211–220 of 310 posts
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American cars, especially trucks, have a great reputation. What are you talking about?
You've never heard the joke that FORD stands for "Fix It Again, Tony" (and, unrelatedly, FIAT stands for "Found On Roadside, Dead")?
My favorite will always be Toyota: Take Off Your Oversized Tires, Asshole.
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You've never heard the joke that FORD stands for "Fix It Again, Tony" (and, unrelatedly, FIAT stands for "Found On Roadside, Dead")?
There's a Chinese meme that PORSCHE means "rubbish second hand car" PO = 破 = rubbish, RS = 二手 (er shou) = second hand, CHE = 车 = vehicle Here's one instance of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x9HlIVCsyg
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Secret recording may be a criminal offense. I am not a lawyer in any jurisdiction, but it appears to be a felony in parts of the US. Admitting to felonies in court is probably not a good legal strategy. Even if you don't get arrested I am not confident the evidence would be admissible. EDIT: I know there are places where secret recordings are illegal but don't know the expected penalties. Recordings are probably lega…
> But in any case it would be wrong. Don't respond to sleaze with yet more sleaze. Is it wrong, or just illegal some places? Is it only "sleaze" where it's illegal, or everywhere?
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People are _extremely_ weird about that company. I was half-surprised that the usual, near-obligatory, “I love my Tesla, but…” quote was missing.
Former colleague of mine was Tesla from day 1. Started an online journal of the life of his car. It's stuff like "well this car is great but this year I spent a huge amount of money because A, B, C broke and wasn't covered under warranty". As time goes on the journal just gets worse & worse. Can't help but laugh and be reminded by the family guy episode where they see a Tesla driving itself while the driver's busy su…
Wasn’t that a South Park episode about Priuses?
Edit: it was about Segway - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entity_(South_Park)
For industrial manufacturing engineers in the audience - what is the threshold of cracking that’s acceptable in a casting this size given the constraints of safety and reliability? Curious if selling this casting to a customer was an intentional decision, and if so, what the tolerances are for this type of deviation in a factory making cars.
A defect like this absolutely should have been caught by quality control. Even if they only take some sample size of parts for detailed analysis from every run, this would have been readily apparent. If it wasn't visible at time of manufacture (sometimes there can be a thin "skin" that covers underlying defects like this) this would have been evident from other inspection methods - X-ray analysis is commonly used to check for internal porosity or cracks in safety critical applications like this.
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Would a part like this get x-ray inspected? I had a summer job working at a machine shop and structural castings would often get sent for x-ray inspection.
It’s the best way and most expensive. For mass production of automotive parts probably too expensive. I mean these guys can’t or don’t want to afford 20000$ camera system for quality assurance.
It is so amazing to me that Elon set himself the simplest possible problem in car manufacturing and is till terribly bad at it.
There's a learning curve parable about the fastest way to learn how to make quality clay pots. Team A focuses on making 1 perfect pot. Specifications, research, process, testing, verification, etc. They get pretty close with their initial pots, but they struggle to scale up. Team B just starts making pots. As fast they can. Make incremental tiny improvements. Most pots are total losses. But they do manage to start ma…
I would not bank on Kia or Hyundai... A large swath of of their engines made within the last decade or so have a reputation for not lasting within or much beyond the warranty period, which has lead to multiple class-action lawsuits. I have a Kia Sorento and overall it's a simple, honest car that's easy to work on and pretty well-built overall. But at 80k miles, the engine burns a quart every 1k miles which is entirel…
I'd accept a passenger-oriented Ford Transit Express BEV.
Manufacturing aluminum castings at scale efficiently (without using excessive amounts of metal) is a difficult problem to solve. This kind of stuff has plagued other car manufacturers too and with much smaller components. For example aluminum Ice engine heads and blocks. Certain vehicle years (for example 2005 Golf tdi) are known for "porous" and cracking castings. There is a very good reason (other than "they" want…
The real problem is that this structural member with a giant visible crack in it somehow made it through Tesla's QA process. I think I could give Tesla some slack when they were originally ramping up Model 3 production (it was a "succeed or the company goes under" moment), but reports of their sub-par QA keep coming and coming.
There's a learning curve parable about the fastest way to learn how to make quality clay pots. Team A focuses on making 1 perfect pot. Specifications, research, process, testing, verification, etc. They get pretty close with their initial pots, but they struggle to scale up. Team B just starts making pots. As fast they can. Make incremental tiny improvements. Most pots are total losses. But they do manage to start ma…