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Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

latimes.com

101–110 of 112 posts

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#101
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unusual in the auto industry. Usually, plants run a second shift rather than paying overtime to the first shift. It's cheaper. Accident rates go up and quality goes down as employees get tired. You have to have a meal break in there, which costs more line downtime than a shift change.

Tesla must have a hard time hiring. I'm shocked they aren't running three shifts with the production backlog they have.

They started running three shifts some months ago.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#102
post #70

The title itself uses a basic framing technique intentionally written to fool you into a false conclusion. 1- "worse than slaughterhouses and sawmills" is more catchy than "better than X" (chose any X automaker) 2- Is the safety level of a slaughterhouses or a sawmill comparable to a car's ? They are things not in the same category, with different sophistication level and different purpose, how many times a day an av…

Of course they aren't. Working on a slaughter house requires gear, starting from chainmail gloves so you don't lose fingers and on.

Have you ever entered a sawmill? Don't get me started.

So, if Tesla is a higher injury place than a sawmill, somebody shoduld send inspections and audit the place thoroughly.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#103
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla must have a hard time hiring. I'm shocked they aren't running three shifts with the production backlog they have.

They started running three shifts some months ago.

Why did that guy say he was working 12-16 hrs per day? I'm out of the loop on internal Tesla matters.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#104
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be "below _median_ safety records."

"Average" is a colloquial term referring to any measure of central tendency. The arithmetic mean is just the most common kind of average, not the only kind.

[deleted]

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#105
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they claim otherwise about their 2015 numbers anywhere? The only thing they mention is about Q1 2017. The 2017 numbers seemed to have improved drastically, something the article recognises (but the HN headline does not :S).

Read the report and you'll find out Tesla frequently has to update its numbers after the fact. So, yes Q1 2017 might look good NOW but in 3 months after injuries manifest and other claims come in (IBNR), it could turn to total shit. Tesla wants you to forget they frequently have to raise their numbers after the fact. So, if history is any indicator, Tesla should shut its trap until it has a full year, after revisions…

"Tesla did not dispute the numbers. “We may have had some challenges in the past as we were learning how to become a car company, but what matters is the future,” a company spokesman said. “With the changes we’ve made, we now have the lowest injury rate in the industry by far.”"

Here in the future, past trends are irrelevant.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#106
post #43
post #3

Title here is misleading. Actual title of article at LA Times is "Tesla had worse safety records than slaughterhouses and sawmills" - note "had", past tense. The records in question are from 2015, and as the article says, they are working on improvements.

Ok, we've changed the baity title to representative language from the article, in accordance with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . All: let's please have a more substantive discussion now. It's amazing how sensitive these threads are to hot coals in the title.

Is there any chance that we can change the rules to make comments about the title and it's clickbaitiness off limits? This is getting to be the majority of comments.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#107
Interestingly, Tesla's approach is to hire ergonomics experts to help address the repetitive stress injuries (severe tendinitis and carpal tunnel).

Compare that with the slaughterhouse industry:

"In recent years, the industry has bragged about dramatic reductions in worker injuries. What they’ve failed to report is that the OSHA injury form was recently re-written to omit the category of repetitive stress injuries – the most commonly reported injury in the industry."

http://www.foodispower.org/slaughterhouse-workers/

So, Tesla is being compared on reported injury rates to slaughterhouses, whose standards have been re-written to exclude reporting the most common types of injuries, which just-so-happen to be the types Tesla is reporting?

(Note that the quote above comes from a pro-vegan site, so it isn't unbiased).

NPR similarly describes widespread under-reporting of injuries in the meat processing industry: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/25/479509221/we-...

I'm inclined to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt here, though we should not minimize the effects of repetitive stress disorders.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#108
post #19
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even then, the records are for number of incidents rather than severity. The two specific things they mention are tendinitis and carpal tunnel, which suck, but aren't the sort of injuries one associates with sawmills...

The title is clickbait. It's analagous to saying "Elon Musk's mouth has worse bacterial contamination than petri dish of Lyme Disease." Sure, by number of bacterial agents, Musk's mouth is more contaminated... But that's not a very useful statement unless you want to mislead people.

Agree, could also have been written Tesla had lower than average safety incidents in ..2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016.. Nothing to see here

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global warming. We're at or past the tipping point already, but electric cars and solar houses are definitely the direction we need to be going if we want to avoid disastrous and irreversible climate change. If-- if --Tesla can help make that happen, it'll be worth a lot of sacrifice.

I have real doubts about switching to electric cars being adequate to address that problem.

Alone, no, not at all. But no one change was ever going to be enough. Electric cars (and home solar, which, as I mentioned, Tesla is also big into) can both be parts of the larger puzzle.

Re: Safety incidents at Tesla plant were higher than industry average in 2015

#110
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there no unions involved? Or was he making tons of money because of overtime so didn't care until it became a critical health problem? Sounds like both the employee and the employer were falling down on the job of ensuring safe working practices. Not to mention lax regulation.

Yes there are unions involved, from the 3rd and 4th last paragraphs: > Alan Ochoa said long hours repeating the same moves over and over with a drill caused enough hand pain to prevent him from working. He was given an office job but said carpal tunnel injuries prevented him from typing on his laptop. > Tesla has made improvements, he said. “But why did they change? They changed because of its union efforts.”

Thanks for politely clarifying that. I have to confess that I read the comments rather than the article.

Must do better.

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