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Tesla’s New Car Smell

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Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#111

Post by rkangel »

sumedh wrote: post #96
gumby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot inspect your way to quality. I have to emphasize the sentence you ended your comment with. Anybody who has worked in volume production has heard this phrase too many times to count. People who never learned the difference between QC and QA never seem to understand this phrase either. Doesn't mean they are dumb, but does mean they don't even understand the scope of what they don't know. Another common mis…

> People who never learned the difference between QC and QA never seem to understand this phrase either. Can you please explain the difference?

QA is checking that your output is good.

QC is making sure that your output is good before it gets to QA.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#112

Post by Lazare »

carlivar wrote: post #38
Hypx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty self-evident if you read the next two paragraphs: > (Ironically, the Fremont plant is prominently featured in “The Machine…” as the locus of the ultimately failed GM-Toyota cooperation.) > As I watched Tesla’s messy, hiccuping line, with workers dashing in to fix faulty parts in place, my mind travelled back to the Honda plant I had visited years ago in Marysville, Ohio. Clean, calm, everything moved smoo…

I really find it hard to believe they don't understand the TPS. Sure. Maybe. I don't know. It seems more likely to me their "goal" (pun intended for those readers of "The Goal") is the TPS but their particular supply chain may not currently allow for it.

TPS is, in part, a way of configuring your supply chain in order to ramp up production smoothly.

Tesla wants to ramp up production as their primary goal right now; if their supply chain is preventing them from doing so then they've funamentally failed.

> I really find it hard to believe they don't understand the TPS.

I agree, but that makes this more confusing and (at least potentially) more damning for Tesla. It's not that hard a concept; if you're running a manufacturing company but you screw up your supply chain badly then...I dunno. Maybe you're bad at running a manufacturing company? Supply chains are really important when you're doing something like making cars. And people having been advocating TPS since before I was even born.

So...it's a conundrum.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#113

Post by Gibbon1 »

carlivar wrote: post #38
Hypx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty self-evident if you read the next two paragraphs: > (Ironically, the Fremont plant is prominently featured in “The Machine…” as the locus of the ultimately failed GM-Toyota cooperation.) > As I watched Tesla’s messy, hiccuping line, with workers dashing in to fix faulty parts in place, my mind travelled back to the Honda plant I had visited years ago in Marysville, Ohio. Clean, calm, everything moved smoo…

I really find it hard to believe they don't understand the TPS. Sure. Maybe. I don't know. It seems more likely to me their "goal" (pun intended for those readers of "The Goal") is the TPS but their particular supply chain may not currently allow for it.

Might be the production _rate_ for the previous models doesn't mesh well with their suppliers. We buy plastics in runs of 15,000 parts. It takes us a couple of months to go through those. And then we order more. The manufacturer doesn't make 200 parts a day. Or 1000 a week. The do a full run of 5-20,000 every three months. Which takes them a whole day, once the machine is setup they run it till the order is filled. Sometimes it's obvious they do higher runs and then break up the shipments.

Okay so our products are cheap and simple. But our yearly totals of 50,000 to 100,000 units is comparable to the what Tesla is hoping to get out the door. Tesla's numbers for previous models weren't nearly that high. Gonna be hard to just in time that.

Personal feeling. What an automaker is doing by outsourcing parts to suppliers and then making them manage inventory is. a) they as someone mentioned, keep the inventory management away from the production line. And importantly allowing suppliers to apply higher levels of scale then you could other wise. Important because likely many of Tesla's suppliers production machinery has vastly more capacity then Tesla needs. Telsa and other automakers are thus 'renting' time on those machines.

Frankly I think Tesla is ramping to this scale for the first time, it's bound to be a mess.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#114

Post by egeozcan »

sumedh wrote: post #96
gumby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot inspect your way to quality. I have to emphasize the sentence you ended your comment with. Anybody who has worked in volume production has heard this phrase too many times to count. People who never learned the difference between QC and QA never seem to understand this phrase either. Doesn't mean they are dumb, but does mean they don't even understand the scope of what they don't know. Another common mis…

> People who never learned the difference between QC and QA never seem to understand this phrase either. Can you please explain the difference?

QA is like linting, having a style guide, having a strong type system and so on.

QC is looking for bugs for in the usual suspects for every output and fixing them as you discover. This can be automated and/or manual.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#115

Post by TeMPOraL »

selectodude wrote: post #100
joelthelion wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Honda doesn't make interesting cars. People are ready to cut Tesla some slack because they are truly innovating.

Because they put a battery in a car?

Because they single-handedly forced the market against its will to accept electric cars, and we're all better off thanks to it, now that regular car companies decided to join the party too.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#116

Post by Tade0 »

selectodude wrote: post #100
joelthelion wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Honda doesn't make interesting cars. People are ready to cut Tesla some slack because they are truly innovating.

Because they put a battery in a car?

Nope, because they made a car without a combustion engine and still managed to convince some people to buy it.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#118

Post by bsaul »

jaimex2 wrote: post #117

Why is this on HN? Guy goes to a group tour and is suddenly an expert in auto manufacturing. "Sees chaos" and stock piled parts.

I think because the guy is jean louis gassée, former ceo of BeInc , which did built their own computers ( as well as an ex apple high ranked employee). So he has experience both with high tech and manufacturing issues.

Granted, he's not an auto industry specialist but he's not the average joe either.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#119

Post by TeMPOraL »

skgoa wrote: post #105
tgtweak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also they've disabled autopilot for the time being. It's an interesting time for Tesla, they feel like the automotive equivalent of AMD - David keeping Goliath honest. How many automotive companies saw Tesla become an actual disruptive threat and then spent tens of billions on self driving and electrification? Tesla isn't going to compete with Honda or Toyota by copying their model (or even their manufacturing proces…

> How many automotive companies saw Tesla become an actual disruptive threat and then spent tens of billions on self driving and electrification? 0. You have fallen for the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. Tesla was not the first company that worked on these things. They were just the first who decided to sell a semi practical implementation and hype it up as if it where completely finished and polished.

True for the self-driving part, false for the electrification part. Tesla seems to be the first company to solve the range problem of electric cars, thus delivering something practical for almost everyone.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#120

Post by TeMPOraL »

ucaetano wrote: post #73
rtpg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't the BMWs of the world have this tech integrated into their cars too? I get Tesla's cars are really good, but my understanding was that it wasn't "miles ahead".

Yes, actually, most of the "Autopilot" features have been available in production cars for over a decade. Tesla is really late to this game, although people can't seem to realize it because of the distortion field. And that's before we get into disengagements per 1000 miles, where Tesla trails most of the industry by far. No wonder Musk tries to demonize AI. Self-driving is a race to the bottom, with its development…

> No wonder Musk tries to demonize AI.

Ockham's razor suggests it's more likely Elon Musk simply got convinced by the Yudkowsky/Bostrom view on the problem of Unfriendly AI (I particularly recall Musk starting to talk about AI only after reading Bostrom's Superintelligence, but that might have been just a coincidence).

Also note that Musk is "demonizing" advanced AI that doesn't exist yet, but is huge on self-driving.

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