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Tesla’s New Car Smell

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Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#181

Post by ucaetano »

tenpies wrote: post #128
prostoalex wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota’s recalls are expensive, as they involve a network of dealers who need to be paid for providing the repair and maintenance. Tesla’s vertical integration of service centers has an interesting side effect - recalls and repairs are pretty cheap, as the costs of service centers and loaner vehicles they give out are fixed and have been borne already. I wonder if that makes the company more dismissive of potential i…

This is scary because it points to a potential future where they're treating cars like software. Weekly/monthly visits to the garage to get the car equivalent of "Weekly bug fixes and performance improvements" would be absolutely off-putting.

They are doing it already, they launched the latest batch with emergency braking off, to be enabled after some real world testing.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#182

Post by dilemma »

Animats wrote: post #165
struppi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"JIT just pushes the costs on to smaller suppliers who a large company can effectively bully in the same way big supermarkets bully framers." This is not how the TPS works (At least not in theory. In practice, bullying may or may not happen - I don't know about any). The idea behind JIT is that you can react to changes in external circumstances faster. Also, the suppliers should also not have huge stockpiles of parts…

If you have a stamping plant, you usually have far fewer presses than part numbers. You stamp out some part, then change dies to stamp out another part. Die changing and adjustment is time-consuming and is non-productive downtime. Once a press and die set is running well, it will produce parts at a good rate without much attention, but die changing is labor-intensive. The less often you change, the lower the cost per…

There are two ways of doing production: large batches, like you describe, and TPS. It is counterintuitive but TPS makes small batch production more efficient and more cost effective than large batches because it looks at the production system as a whole. You may want to read up on it - Check out The Machine That Changed the World.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#183

Post by gumby »

tome wrote: post #122
sumedh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Etymologically, Quality Control implies some sort of feedback. Quality Assurance merely implies a filter at the end of some process.

Actually QA applies from the beginning of the process while QC is the check.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#184

Post by nihonde »

hector_ka wrote: post #158
nihonde wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at how Toyota's dealership network operates in Japan (Toyopet, Netz, etc.), you'll see that Toyota is capable of vertically integrating the entire distribution chain very well. My own experience of buying (in my case a Suzuki kei model) a domestic car in Japan was quite eye-opening: my dealer came to my house and had tea with us, found us the best, least-expensive configuration of the car, dropped it off…

I am fascinated about this . Do you know where we can get more info about the way businesses treat their customers in Japan?

It’s basically impossible to learn about Japanese culture by reading things in English. For some reason, Japan brings out the worst kinds of cynics and misanthropes, all of whom feel the need to dispel anything positive that’s said about the place. In my experience, many businesses in Japan go beyond customer service and provide what I would characterize as hospitality or the kind of consideration that could only be repaid with goodwill and familial loyalty. Not to say that they are infallible: I bought a knife from one of the oldest blacksmiths in Kyoto and he flat-out forgot my order until we bothered him a month later. Damn good knife, though.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#185

Post by rconti »

wpietri wrote: post #164
brianwawok wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota also had profits of billions of dollars from other lines to back their Hybrid model. Tesla is basically a really big startup, and has nowhere near the cash reserve to take 6 years to bring the model 3 to market. It it basically get it out NOW, or fold. In 6 years Ford etc. etc. already has a model 3 equivalent for sale and knows how to manufacture. You can't play it so safe in an established market if you want…

I don't think it works like that. "Getting it out now" means building a very reliable, high-volume production line. If you rush that, you get an unreliable production line, which unless you just ship garbage, will be a low-volume production line or a very expensive production line. Or both. I understand why "hair-on-fire mode" feels right. One's internal feelings of urgency are matched by dramatic action. The chaos a…

I just don't get the theory being passed around here that if they don't nail the process absolutely right on the first try (okay, third) that it can't improve.

What's wrong with improving the process as you go, as Toyota almost certainly did?

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#186

Post by omarforgotpwd »

xenadu02 wrote: post #49

Manufacturing ramp-up is exactly this sort of thing. Building by-hand as you work out the process and employ more automation. I'm not sure this is unexpected? As an investor I know full well Tesla has a ticking clock. They must achieve scale before the giants can catch up. People underestimate how god-awful slow the big car makers are. They haven't even come to terms with what Tesla is really doing yet. None have any…

Exactly... you're writing to tell me that Tesla's factory in 2016 was not as advanced as Honda's? Well... I'm not surprised. Honda is extremely good at producing extremely large numbers of cars and Tesla produces very few.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#187

Post by rconti »

prostoalex wrote: post #85
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think Tesla has the best system? The managers in charge of autopilot keep quitting. The media says they are quitting because Elon is making deceptive claims about autopilot. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

It’s not like choosing a fridge, where there are 500 models available. There are two autopilot systems commercially available today - Tesla Autopilot and Honda Sensing Driver Assistance. Two more are slated to be released - Cadillac SuperCruise and Audi Traffic Jam Pilot. The rest is an all-you-can-read buffet of press releases about some great tech this one company tested in this one lab (I hear Waymo is great, and…

I looked at Honda's PR site for Honda Sensing Driver Assistance. Lane departure, forward collision warning, collision mitigation? So, in other words, everything my Golf has? Hell, the DSG Golfs will even go to a full stop on laser cruise. It takes a button press to get it to resume, but it's pretty damn close to non-steering autopilot (yes, it has lane keeping, but like most of these systems, it makes you take over after a few seconds of inattention).

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#188

Post by rconti »

avar wrote: post #125
thrav wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My subaru’s adaptive cruise control has been pretty amazing. I still have to do most of the steering, but that’s probably a good thing in terms of keeping me engaged. I can easily go hundreds of miles from stop and go to 80 and cruising without touching the gas though.

I spent all of 5 hours in a new Subaru Outback I rented this summer and wasn't impressed. I could set the cruise control to a certain speed and it would normally slow down if there was congestion, which was very nice. But it wouldn't work at bends in the road, because the system was seemingly just directly ahead line-of-sight. I wanted to see if it would slow down itself in that situation before I had to slam the bre…

Huh, I have relatives who really love the system in their outback. I know the system in my VW impeccably follows cars in front of it, in bad weather, at imprudent speeds, around sharp bends, perfect.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#189

Post by TeMPOraL »

ucaetano wrote: post #179
TeMPOraL wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-drivin…

Ockham razor suggests that he's doing so to avoid losing money. That's a far, far more simple explanation.

It doesn't pass the sniff test. Musk demonizing AI to slow down progress in self-driving even though he's very big on it and pushing hard to make it work? What?

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#190

Post by brianwawok »

rconti wrote: post #185
wpietri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it works like that. "Getting it out now" means building a very reliable, high-volume production line. If you rush that, you get an unreliable production line, which unless you just ship garbage, will be a low-volume production line or a very expensive production line. Or both. I understand why "hair-on-fire mode" feels right. One's internal feelings of urgency are matched by dramatic action. The chaos a…

I just don't get the theory being passed around here that if they don't nail the process absolutely right on the first try (okay, third) that it can't improve. What's wrong with improving the process as you go, as Toyota almost certainly did?

How serious the problems are will determine if they are 2 month to fix problems or 2 year. If they are 2 year then model3 is in for some trouble.
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