171–180 of 205 posts
You can complain about Tesla missing a deadline by a year but you need to also consider them pulling the rest of the industry forward by 10 years when they do it
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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…
1) An app is solid, has awesome QA... but the environment does not. You need to shake out some networking bugs / load bugs, etc.
2) The app is terrible. Every part of it is broke. needs a total rewrite.
To an end user both feel the same, but the expected curve to make it stable is VASTLY different.
In theory Tesla has been in the car business for at least a few years. It MAY be closer to 1. Maybe 2 or 3 vendors are 3 months behind schedule in delivering production machines. Which is bad, but not "we are totally screwed" bad.
On the other hand, it is insanely ambitious. It totally could be a #2 totally screwed bad.
Time will tell.
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Etymologically, Quality Control implies some sort of feedback. Quality Assurance merely implies a filter at the end of some process.
Interestingly, your inference is almost opposite to the commonly accepted definitions.
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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.
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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…
So to try and bring back to software terms. There can be two reasons for a shaky launch in a software product: 1) An app is solid, has awesome QA... but the environment does not. You need to shake out some networking bugs / load bugs, etc. 2) The app is terrible. Every part of it is broke. needs a total rewrite. To an end user both feel the same, but the expected curve to make it stable is VASTLY different. In theory…
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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…
Toyota is a global car manufacturing company who has been manufacturing cars (and building new car factories) for many many decades now. This is will be Tesla's first high volume line of vehicles. I think it makes sense for some time to work out kinks in process and meta-processes. Even a couple of years back when Toyota passed GM as highest volume maker of vehicles, the execs at Toyota said there was a moment where…
I think it makes sense to consider the state of the art for reliable production lines. But NIH syndrome will have its way.
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Here we agree. I come across as a Tesla fanboy in these comments but I think Tesla's valuation is crazy high, too high, and I still think there's a chance they fail completely like so many other auto companies (a tough business). My theory is Musk knows the only way he'll be able to compete is attracting the best talent through stock incentives, and to do that he needs to jack up the stock price by pushing engineers…
The increase in shares was due to secondary offering https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/26/tesla-motors-maxed... Tesla’s stock behavior is due to the ongoing game of “who blinks first” between TSLA shorts and TSLA short-squeezers. With $10 billion short position the company’s fundamentals are reduced to a side show.
It's primarily from equity grants. Even your article says Musk tacked on his stock option exercise as part of the secondary offering, which increased the dilution.
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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 n…
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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-drivin…
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> 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 addresses your process, from repeatability (e.g. ISO9000 in the cases where it makes sense -- less often than it is used, but sometimes it's crucial), incoming materials inspection, choosing processes that error in directions you want (should you mill material away from a billet, potentially taking not enough, or cast and potentially have the part shrink? Some systems can handle a too-small part better than a too-big one; other systems are the opposite) etc.
QC can be thought of output validation (i.e. testing, which is a lot of it): are my products of the necessary quality/within spec etc? Sometimes you can do 100% inspection, sometimes you have to use statistical methods (there are whole ISO specs devoted to nothing but sampling algorithms).
If you are not clear in your mind about the differences, the jargon can confuse you more (e.g. incoming materials inspection is sometimes referred to as "incoming QC"). But from this you can see why you "can't test your way into quality": the tests happen too late in the process.