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Tesla’s New Car Smell

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Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#131

Post by majc2 »

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 about how you work to ensure you build a quality product QC is about the tests you do to ensure a quality product has been built.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#132

Post by Cthulhu_ »

carlivar wrote: post #18
Hypx wrote: post #13

> I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”, prescriptions for car manufacturers that are lucidly detailed in The Machine That Changed The World (a great and, in parts, sad read). In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals. If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspe…

What makes you think Tesla doesn't fundamentally grasp it? This anecdote? The plural of anecdote is not data. Your wikipedia link on the Toyota Production System says it was developed between 1948 and 1975. So it look 27 years to develop. Working for a startup myself, I'm very aware of Kanban and other TPS-inspired work processes. Sometimes in startup-hair-on-fire-mode that all goes out the window and I think that's…

Tesla isn't a startup though, they've been building cars for ten+ years and have a lot of smart people working for them that could've looked to wikipedia to figure out how the other car manufacturers manage to be efficient.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#133

Post by nihonde »

prostoalex wrote: post #80
Hypx wrote: post #13

> I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”, prescriptions for car manufacturers that are lucidly detailed in The Machine That Changed The World (a great and, in parts, sad read). In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals. If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspe…

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…

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 at the house some weeks later, and then stayed in touch like a member of our extended family, checking in every few months to let us know he was available. When I accidentally left the dome light on overnight night, he drove an hour each way to deliver and install a new battery, at 10PM, in the rain. And we had to beg him to invoice us. Sure enough, when I sold the car about a year later, I offered it to him first. He took the Shinkansen from Nagoya to Kyoto to pick it up, had tea with us, handed us an envelope with about 70% of the original purchase price in cash, and drove it home without even so much as an inspection. (By the way, the purchase price was $13K for a 2017 model that got around 80mpg.)

The inefficient dealership network is not something that emanates from Japan, but is Japan Auto adapting to local customs, legal requirements, and standards.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#134

Post by Cthulhu_ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #115
selectodude wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Forced? Not really. They made a good battery-powered car and a lot of governments heavily subsidized fully electric cars.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#136

Post by dilemma »

Animats wrote: post #82
Hypx wrote: post #13

> I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”, prescriptions for car manufacturers that are lucidly detailed in The Machine That Changed The World (a great and, in parts, sad read). In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals. If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspe…

Tesla is doing stamping on-site and in-house. They have to store their in-process inventory somewhere. Toyota tends to push that problem back on their suppliers, demanding small just-in-time deliveries at a steady rate regardless of the optimum batch size for each part. It's an classic problem in manufacturing. Where do you put the in-process inventory? Near where it's made? Near where it's used? Someplace else? What…

Work in process is extremely expensive and large batches are more expensive than just in time production. This is the core of TPS and its not disputed.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#137

Post by acomjean »

joelthelion wrote: post #97
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #65

> 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 smoothly. I was so shocked by the contrast that I imprudently voiced my concern. That didn’t go over well with my fellow Tesla owners. I was a killjoy, I was calling their choice into question. Well, it'…

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

As an Honda element owner I would disagree. Except that its discontinued and nothing out there now matches its practicality. Stylish it is not however.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#138

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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?

QC means you don't sell duds, you test them, if they fail you don't send them for sale.

QA means you make sure that products aren't duds, you do that by finding what causes the failed products to be made and fixing it.

Meta: The focus on QC instead of QA brings to mind the UK government approach to education, adding more tests instead of using the time/resources devoted to tests to educate the children.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#139

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rkangel wrote: post #111
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?

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

Either you or I have it back to front.

Re: Tesla’s New Car Smell

#140

Post by immutable_ai »

prostoalex wrote: post #80
Hypx wrote: post #13

> I couldn’t help check off the sins against the “Toyota Bible”, prescriptions for car manufacturers that are lucidly detailed in The Machine That Changed The World (a great and, in parts, sad read). In particular, one mustn’t stockpile parts on the floor, they must be fed in small quantities at small time intervals. If a part has a problem, only a small quantity needs to be shipped back to the supplier who can inspe…

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…

> Tesla’s vertical integration of service centers has an interesting side effect - recalls and repairs are pretty cheap

This is assuming that Tesla's centrally managed monolithic dealer/service network will be run more efficiently than the distributed and competitive dealer networks typical of other car companies.

That assumption runs counter to typical economic thinking that competitive market based solutions will be more efficient.

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