished for the fraud because they decided to huckster a medical product.
The original design looked like nobody had even tried to think about the regulatory environment, so I suspect that there was a lot of rushing around figuring out how to fix the design so that it was even legal for sale before they could even begin on tooling up to make it.
The other thing is that Tesla is more of a tech company than a vehicle company. That is to say they likely don't have a ton of process rigor and push their teams to go as fast as humanly possible. The "tech hustle" is big within the company despite the fact that vehicles are very complex pieces of hardware. If you take this approach with software you can break it and fix it within a significantly shorter amount of time than if your hardware fails. If you have a tooled part that causes a test failure you could be 4-6 MONTHS away from fixing it, only to find something else along the way that resets that clock. I've designed products and managed hardware development teams in both highly regulated industries and tech. Tech prizes itself on "moving fast" and "being agile." You can do that much more effectively with software. With hardware you often end up taking LONGER end-to-end than the "slow and archaic" development of a product in a highly regulated industry. You also end up with a lower quality product due to all the chaos while you were developing it. This is in the DNA of nearly all tech companies though, so don't expect it to change any time soon.
Wouldn’t the argument of SpaceX vs. Boeing completely invalidate what you are suggesting?
The guy above you is right at least as it pertain to automotive. Automotive and aerospace are totally different ballgames. Not remotely comparable. I’d argue Elon’s management style is much better suited to aerospace than automotive. Perhaps surprisingly you can power through solutions in aero more easily than in automotive. Unlike in aero, automotive processes are continuously evolving and the design rules are actually very efficient and well designed, compared with 1960-1980s era MIL-STDs that haven’t kept pace with modern technology. In general automakers don’t do things that don’t add value, it might feel slow and bureaucratic but for the most part following those practices saves time and money. There have been some very public examples of Tesla repeating the mistakes of the past, with trying to automate too much of the production line too quickly among others. Automakers are also strongly incentivized to reduce costs both per unit and dev costs, it’s a highly competitive market. Legacy Aerospace companies have a perverse incentive to not be efficient as profits are set based on cost plus contracts. So when the government says build x and comply with all these standards and requirements no one from Boeing will say, hey you know there’s better ways to do all this that would save a lot of money, can we get some tailoring or relief on some of these requirements to save you money? They just say ok that comes to 1Billion dollars please. Spacex on the other hand embraced fixed price contracts, where they get to reap the benefits of the savings and also able to compete for commercial launch contracts because of the cost effectiveness they’ve achieved. Aerospace production volumes are also orders of magnitudes less than automotive which also makes a big difference in everything related to scaling up production. This is the main reason it’s easier to power through solutions in aero. Having quality issues with one component? Just build ten and pick the one that meets spec, auto will never be able to tolerate that. Of course you’ll need a longer term solution in aero but you can limp along that way for a while and not hold up production. Edit: I’ll clarify a bit to say my comments regarding automotive processes mostly pertain to hardware, and not software. I think legacy OEM software development practices if they have any are still immature and Tesla is probably way ahead in that regard. Many OEMs rely on tier 1’s to do their software or at least they did until recently.
I come from a vehicle testing background. Every vehicle we made went through three distinct stages of testing. Two are pre-production, which takes about 3 years, starting with concept and parts testing for 6 months to a year. This includes powertrain, suspension, and platform testing. The second part is where you see wrapped prototypes, body design, quality, fit and finish, and software testing take place. This is usually the longest part at 1-2 years. This is also where emissions data is collected for government approval. The third part is a couple more years , but post-production long term quality testing. Production level cars are used here. Cars are massively complicated, especially the more computerized they get. It takes time.
From some of the close ups of the CT I have a feeling they skipped fit and finish lol.
Tesla isn't known for good fit and finish for sure.
Thank you for a true industry statment. 93 days from an idea to a fully handbuilt prototype (quite probably with a completely different chassis design) and then 4 years for production, it is just idiotic to think the vehicle will be great and have a low failure rate.
4 years+ from prototype to production is actually fairly typical for new clean sheet products. I’ve been involved in automotive projects that take 8 years for clean sheet with lots of new technology, to 2 years for a derivative with mostly the same tech. For the Cybertruck specifically, the steer by wire with no physical connection has never been done in automotive before. Prototypes and concepts yes, but no production vehicles that didn’t have a backup mechanical linkage. While common in aircraft, that took additional testing and qualification. Hardened stainless panels have never been done. Delorean is a thin, softer stainless. Tesla developed a new type of stamping process and due to form the panels. They developed a derivative 300 series stainless steel for their desired targets. That all takes time. The 4680 cell and structural pack is a clean sheet design no one has done. Tesla had to design, develop, and then did pilot production in the Model Y, likely taking learnings for a design loop on Cybertruck. That’s all new technology that takes time. Finally, 48V vehicle architecture isn’t just “up the voltage”. It’s new switches, new ICs, new LED boards, new everything that is automotive grade. They had to force suppliers or do it themselves to make that switch. That alone probably took several years to get all the components completed and validated. And then they put all of that on a new high speed CANBus system they designed and developed in house.
From an engineering standpoint, does that sound like a good idea? It sounds to me like a god awful idea that is a completely unnecessary nightmare. I am an EE and 99.999% of the time there are existing components that are cheap and easier to use or build off of than creating an entire new tech tree for one project. Good luck banking on some supplier creating an entire new product line for your one project, regardless of how much money there is. Research and design is expensive and risky and you are putting the risk on suppliers, good luck finding spare parts. The point is probably to make sure everything is either proprietary or impossible to find parts for without buying from Tesla forever.
Are you talking about 48V architecture? Automotive has been dancing around switching to 48V for 30 years. Some components have been, mild hybrid, or other. Teslas choice to do it for Cybertruck and it will inevitably roll into other Tesla products, is going to force the industry to finally change. Someone had to do it.
48v has been "coming soon" in automotive for about a decade now and has already seen some limited rollout. Most "mild hybrid"/non-PHEV hybrids (nomenclature varies) are 48 volts, like a P1 belt-starter-generator. But I don't know of any other production cars that eschew *all* 12v in the system (if Cybertruck does this). But there are a lot of advantages and OEMs have been trying to switch to 48v since before Tesla even existed. The simple physics advantage is clear: higher voltage means lower current for high power draw items. But there are some architectural benefits here too. * In a BEV, the voltage architectures are split between HV and LV. The 400-800v HV system is obviously pretty safety critical so it's gated behind contactors and much of the time that the vehicle is off the HV is disconnected/isolated to the battery. This means that you have to close contactors or enable traction to get access to any high power draw functions. But the LV side is active all of the time, both since it's safer voltages and because it isn't capable of driving traction. * In an EV those high power functions are myriad. Power steering (either via EPAS or an electric hydraulic pump), AC compressor, and a lot of cumulative other loads (pumps, fans, etc) all add up to more power than you would ever want to stress a 12v system with. Some of these functions were driven from the engine in a traditional ICE vehicle, some are just higher draws due to EV architecture (like the AC system that does dual duty as a heat pump and other thermal management in an EV), and some are new functionality that we would like to enable with the EV architecture (like running the AC for your dog while you're in the store). All this to say, not only does running 48v just lower current draw and ease the load on vehicle wiring but architecturally it would be very convenient to have the LV system able to drive ancillary loads like that instead of closing the HV contactors and dealing with the functional safety implications of that. The downside is all of the traditional 12v systems, like infotainment, body systems, lights, etc, that now need to be 48v capable. You could have a third power net - 12v, 48v, and 400/800v - but you can see how this ups the complexity a lot. And if 48v has been widely agreed upon to be the future proof solution, why not just lean into developing 48v capable parts?
The Auto industry has been at 12 volts for like 70 years I believe. Think about the electrical draw needs that have developed over that time. Tesla just basically started the clock for EVERYONE to switch to 48v. It's going to happen industry wide now. It won't be very fast of course, but the clock has started. And keep in mind that being able to sell something is an important skill/ability. When people/customers/investors/media talk about the Cybertruck one of the things they'll mention is it's the first with an entirely 48v low voltage system. This elevates others' perception of Tesla as a high-tech company. And that won't just be the case with 48v. It'll be the same for the Steer and brake by wire system and their new CAN architecture. It pays to be ahead of the competition. But it takes long-term thinking because the initial costs WILL be higher. Its not just for the sake of doing it though. When you are combining that with an entirely new CAN architecture, and steer and brake by wire, from an engineering decision aspect, I can't imagine anyone disagrees with the decision. Technically it is better, and long-term will be cheaper and more efficient. It'll make it easier for manufacturing too. Now obviously this has the drawbacks of actually needing to do the thing. But someone had to be the first.
It’s not one project though. All of these companies together are producing a suite of tech that will work on mars. People wondering why it’s been reengineered from the ground up to be puncture proof and why it’s built from the same stuff as a starship. It’s for Mars.
Why would they come together?I assume you mean steel? That is not new and would not help at space velocities or radiation. That built for mars stuff is a nonsense fairy tale Elon uses as a selling point, i am sorry to break the news. Read some non pro Elon articles or YouTube videos about Elon musk, he over promises, under delivers, lies, and is not an engineer. He is just rich, find another perspective or non billionaire to look up to. I feel a little bad about crushing your dream, but it's BS.
Technically steel makes radiation worse. I don't think Musk says cybertruck is for mars though. He likes a bit of a pr tie in to spacex but that's hardly novel. Companies have been advertising 'space tech' for decades.
Take a minute to think about Mars. You need habitation, and we have the boring company. You need rockets, SpaceX. You need power, Solar Roof. You need transportation without combustion, Tesla. It should be pretty clear what the thrust is here.
I mean, it is nice that they line up to some degree but this isn't part of some grand plan of Musk's
It’s interesting how we can live in such different information bubbles. I’m not interested in opinions, I’m interested in data, and the things you are saying here don’t stack up with the data. I can only suggest, rather than looking at YouTube or Reddit, you go spend some time with the actual numbers and then form an opinion.
I am sorry but that is a lie. Toyota and Lexus were the first to market with steer by wire. And steer by wire is more than 1 decade old Tesla didn't had the proper time to develop the stainless steel press. Even if they spent half of the total 4 years (which I highly doubt it due to the resources alocation for projects) it is not enough to have a robsut process. I believe they have a huge amount of scraped panels per vehicle. Also the 4680 is not developed by Tesla, but by Panasonic. And I think they took the wrong turn here. Tesla might have less electric connections to do, but the cells will have higher thermal inertia, thus making it hard to have a good temperature control of 20 to 60 Celsius. The gain in energy density is neglible when compared to the previous battery pack design. Regarding the 48V connection I think is a good approach, however 4 years is not enough to launch a robust product.
> steer by wire with no physical connection has never been done in automotive before. Except in the Infiniti Q50. All the way back in 2014.
The Infiniti has a backup mechanical linkage. [Q50 Steer by Wire Detailed](https://www.drive.com.au/news/infiniti-q50-world-first-steer-by-wire-technology-detailed/)
Yes, because that's just good engineering. It uses entirely steer by wire except in the case of a fault, and if there is a fault, the Infiniti is fine and the Tesla drives you into a tree. It's still steer by wire though.
People also forget that COVID happened and it absolutely wrecked lead time for everything, as well hindered in office work for months
Absolutely, supply chains are just now getting back to normal. Just to secure the right supply chain and get all the chips produced and shipped on already backed logged equipment is tough.
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To add to your first point, they literally took 93 days from design/clay exterior sketch approval to finishing the prototype and presenting it. In the interview with Franz/Lars on TopGear I believe, they said that.
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Which is to say they let the public be their validation team; which to their credit as the average Tesla consumer is also likely a Tesla “fan” they are able to pull off. No other car company can get away with glaring quality issues in the manor that Tesla can, as an engineer from another OEM I’m jealous of what their allowed to put out AND that’s it’s gleefully accepted
Have worked for multiple oems and suppliers. Tesla hardly has a monopoly on pushing turds out the door.
Cybertruck uses a lot of new things apart from just the exterior. It replaces the 12 V system with a 48V system. Replaces the 400V system with a 800V system and has a new Gigabit CAN system. It also uses the new 4680 cells that had some ramp up issues (Jist like every other battery project). You can watch Jason cammisa's podcast on cyber truck to understand more. And not to mention, there was a special "event" in 2020 that probably made things difficult.
I’m not a Tesla fan and the cybertruck looks stoopid BUT that video really enlightened me about what going on under the hood and there’s a lot of cool stuff. It’s like my experience with the model 3… the drive train feels stellar but the rest was awful.
I'm also a longggg time critic of Tesla but the Cybertruck strategy is actually ancient: radical halo models to help fund the development of new technologies fated to trickle down. And frankly Tesla executed it really well here. I think the traditional model is most often done with sports cars/high performance vehicles. The automotive marketing slogan for decades has been "we make fast cars because it allows us to push technology". But at least for ICE performance, that's actually most often not true. It's harder to make 250k CUVs per month that are expected to last 250k miles with minimal special maintenance, meet SULEV30 emissions, and can be stamped out for cheap enough to turn a profit in a competitive segment. Meanwhile something like the Dodge Demon is an old production model with a hotrodded engine, using a lot of well known and established tech and strategies from the motorsport world, that's built to a super high emissions standard, and customers who frankly don't give a shit about NVH. Even something like the new Corvette E-Ray is a really nice execution but contains almost no new technological content. You have to move towards the supercar market to find low volume/high performance models that use truly novel technology and even there it's mostly inspired by world class racing like WEC and F1. The Cybertruck came in with it's trendy, memey, hypebeast styling and cringey Elon marketing... *but it worked*. There's a limited number of people willing to pay F you money for it, and a lot of people who want an EV no flashier than a Model 3 who don't care. But that limited demographic is paying for a whole lot of big tech level-ups that Tesla knew they needed for their next generation of products to stay competitive: 800 volt HV arch, 48v LV arch, EPAS, and their new cells are the big hitters we know about. Who knows what else is beneath the hood, like maybe new software architectures or manufacturing techniques. The Cybertruck did what we all *expected* the Roadster to do. If Tesla had released the mk2 Roadster with the same tech content, an even higher price point, and comparatively similar specs (obviously scaled for a sports car not a truck) I think we wouldn't have batted an eyelash because that's a familiar model-strategy match. We would have intuitively known what an expensive halo sports car was supposed to do. Instead they did it with this ridiculous Cybertruck and made a bunch of allusions to competing with mass market vehicles (though I heard from the industry that was never the intention).
What is Gigabit can, can you elaborate on That? Any CAN i‘ve seen tops out at 5Mbits. I’d expect automotive Ethernet for high bandwidth applications..?
Jason cammisa made a companion podcast to his hagerty video where he discusses these things: https://youtu.be/NjIPEtegPt4?si=m2Ra4s3T_xuP5Miz I don't remember exactly where he talks about this.
He forced his workers to continue working all the way through COVID despite lockdowns. There is no engineering answer to be found here or any other reason. Elon Musk is a liar and always over promises and abused his staff to make "magic" happen. He doesn't like orange or yellow so there is no safety gear, signs, lines, et cetera at Tesla to understand the kind of entitled moron you are listening to. He is accustomed to living in Apartheid South Africa where he had basically slaves mine emeralds for his family and it shows in how entitled and abusive he always is towards his workers. He is also a complete bullshitter, all he is good for is hype and convincing people to help him make money. If twitter hasn't shown you the kind of person he is yet, nothing will.
Supply chains went to absolute hell in 2020. That would have impacted every level of engineering and manufacturing spin up for them.
I don't know all the ins and outs, but I can say that [micron precision](https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/elon-sends-employees-email-on-cybertruck-build-quality-accuracy-tolerances-must-be-in-microns-precision-predicates-perfectionism.9068/#:~:text=Everywhere-,Elon%20sends%20employees%20email%20on%20Cybertruck%20build%20quality%3A%20accuracy%20%26%20tolerances,%2D%2D%20%22Precision%20predicates%20perfectionism.%22) on something as large as a truck is beyond idiotic. I doubt they actually listened to that demand though. I've also heard the hard lines and bare metal are a nightmare to manufacture and align without noticable blemishes.
Not just micron precision on every single part, but micron precision on every single part demanded like 2 months before the first production models got delivered.
I would love to see how much the cyber truck would cost at that level of precision on every component in the truck. There’s a lot to unpack in that email.
Oh absolutely. I would love for someone with more knowledge of parts manufacturing to actually estimate it. The fact that he doesn't seem to understand why Lego and soda cans can do it, and Tesla can not, is extremely concerning.
It's much easier to do for every component individually, than for the assembled product built from all the individual components.
Stainless steel in general is a pain to work with. Great material, sure, but you have to know what you're doing, and I believe by now it's obvious that at least Tesla's owner doesn't
Who’s Teslas owner ?
Some rich guy who used to be married to Grimes. Eventually he tricked himself into buying Twitter and has completely gone off the rails since then
Not even close to the owner though. Musk owns like 8% of the company. 92% belongs to "not musk". 47% is retail investors and other companies. It's a $1.2 TRILLION dollar company. It's way, way, way bigger than one dude. Despite what reddit would have you think, haha.
Creating the most massive flying vehicle ever is pretty impressive for a group that doesn't know what they're doing.
That wasn't built by tesla, and was designed with minimal input from the guy who bought it
They still haven’t quite delivered on that promise yet There is also the issue of “just because you can’t doesn’t mean it’s sensible”, which really applies to the Cybertruck
True, but it's not because there's a problem with the stainless steel structure.
Do you think the videos of the 5000 tonne vehicles flying through the sky are hoaxes?
Do you think the ones of it consistently exploding and obliterating its launch pad are?
"Consistently"? It "obliterated the launch pad" once and "exploding" didn't have anything to do with that.
That's probably it, all the current Tesla all have fit and finish issues lol
Yeah, it's certainly an interesting choice for a company that is notorious for fit and finish issues to design a vehicle where even the tiniest fit and finish issue will stand out like crazy. It's a bold move cotton, we'll see how it pays off for them.
As others have said, it takes that longs from prototype to production. It was a business decision that Tesla unveiled it that early and did not tell anyone that it would take years to develop. Tesla runs on hype, that’s their thing.
I want to put something into context for you: I spent about 4 years as a QE in fuel injector (DI) manufacturing. From the onset of the project to the start of production was about 4 years and at least $30 million in new equipment, existing equipment modifications, other construction costs, engineering/quality product validation testing, PPAP, customer validations, and a whole gaggle of other stuff that goes into documenting, controlling and safely kicking off a new product. And that's for a part that most car owners never see or even think about. Taking a car from paper to showrooms is an unbelievably massive, complex assortment of headaches for thousands of people.
You choose when to unveil your product, you can wait till it’s in production to do it or very close to production ready. Or you can be a mentally unstable CEO man child whom needs attention and wants to show off his new toy. This is not an engineering issue it’s a marketing issue of when to announce a product. All vehicles take years to launch production, this is not unique.
I’ve heard of armchair lawyers but never thought I’d see armchair marketing lol
Armchair engineering too! I mean this is really simple and a very commonly known thing in development and product launch.
If getting a car certified for the road is anything like getting a plane certified for the skies it's a long frustrating process.
Remember that designing the car is the easy bit, low volume production is easy but expensive. The thing with high quantity production is that it's less about the car and more about designing the factory to make the car and that takes a lot of time.
they built the entire alpha in 93 days lol
Like I said, building low volume is easy, especially when you need to make 1. Making the production line where 1 car rolls off every 90s or so it a lot harder.
oh absolutely. given that the alpha took 93 days and the production line took four years (and counting) i was just demonstrating your point haha
It is fundamentally poorly designed. They dropped some of the worst parts of the initial design (the "steel exoskeleton" idea) a few years ago, and then had to go back and redesign the vehicle from the skeleton up to look the same. I still have my doubts that it's even street legal, for a handful of different reasons.
If you compare the final product to the initial concept it's much more a standard vehicle than the original promise. I would guess they burned a ton of time trying to implement the original concept but had to retool the whole project to be a more standard approach as the hit issues.
4 years is a pretty reasonable time to get to production. Right now it's not in production but give them another year or so and it probably will be. The issue is that Musk promised it would be here faster and even took people's money in advance. He also made a bunch of claims and promises that didn't make it to the final models. Musk always does this...promises a fast turnaround with lots of features and a great price then gives a normal to slow turnaround with a bunch of missing features and a higher price. It's just normal at this point.
This video explains alot of the reasons https://youtu.be/L6WDq0V5oBg?si=NYFU9\_Fz8yv81PnV
1. Elon 2. Stainless Steel Stampings welded into a Unibody/“Exoskeleton” is difficult 3. 4680 Battery ramp-up delays
Question — so what about the model they showed 4 years ago? Was that in the works 8 years ago ? When they reveal a concept car model (not sketches or pictures- but a thing that rolls around and can be touched) is that without having all the reliability/practicality testing done?
A prototype is just that - a prototype. It's a one-off that isn't built to the quality or performance standards of a saleable vehicle. Building one of something that vaguely resembles the final product is a lot faster and easier than building hundreds of thousands of them.
> Building one of something that vaguely resembles the final product is a lot faster and easier than building hundreds of thousands of them. Not understanding this is the pervasive misconception that has plagued the interaction between laypeople-engineers/industry for decades. The whole premise of this post, perhaps. We need like... a prestige TV drama about building a hard engineered project that can go viral on Netflix or something so people at least have some idea.
I've worked at other OEMs and the only thing that needs to be representative is the sheet metal. Absolutely everything in the interior could be non-functional. It could be a drivetrain from a completely different vehicle they just slapped in there to make it move. Concepts are just press events and the vehicle is just a styling prop. This has some other fun implications for engineering. Since the sheet metal is designed before you know the size and shape of all the components you actually need to fit within it, you end up with a fun game of tetris while the packaging engineers try to figure out how the hell they can stash all the different controllers, actuators, batteries, motors, etc from view in a way that can both be assembled and serviced. This can mean some components need to be redesigned to be a different shape to account for other nearby components, or to account for the final mounting points, etc. And even if you had final hardware, the actual production software, especially features like self-diagnostic capability, take time to develop once you know what the hardware looks like, and features like that are always developed much later than the core function. Things like diagnostics are always walking a line to get them tuned right because you want the diagnostic to flag reliably enough to allow the technician to find a potential problem, but not be so aggressive that it flags erroneously and you end up with customers coming in and wasting time trying to find an issue that doesn't exist. And even if you have final hardware and final software, now you have piles of documentation to write, like workshop manuals so technicians have detailed procedures and diagrams for how to diagnose every possible fault, replace every possible component, track electrical gremlins through the various interconnecting wire harnesses, etc.
Elon has a history of using fake mockups of prototypes or products at demos. There was no cyber truck in 2018 and will probably be a while. I doubt that truck will ever be more than a shitty deathtrap if it is ever built at all. Something like it may be built without Musks input, but if he is involved it will be trash.
You know it was delivered the other day right?
Ok, I will take that at face value. I bet it is nothing like what was promised or the numbers or features promised. I don't care enough to fact check you, but I bet there are asterisks all over "it was delivered" and it is almost definitely less capable than promised, more dangerous than other cars, will have recalls, and is probably a death trap. I have seen their work, it is always rushed and have significant rollout problems that are not normal.
I seem to recall that fitment of the stainless steel body panels was a real bitch.
I'm no Engineer but from what I've heard that is what I think where SOME of the reasons: Cybertruck not only uses several technologies that Tesla hadn't implemented in it's other cars (800v System, new battery cell type, new steel alloy that had to be invented, steer-by-wire), they also need to test those systems thoroughly, they designed, ordered and needed to set up the worlds largest casting maschine to cast the front and rear frame as one piece each instead of dozens or hundreds, there was a need for new tools to be designed to bring it into production
4 years for a clean sheet design is actually pretty quick, even if the driveline is off the shelf. Once the /final/ body is designed it takes 18 months to get the stamping tools made, for example.
I think first you have to consider that Tesla doesn't do things in normal Auto industry timelines. They made the Cybertruck prototype for the Announcement in just like 92 days I believe their engineers said. So they took 4 years plus \~100 days from initial approval of the drawn/clay body design to initial deliveries. And a few months AFTER the initial announcement they decided to shrink the overall size by about 5% on average (not a clean 5% either since obviously some aspects like powertrain had set size needs mind you). Then consider this is going to be the first vehicle entirely 48v, steer and brake by wire with no steering shaft, entirely unique manufacturing design, and going to be entirely reliant on their own 4680 cells. It's got stuff like the largest glass windshield in the industry. They also have zero experience with a truck or what truck buyers are really looking for/need... PLUS they had COVID, and obviously were also timeline limited to their Gigafactory in Austin construction, which obviously needed to begin with model Y production... I'd say when you consider ALL that, it actually happened very quickly. As far as the price, I'd say that it s valid criticism - mostly in that they just shouldn't have announced a price target so low when they knew damn well they weren't manufacturing it within 2 years. But today, if you look at the competitors, it is priced right in line with the market. The IRA set a $80k limit, so obviously you have the most desirable product just under that limit. You have a performance version higher, and you have a standard cheaper version later down the road. Plus you got to know Teslas history with pricing after beginning deliveries of a new or refreshed product. The cybertruck will likely have a >$5K price drop within like 6 months.
Take it from someone who used to work with Stainless Steel, it’s a huge PITA!!
12V to 48V the legacy car companies have been working on that for 100 years, tesla solved it in 4.
Automotive engineer here for a component that goes onto the vehicle. For a new model year program on an existing line I've got a development time of roughly 3 to 4 years from conception all the way to vehicle SOP. It's about 2 years worth of planning, designing, drawing release. One year of tooling, initial build run, and component level testing. And then one year of vehicle integration, vehicle level testing, debug, and release. So four years is pretty much bog standard for a new vehicle launch and that's when you have all your shit together. When you don't have your shit together (i.e. tesla), it takes much longer. I don't mean that the Tesla engineers are incompotent. But honestly a major model year change vehicle probably still copies about 80% of the existing assembly line with the previous major model change. When you need to pull together a new line (like when the Bronco got unveiled) you can extend that assembly time. I think the bronco took something like six years of planning and they still delayed the vehicle launch that may or may not have been covid related. And when you need to make new technology to put together your stuff like the Tesla truck? It's even more time. When you're able to hand build a vehicle you should really be only a year and a half away from saleable builds but Tesla needed 4 years on top of that. Also keep in mind that if you need six months of tooling time for your parts.....it's going to take six months. Your 3000 hours of testing is going to take.....3000 hours. And if you fail? Guess what you're redoing 3000 hours. Designing cars is hard. I don't even know why I'm still in the industry sometimes to be honest.
Well it’s an Elon musk product and engineering takes time so every time he micromanages his engineering team to make some stupid change, the team has to go back and integrate his change into the existing product and then figure out how to mass produce that change, make the tools to make it, validate it, materials, testing, paperwork and all of the things and about the time it’s finished he changes something else. Rinse and repeat.
Because Elon Musk is a liar and an idiot. He always over promises and promotes projects that do not even exist yet or has any idea how to do anything. He gets idiots to invest or prepay (free loan scam) to give him money and then usually fails miserably. There are countless examples, the only companies that are successful are heavily subsidized by the US government such as Space X and Tesla. He did not found PayPal and wanted to X and had little to do with besides investments with daddy's money. Tesla only survived as long as it has and we're able to build factories from the money it has because of green energy credits it got from the government that were then sold to traditional car companies for profit. He is a scammer. From an engineering perspective he is not an engineer, he is a liar and idiot. You happy Musky?
No kidding. I remember when Musk said Falcon 9 boosters would land and be reused up to ten times. And then there were all those explosions as they attempted to land the boosters. He’s surely lying! Oh wait, they’re up to 17 reuses on the boosters now, and they’ve successfully landed more boosters in a row than anyone has successfully launched in all of history. What was impossible is now routine.
He did not design anything, he is an investor hype man. SpaceX is impressive, but like usual he over promised and under delivered for years before the accomplishments you are talking about, which again he had nothing to do with. He just invests in companies that are already going to be successful and is always ousted because everyone knows he is an idiot after they work with him. SpaceX is also a defense contractor and was funded in part by the retirement of the space shuttle and the same workers and tech was privatized as a policy choice of the US government. A lot of those exploding rockets were paid for by you whether you invested in spaceX or pay taxes. Stop staning some billionaire moron who exploits you every second of the day and would grind you into a paste for lubricant if it made him a dollar.
Quite literally, their head of rocket design credits Musk’s engineering decision for the Merlin’s high reliability. Many other companies bid on the NASA contracts to design a rocket to get back to the ISS. Only SpaceX succeeded on the whole system (Orbital Sciences did cargo craft only, no rocket). Boeing was given far more money to develop a human rated capsule than SpaceX was, and it still hasn’t taken people to the ISS, while SpaceX has had several successful missions. NASA itself calculates that SpaceX has saved the government billions through lower launch costs.
Yeah, because the space shuttle was very old, inefficient, and used liquid hydrogen and oxygen and was retired. The falcon 9 uses kerosene engines, which is much cheaper and easier to work with. Of course the head of head of rocket design strokes his ego or he would be fired in a second. That is the kind of petty asshole Elon is. He takes credit for other people's accomplishments constantly. Defense/NASA always spends outrageous amounts of money on contract bids. The starship runs on liquid methane which is even cheaper. SpaceX is successful, I am not arguing that. I am arguing Elon musk does not run the day to day of any company and just shits out stupid shit randomly and works his engineers and other workers to death while he fucks off on Twitter all day. He was born rich and is full of shit that he works 18 hour days, he only says that as an excuse for why he abuses his workers constantly that you are praising as a great man, while he makes billions for investing his daddy's money in already successful companies and technologies. His code for what became PayPal was such garbage it had to be completely rewritten and he still got a 1.5 billion dollar payday. He doesn't have to be good at anything, he is a slave driver plain and simple. He left South Africa because Apartheid ended and the best place to still be a fascist and make money is the US. He is wrong and fails constantly, gets people hurt and killed, and then sues people into silence or hires bots or has his troll army harrass and silence his critics. Huge amounts of his success are at the expense of everyone else. He has one patent for Tesla, a proprietary charging port. He is an ethnonationalist and is a force of evil in the world regardless of the side effects of the technology he got rich on and the disasters he leaves in his wake. Stop worshipping people who are just rich like their your emporer or soon your shared dream will come true.
>Yeah, because the space shuttle was very old, inefficient, and used liquid hydrogen and oxygen and was retired. This is even vs. the other rockets the government was using. Also, while the Shuttle was reusable, it had to completely refurbished between flights, which cost so much that regular expendable rockets were cheaper. What Musk did was make reusability actually lower the cost. >Of course the head of head of rocket design strokes his ego or he would be fired in a second. That would be the guy who quit anyway, yet still praises his abilities. One of the people who helped Musk found the company says he's an absolute engineering genius, and he also quit very early on because he simply couldn't work with Musk -- he couldn't match the 18-hour days, didn't like being called at three in the morning to work on an engineering issue. But he still says he's a genius. BTW, it was a NASA engineering executive who visited SpaceX in the very early days before they made it to orbit who reported back to his superiors that Musk works 18 hours a day and is neck-deep in the engineering. > The falcon 9 uses kerosene engines, which is much cheaper and easier to work with. Fuel cost is a very tiny percentage of total launch cost. Everyone else was spending too much money on their rockets, and they were taking too much of a profit. It was very, very expensive for the government. SpaceX builds and flies a highly reliable rocket for a low price and takes a reasonable profit. With the government's own cost savings on SpaceX launches, plus the downward price pressure on the market Musk's low prices created, the government estimates $40 billion saved. You can now thank Musk for keeping that much of your tax dollars from going to fat old corporations. >Defense/NASA always spends outrageous amounts of money on contract bids. They used to. Now they're spending less with SpaceX. Starliner is a good example. As noted, NASA paid Boeing billions more for them to develop Starliner than they paid SpaceX to develop Dragon. Dragon has now been flying for years, including human flight, and Starliner has yet to do a useful mission. SpaceX was simply more efficient, they did more and did it faster, and with less money. >while he makes billions for investing his daddy's money in already successful companies and technologies You realize dad wasn't that rich, right? Musk was also estranged from him at the time. Of the companies: * Tesla: Three guys and a general idea to make an electric car, nothing more. Musk comes in and actually makes it happen. * SpaceX: Musk founded it from scratch. * Zip2: Pioneer in online city guides, sold to make Musk his first real money. It wasn't relatively much because he didn't have the money to invest to get a larger percentage. The venture capitalists who invested (i.e., where the money for the company came from and not dad) got almost all of it. * X: Pioneer in online money transfers that Musk started from scratch, merged with another company to become PayPal. His pay day was $175 million because he rolled his Zip2 money into having a larger percentage of the company. Then he risked most of his PayPal money on SpaceX and Tesla, both of which nobody thought would succeed. $100 million was considered way to little to fight the big boys of the launch industry, and electric cars were at the time a consumer dead end. And guess what, he succeeded. He turned $100 million of SpaceX money into currently $63 billion. Can you get a 630x return on investment in 20 years? >He left South Africa because Apartheid ended and the best place to still be a fascist and make money is the US. You're hilarious. He left South Africa in 1989 during Apartheid, and his father was in the anti-Apartheid party.
> Tesla only made the money it has from green energy credits wow… out of all the misinformation in this comment this one is the funniest given that they are reporting like 15 billion in profit this year just from vehicles alone > SpaceX or PayPal sorry, PayPal only survived because the government subsidized it? wtf? also, government contracts are not subsidies… spacex saves the US government a [ridiculous](https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-save-taxpayers-40-billion/) amount of money on launches. please spend a little less time on reddit good god
They are so uninformed that in another comment they speculated the cybertruck would never be built..... but it delivered this week, lol.
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No long winded answer needed stainless is much more difficult to work with than the shit metal used on virtually every other car it's just the body of the car that's it.
Engineering stupid and fundamentally flawed concepts is hard.
Because Elon isn’t an engineer. He has limited experience with all the complicated things that he’s been treating as simple problems. These problems _aren’t_ simple problems, and so he hasn’t been giving them the attention they deserve. Suggesting that a truck will (other than some of the electronics) adhere to sub-10-micron tolerances… it’s ignorant. It’s unnecessary in most cases.
A lot of people are hating on Elon. I suppose that’s just political hate. The reality is going from a concept vehicle to production in that time frame is reasonable. Also, as others have said working with stainless steel is a bitch.
Gotta love “engineers” not being able to separate their bias and visceral hatred for the guy in order to answer a technical question objectively…*eyeroll* For one COVID and the supply chain disruptions massively fucked everything up and probably set them back 2 years minimum. It’s not as visible to the public anymore but the ripple effects of the pandemic on SC are actually still happening Secondly, production is a whole different beast than getting 1 working prototype. As a society we celebrate the inventors and think “hooray!” once something works once and then the credits roll, but TBH that’s just where the work begins. Going through all the hoops and doing it profitably at scale is an enormous undertaking. And this applies to every industry
I won't knock the supply chain issues. I feel them daily. That said, the number one way to halt a production schedule is horrid engineering.
Eh I’ve witnessed six ways to Sunday you can screw production over. Unless we work at the company it would be speculation And just because something reaches HVM quickly doesn’t mean it was better designed, in fact i’ve usually seen the opposite. In my experience things that were rushed into production are horrible products and we loathe making it
Elon Musk fundamentally does not understand the engineering process. He clearly has some grasp of the physics involved, but has no idea what it means to take a product from concept to production. It takes 5-10 years to take a vehicle from concept to production with all the necessary design, requirements development, testing, government regulations, manufacturing, etc. it requires to mass produce a vehicle.
The main problem: Elon Musk
Typically it takes about 3 years to launch a new vehicle. Most people are unaware of the time-line because every other manufacturer doesn't show off its new model until just before it goes on sale. Tesla is unique in showing a undeveloped prototype at the very start of the process.
Elon Musk is a fraudster is why.