Elon Musk says ‘we dug our own grave’ with the Cybertruck as he warns Tesla faces enormous production challenges::Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the Cybertruck’s unique design means the company faces immense challenges in scaling production.
“We”
When things go right, it’s “I”. When things go wrong, it’s “We”. These are Musk’s situationally preferred pronouns.
I mean it’s capitalism in general usually. When the company is profiting, it’s due to the CEO. When the company is failing, it’s the fault of the company as a whole
He’s very likely the one who pushed the engineers to try to make it work in the first place. They probably tried to warn him of the challenges it was going to face at every step, and he just used the power of arrogance, bullying, & positive-thinking to ignore it and just go full steam ahead with it. He would’ve just fired anybody that directly challenged him on it and told him what an idiot he is.
Not only they warned him. Reports are Tesla design department out of their own initiative and knowing how bad the proposed cyber truck was developed and alternate “sane” Tesla electric pickup truck proposal. When they tried to suggest it to Elon he reportedly didn’t want to here none about it and got mad.
He told the design boss just to make the existing design work. As we can see that didn’t end up going well.
Wasn’t he the one who made a bunch of ridiculous demands? This car seems like it was designed by Homer Simpson.
That’s weird, I could have sworn he said that they nearly had all the issues sorted out and that it was coming next month… Trying to remember when he said that… 2021?
“When you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you’re trying to solve at scale,” he added.
does it have new technology? i thought it was just like, shockingly ugly?
It’s got a lot of new things to them
800v power train
Newer 4680 cells
~85% custom chip controllers (up from 60s on Y)
48v power electronics instead of 12v, which is fairly new to everyone and the supply chain isn’t as robust as the 12v one, but long term it’s good for industry. (Edit I’ve heard talk of how they connect everything is going to be very different too, but nothing I’ve seen confirmed)
Folding the stainless steel at scale
9000T press, biggest one made
The wheels that can turn on front and back
New assembly method (excluding stainless steel part)
I’m sure there’s more they didn’t tell us.
It went from being a weird vehicle (love or hate it) to a new technology platform.
I did say “to them”
800v isn’t new either, others use it
Edit: stainless steel aside, I have a suspicion that the 48v stuff will cause the most problems. That seems like a lot of suppliers where 1 problem halts the line.
Pretty much the entire list seems like features that have existed for industrial applications.
Which, sure, is challenging to transition to a new company and scale up to consumer levels of production and down to consumer levels of cost. But I agree everything about this truck seems iterative.
An example of a thing which has been tried so many times, but which ultimately only increases complexity, expense, and rate of failure for very little gain.
“Ah yes, let us take one of the most finicky vehicular systems outside of the engine itself and make it literally twice as complex!”
And in return you get… slightly reduced turning radius.
For a company with already terrible QC that’s a lot more things to go wrong for buyers unfortunately
I don’t think a lot of those things are where Tesla really struggles with quality that’ll impact the customer. Just production delays and cost.
I’d be pretty surprised if the power train is a problem as that’s their specialty.
Same with the electronics, those don’t usually have problems except the electronic door handles that the Cybertruck won’t have.
I’ll be pretty surprised if the steel doesn’t cause QC problems, and I’m half expecting that massive windshield wiper to be a problem somehow.
Maybe the air suspension will be problematic, and probably the powered tonneau cover.
How is 48v better than 24v, for example? I don’t really know much about car electronics
Higher voltage allows for fewer amps. Higher amps creates more heat and requires thicker cables which cost more and add weight. So it’s substantially less copper since the wires don’t need to be as thick.
I can’t give exact numbers, but going from a 12/24v to 48v wiring harness will reduce the harness weight. I don’t know if that’s on a linear scale or not in terms of reduction.
A thinner wiring harness would also be easier to manage and place, e.g more bendable, less space required to place it.
It also gives you more leeway if you do want to push more amps to something without having to get into the really really big unwieldy wires that are very difficult to shape.
24v would work, but I imagine the thought is, if we need to create a whole new supply chain for automotive parts at a different voltage, why go to 24v when we can go to 48v and get even more benefits? The process is already happening, others have some hybrid 48v usage.
Someone else could comment on this, but without knowing more, I would speculate that higher voltages would even allow some sort of shrinking of the components themselves since internally they wouldn’t need to support as high of amps either, but that’s just my speculation.
Edit: Just some hypothetical numbers. If a wiring harness is 150lbs and lets say 48v gets it to 50lbs, that’s a $375 cost savings in copper alone. That’s also a ton less copper used/mined across the whole auto industry once transitioned. At 67 million cars a year, that would be 6,700,000,000 lbs of copper saved per year.
ok i work in a kind of tangential industry and can kind of answer this probably
in general the higher the voltage the smaller the current, which you’re generally happy about because your 1) electrical losses and 2) cable/wire diameter are both proportional to current
the tradeoffs being 1) it gets harder and more important to isolate the circuit (e.g. your wire insulation that prevents the 12V bus from shorting out to the vehicle chassis now needs to be thicker) and 2) all the stuff people make for cars (i dunno, windshield wiper motors, radiator fans, whatever) is currently for 12V
in general this move probably makes sense, provided they’re able to figure out their supply chains, and if tesla can position themselves as being like the first company to figure out a bunch of these 48V components at scale that’s probably going to be really good for them. they did a kind of similar thing with the charging infrastructure if i understand currently, like now the tesla charging cable is the de facto north american standard
So here is some information on where the 48v standard is coming from. https://www.microcontrollertips.com/what-is-the-ideal-ethernet-choice-for-automotive-applications-faq/
it’s new to Tesla but not automotive.
First you have to mass produce a lot of cannon balls, hire people and train them to throw the cannon ball perfectly so the broken window looks perfect.
Gee… telling the engineers to getting precision to below 10 microns would cause production challenges.
I’ve been doing PCB-board design recently. Here’s the manufactuering specs: https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/dkred
So that’s 0.13mm tolerances to my printed-circuit board. Or 130 microns.
Current leading theory is that Elon Musk is such an ignorant dumbass that he doesn’t know the difference between mils and microns, despite running a car company / manufacturing firm. Give that a thought. Even then, 10-mils tolerance is near this PCB design, an object that’s only a few inches in size. Cars are much larger and normally should be built to much wider tolerances than a fucking PCB board.
If he said <10 mils, I’d might have bought the explanation that Elon actually meant millimetres. Micron is a very specific metric-based unit which to Elon might have been trying to use like a buzzword.
The moral of the story is don’t say stupid engineering stuff if you don’t want engineers to laugh at you.
Ten mils is .010" or .25mm if I’m not crazy.
It’s a very standard tolerance for aircraft parts.
It’s almost like Elon Musk is a complete fucking moron and not an Engineer. The wanker has never actually designed a thing in his life. He just tells other people to design something, or buys an existing company, then struts around like he thinks he’s the smartest thing around.
I recently listened to a podcast about musk which was more on the anti side. The podcast had some parts about spacex and musks own work ethics, which told more of a story that he actually has some insights and knowledge and was a insane workoholic. Which shifted my perception of him. He isn’t dumb, he is a really good conman.
Lmao “if Lego and soda cans can do this, so can we.” At least he found materials similar to his existing vehicle build quality
Cool. Build 10 pieces and fit them together with sub 10 micron precision.
Ok, and once that’s done with the high level of repeatability and quality I’ve done it a thousand times, then what?
Bullshit.
The thermal coefficient of expansion of say… Aluminum is 23.
That means that when a 1 meter piece of Aluminum rises from 20C to 21C, just one degree Celsius, it grows by 23 microns.
Your 3D printer is not a temperature controlled precision instrument. Your tolerances are no where close to 10 microns let alone 1 micron.
There are micron-level precise instruments in the engineering world. They all come with temperature characteristics because thermal expansion is a bitch. 3D printers that literally heat up hundred degrees and cools down regularly literally can’t be this precise, the heat alone wrecks your precision.
Bullshit.
You’re changing the premise of the question.
Pick a temperature - design your model to be whatever you need it to be at that target temperature - just like every other engineer with 26 years of experience, such as myself.
(by the way, my UV resin printer is quite temperature stable.)
The problem isn’t that it can’t be done. The problem is that it is unnecessary and very expensive.
https://www.creality3dofficial.com/products/ld-002r-lcd-resin-3d-printer
Don’t forget - it’s not as simple as just buying the printer. You need the right resin, several iterations of test models, and the right modifications of the model to work within the constraints of the printer and material.
With the right tuning, you will be able to create parts which measure within 1 micron tolerance reliably. (don’t forget to use an indicator and good reference blocks - you aren’t going to measure microns with a caliper or micrometer)
