Tesla is facing issues with the bare metal construction of the Cybertruck, which Elon Musk warned was as tricky to do as making Lego bricks
It’s almost like he hears about how bad the build quality of Tesla cars have become, so he thinks the solution is more accurrate, more expensive parts. Kind of like he has absolutely no clue what he’s doing, and doesn’t want to listen to smarter people telling him what they need.
Elon is a masterclass in the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I think we should rename that effect after the man who invented it: the Musk-Dunning-Kruger effect
Two to invent, one to perfect.
On the kneecaps of giants.
Family emerald mines not withstanding.
Seriously. He can’t NOT publicly repeat every technical term that he hears, usually with next to no actual understanding.
Microns
I think it’s more likely that he is looking for excuses for the years of delays on the cyber truck.
Now he can blame it on his “desire for perfection” instead of admitting that his timeline was never viable
The design isn’t viable. They could have developed a new car in less time if it wasn’t going to be an absolute nightmare to produce reliably.
Let’s not forget about the new Roadster that was due to enter production 3 years ago.
Everyone that bought one gave Tesla a $250k interest-free loan.This is all starting to seem intentional.
At some point, once consumer rights are eroded enough , the straightest path to profits is just downright theft. Take money now, worry about product later. It’s literally inevitable and the video game industry is really fuckin good at it.
Tesla should mill the car from one solid block of steel.
10 microns is .4 thou, about the width of a cotton fiber. Its possible to machine those tolerances, but very time consuming as machine maintainance steps up. Its also small enough that the thermal expansion of the sheets will be larger than that
So basically elon would rather dump money into expensive equipment to improve build quality than do the thing that’s actually needed to improve build quality and pay his workers what their work is worth and make their factory environment safer?
This is the kind of petty angry bullshit you have to do to be a billionaire. Its not about being smart, it’s about on some level hating everyone that isn’t you
You aren’t going to hit that tolerance consistently on an assembly line no matter how much you pay. Can be done by a skilled machinist, but there are too many dynamical variables in an assembly line environment, like the previously mentioned thermal expansion.
I guess they could do like Nissan did with the GTR’s engine: climate controlled assembly bay, temperature check on the parts etc…
But I mean, they did it only for the engine which is relatively small
It’s not even about that. You absolutely don’t need those tolerances for a cup holder. An assembly line will fuck it up regardless. You use tolerances like that when needed - in jet engines or turbines. Insisting on those numbers on a car is plain stupid - it isn’t better (other than the ego boosting “my car has high tolerances where nobody cares”) than just doing it like every other manufacturer does it. It’s a waste of money plain and simple.
For reference, in working with parts that interface directly with optical components about the tightest I’m ever comfortable specifying at production volumes is 0.05mm and that is for very specific dimensions and not entire parts yet he is demanding 5 times lower tolerances here.
What I meant is that Elon has set a fairly un-achievable standard, as the sheet metal parts he is talking about will grow and shrink by more than that depending on weather. Additionaly, the small parts can be machined to that tolerance, but only by a skilled machinist and not at assembly line levels.
Besides just thermal expansion, which will totally happen by driving on the road, the rotation of the motors and the use of brakes.
It will also flex as it hits bumps and takes turns.
And these will be different metals. With different thicknesses which will expand and contract at different rates.
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Isn’t that 10 microns? 0.01mm?
Which is 0.4 thou
Oh haha, yeah, I understand my error now. Thanks for bearing with me
0.4 thou = 0.4 mil
(TIL about thous, all my engineering textbooks referencing US units must be old or something)
decimal inches is basically only used in machining. The only time ive ever seen it is in schematics and an indicators.
Thanks, I understand my error now. Corrected
Oops, thanks. Thats even more unrealstic
If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.
This man is a certifiable idiot, and I feel bad for anyone working for him.
I mean, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong, you can get that accuracy on larger parts given sufficient time, materials, tools, expertise, etc.
But a car has more parts than a Lego brick
Yeah anything is possible with enough time and money, it’s just that is about the most textbook example of comparing apples to oranges I’ve seen IRL.
Also, I suppose Lego bricks might be considered low cost if you’re a billionaire, but in the grand scheme of molded plastics they are very much a premium product.
Yeah compared to car plastics they’re crazy expensive
Which will balloon the cost exponentially.
Maybe he can build the truck out of LEGOs - it would cost about a bajillion dollars to make something that size, but maybe less than the parts he’s demanding would be.
“All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
LOL
Yeah ok.
Tell me you know nothing about manufacturing, without telling me you know nothing about manufacturing.
That one quote - assuming it is accurate - explains that Musk is even more of an idiot than everyone already knew he was. You don’t make things at those tight tolerances. A couple of dimensions on a part might be (for instance the bore on a press fit sleeve), but you’d almost never, ever hold an entire part to that tight of a tolerance.
In imperial units, 10 microns is .00039". A human hair is roughly .001 to .005" thick. So he is asking for a tolerance that is 3 to 10x smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To put the absurdity of Musk’s demand into perspective, most parts that go into a car are roughly an order of magnitude looser in tolerance with some dimensions being 2 orders of magnitude looser.
That difference might not sound like a lot, but holding something to +/-.0039 versus +/-.00039" could easily triple the price of an item or more. Easy. You use a tight tolerance only when you need to - that’s engineering 101. Some parts could easily be +/- .039" and not affect their performance on bit. Close tolerance engine parts might be held at what Musk is demanding, but never “ALL PARTS” would be held to that.
As someone who knows almost nothing about the topic, wouldn’t some (most?) of these parts be big enough that a small change in temperature or air pressure alone would cause these parts to expand/shrink enough to go over the tolerance limit?
Yes, and different materials will have different rates of thermal expansion. That’s probably why the pixel 7 camera glass was cracking for no apparent reason when winter hit. Imagine coming out in the morning and finding all the glass in your car shattered because it got cold overnight. Or even worse you take it out of a heated garage on a cold day and the glass shatters while you’re driving.
Thermal expansion of steel is .0000072" per degree F. All you would need is a 100 degree F temp change to blow that tolerance out of the water. And 100 degrees is not that much when it comes to cars. A freezing cold day versus a boiling hot day in the summer is a temperature swing more than 100 degrees. A ICE engine runs at roughly 250 degrees F so that right there would easily expand parts way more than the tolerance he is calling for. On an EV, I don’t think anything gets that hot, but the motors still get warm.
Is that per inch or per foot?
We compensate for thermal expansion. The standard temperature things are measured at is 68F/20C. So if it’s 72 degrees we’ll compensate it back to 68 in software for the material we’re measuring. We use scale bars of known length and similar material type to verify scale. (I run laser trackers and laser radars.)
For measurement equipment that’s stationary, like CMMs, you just control the environment.
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I work in semiconductor industry where machines need to have sub-micron positioning accuracy and even we don’t generally design parts with 10 micron tolerances, unless it really needs to.
No customer would ever pay for that accuracy on all parts.
No customer would NEED that accuracy on all parts. Just shows what kind of clown Elon is.
When I was young I got a job at a manufacturing place that made all sorts of parts for sensitive equipment. Younger people, or people with steady hands would debur and smooth. We would have these huge magnifiers and friggin microscopes and be working with what looked like a really long tiny exacto knives that needed to be replaced every 5 minutes or a couple dozen uses to get that stuff to spec. You can spend 20 minutes on a piece, think it’s perfect and then QC would send it right back because they somehow found some tiny inconsistency or groove you didn’t or couldn’t notice.
There is no way you can expect that level of accuracy, unless your willing to pay for clean room level stuff. Even we weren’t always quite that accurate depending on the end use and they charged like almost $50 for something that looked quite like something you get a hardware store for 50 cents.
I’ve told many (usually new) design engineers that they’re stupid for asking for 0.001" tolerance on parts when they only need 0.005 “or 0.010”. The difference between 0.010" and sub-10 micron is easily a factor of 100 in most parts, ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
not just that, he said “all parts”. The stitching on the seats, the floor carpets, USB ports, cupholders and the A/C vents have to be more accurate than the width of a human hair too
Unless you are talking about a press fit location or some kind of high precision alignment issue, almost nothing needs anything tighter than .001" and .005 or .010" is perfectly fine for most things. I work with a lot of weldments so if we’re within .030" we consider that good enough.
Gear teeth I believe need to be precision ground to less than a thou for best efficiency and life. But that’s not for most things.
+/- .030 good enough for most skin panels on airplanes.
hah historically Teslas body panels are closer to +/- .39"
Just coming in to say you are completely and absolutely correct. 🍻
I don’t see anywhere in the article where Musk says “tolerance”. He specifically says “accuracy” and goes on the talk about listing more decimal places instead of rounding. Any mention of tolerance is done by the author of the article. If certain dimensions are not naturally rounded to one, or even two decimals, there is no reason not to list it to three or more on modern drawings. GD&T can specify whatever tolerance is necessary without relying on a decimal-based block tolerance. I’d be interested in seeing the original email but it seems like there is a misunderstanding by the author given the context being discussed.
I default to three decimal places for all my basic dimensions on both in and mm drawings. One of the benefits of GD&T is that you can give provide additional dimensional accuracy, completely independent of the tolerance being specified.
That’s a really good point. If this is actually for the intervening calculations, that’d make a lot more sense.
The linguistics of metrology is not exactly a topic I’m particularly passionate about, but if yiu look at the technical definition of accuracy, it essentially is the same as a tolerance.
Accuracy: the degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification conforms to the correct value or a standard.
And when it comes to decimal places, you’d never display more than you really need. If a dimension is +/- .010" there is absolutely no reason to display it to 4 decimal places. That doesn’t win you anything. More importantly, I’m sure a company like Tesla doesn’t even use drawings at all. I’m sure they are paperless and send out their models for machining.
I think there is a very important distinction between accuracy and tolerance in engineering. +/- .010" is not a dimension, but a tolerance that can be applied to a dimension. However if your example was changed to a .010" dimension, I would agree with you as I stated in my last comment. There is no need to give any further accuracy to that dimension if you are just adding zeros to the end (unless you are using block tolerances that rely on a specific number of digits to correspond with a standard tolerance). Unfortunately, not everything is designed using the same units and you will inevitably end up with a part designed in mm that uses a bolt-on component using a hole span in inches (for example, a nice round 1-in span). If you want a +/-1 mm tolerance on that part, you wouldn’t want to round every dimension to the nearest mm because you may end up with a tolerance of 24-26 mm when you really wanted 24.4 to 26.4 mm. I like to provide true dimensional accuracy (to microns or .0001" if I’m not just adding zeros) and then apply a suitable tolerance independently, using GD&T.
Regarding paperless manufacturing, I agree that many components are made straight from the models these days and imported directly into a CNC machine. However, there should always be a drawing or a digital equivalent a drawing. This is the contract that specifies acceptable tolerances to the manufacturer, and it will be used during QA inspection to determine if an acceptable part has been delivered.
I think there is an important distinction between accuracy and precision in engineering. I’m having flashbacks of sitting in class when the professor was going over this stuff. I honestly always found it some of the most boring topics in the curriculum.
One of my physics profs had a story about this. He needed two resistors to be very similar in performance for a circuit he was making, so he asked for a couple of the super-high-quality ones.
His advisor said “fuck that, get the 1% bin, they’ll be bimodal at 1% above and below rating, sort em and find two that match to the degree you need”
That’s kind of analogous; do you need to try to hit a particular value (accuracy) or do you need things in a consistent relation to one another (precision)?
Engine parts? Tesla’s don’t have engines, they have electric motors which shouldn’t need this level of precision. Electric motors they have today work pretty well already.
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He’s probably hyper self conscious about people ripping into Teslas over their clearances (with inconsistencies measured in millimetres). But, no, instead of saying “VW can produce stuff that doesn’t look like it fell from a truck and you will figure it out, too” he’s going overboard.
If we’re going overboard, why bother with cars at all? Just use this cheesy blueprint, make it work and solve all of humanity’s problems! This is what California should invest in instead of trains.
It’s just marketing. Elon wants dumb tesla bros to think their truck is built that accuracy. No need for it to be reality.
As opposed to smart tesla bros?
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Sadly this could work, no one’s gonna be verifying this shit and the ones who do won’t reach enough tesla bros
Well his paranoia was fed (rightly) by sites like Reddit who ate his lunch over panel gaps on the model 3. He wants this to be better and there’s nothing wrong with that!
Will the steering wheel fall off still? We need more innovative features like that
In the full email he goes on to tell the engineer what a micron is.
I guess, he just read that word somewhere and now feels cool that he knows it.
It would be cute if he was a junior manager, but this way it’s just sad.
You really think he wrote it? He has an army of engineers working for him, many of which would kill their mothers to get on Elon’s good side, corporate culture is same shit different smell no matter the corporation.
The leaked email has his name on it and the leak claims it was an email from Elon to employees. Can’t really tell if the leak is real or fake, but if it’s real then Elon is definitely the one who wrote it.
Based on his proclivity to say dumb shit and his inability to keep his mouth shut, I’m inclined to believe it’s a real leak.
This 100% sounds like him. I don’t see any reason to doubt it given that if someone was going to make something up it wouldn’t sound like this.
Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.
It sounds to me like the reasonable conclusion to draw from this would be to modify the design of the car. I’d also assume you don’t need tolerances to be the same for literally all parts inside and out. I’d also think that, if the car looks that bad if things are 10 or more microns out of place, these cars are going to age terribly after regular use.
But what do I know? If I were smart, I’d be rich, right? And Elon is so rich, he must be a genius!
Tesla is know for shoddy panel alignment correct? This is gonna look horrific.
They are, and that undoubtedly gets under his sub micron thick skin, which is why he’s going overboard about it with this.
Yeah heat that mf up on a sunny day vs a cold day lol what an idiot.
It’s not like “accuracies” doesn’t add up either ha ha what a genius.
Usually car makers solve the expansion and contraction using glue, curves, and trim to deal with expansion and contraction.
The cybertruck has no curves and not much trim, the glue would have to be very flexible, which would lead to separation.
I am going to bet that we will see cybertruck with panels flying off or flapping at highway speeds not long after release.
Oh yes, I’m all with you here, either make a frame and stick the “panels” to it individually (probably good if you make a cheap tank vehicle or something IDK) or make a chassis that take the deformation forces and distribute them as evenly as possible.
My bet is they have him as a stupid publicity monkey drawing attention to Tesla, cybortryck etc (I mean all publicity is good right?) and away from bad things like Tesla didnt self drive end 2019(?) and still doesn’t, child labour, … etc
to build it to that accuracy the car would have to cost millions
To build it with that accuracy would be physically impossible. Guess he forgot about thermal expansion and contraction. Guess he forgot about the weather…
I mean, it says cybertruck parts, not the whole thing including assembly. Certainly possible for some manufacturing processes under given conditions to produce parts with ±0.005 tolerances like laser cutting or precision CNC machining of small dimensions. But it’s obviously completely unrealistic given that most parts for a car will be of large-ish dimensions and stamped, injection molded, cast, forged, extruded… none of which lends itself to IT grades better than 10, far away from talking about microns.
Didn’t you see what musk said about legos and pop cans? It can be done, the tronk just needs to be built out of legos and pop cans, duh!
A rumor I’ve heard somewhere online is that people are noticing the body panels wobbling, or ‘breathing’ in and out in the wind. Not sure how true that is, I can’t find a video showing this happening, but it does make sense. Even the most subtle flexing of a shiny flat surface becomes way more obvious and sticks out like a sore thumb.
Musk is a scammer who has almost no practical understanding of engineering.
He (and unfortunately many after him) forgot about thermal expansion and contraction as well with his dumbass Hyperloop idea. Have a hermetically sealed metal tube with a vacuum run exposed for 200km and let’s just ignore thermal expansion. One station would have to move left and right for several meters throughout the day, every day for that, the 200km pipe somehow would need to be able to move about… His “designs” and “ideas” are engineering nightmares
Nah, not impossible people build stellarator type Fusion reactors with large freeform metal parts in that tolerance region that are exposed to liquid helium.
Does not change the fact that all materials expand when temperature rises and contract when temperature cools. Plus different materials have different temperature expansion coefficients.
Most. Water, for example, takes up more volume in spaces when frozen
True, water is weird like that.
So does the stellarator. What’s the argument here?
just define a temperature :D
Indeed, that’s about 10 to 100 times more accuracy than other automakers. Those tolerances just aren’t necessary so no supplier is going to have the tools or infrastructure in place to make parts to such a high degree. Body shop alone sees fluctuations in millimeters because industrial robots can’t do any better than half millimeter accuracy, if they’re brand new.
If you can even get something like +/-3 or 4 mm with say a cpk of 1,33 you are doing pretty well for a whole body.
It’s probably a pr stunt. If this is real then they are doomed because they have not yet understood that you need to compensate tolerances and design a robust assembly that can handle this. If you are trying to get crazy high part precision you have not understood how big scale manufacturing works. This is why the Japanese are often so highly regarded in this and might be the true art of car (or large scale) engineering.
Hilarious considering the panel gaps in all his other cars, dude is fucking insane. Unattainable standards don’t breed better work they breed exasperation and apathy.
Elon gonna engineer the shit outta this thing. Nevermind coil steel itself varies by more than that before it goes into a die and stretches. It’s almost like he doesn’t have any background in automotive manufacturing. This statement makes me think Elon may not know what a micron even is. The fit and finish of Tesla’s current offerings seems to evidence it anyway.
Two things, not necessarily related.
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The cybertronk looks highly regarded when put together correctly. Imagine if it has the panel gaps of other cars TSLA makes.
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My tinfoil hat theory on why Elon is acting all right wing all of the sudden is to get those idiots to buy electric bare metal Pontiac Aztecs with “unbreakable” windows instead of F-150’s
My tinfoil hat theory on why Elon is acting all right wing all of the sudden is to get those idiots to buy electric bare metal Pontiac Aztecs with “unbreakable” windows instead of F-150’s
can he recoup $44 billion tho…? it’s a bold move.meme
wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of logical explanation for his demented thrashings?
I don’t think he actually cares about the money he blew on Twitter. Money is a construct and that is even more true for rich people. If he cared about the money, he wouldn’t have tossed Twitter down the shitter.
I think he cares more about the impression he is making, whether it be good or bad. People are talking about Elon and that’s all that matters.
He was ordered by the court to proceed with the Twitter deal, that he vocally tried to back out of.
While I don’t know the cost to develop the cyber truck assuming it was 0 dollars to make the cost of the Twitter deal from cyber truck alone, it would take 88 thousand of them at elon getting 100% of the money from the sales. ( how he expects to sell an electric truck for 50k is beyond me)
My theory is he’s a wealthy dude, so he’s going to have right wing tendencies since the right wing benefits wealthy dudes.
Also, one of his kids came out as trans, he went nuts, blamed social media for making his kid a “degenerate”. Then bought twitter to destroy it out of revenge.
He’s kinda like a James Bond villain, but so much dumber.
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highly regarded
Did you mean highly retar…? Is this a mistake or are you avoiding the r-word?
Regarded is a common meme substitute for retarded, indeed.
100% everyone is making fun of teslas already, so imagine how the people feel who pre-ordered some garbage years ago. Now with their “leaked” email they can tell people how their future car will have toleraces that are on an qtomic level. These are also the prople who believed that teslas can fly in 3 years. Which was in 2016 i believe
I had exactly the same theory for 2. He seems to genuinely want to save humanity (reusable rockets, electric vehicles etc) and so converting right wingers to electric would fit the goal
Dumbest comment I’ve seen on lemmy to date
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I’m sorry but that’s utterly delusional. That’s the same logic as saying that Trump was playing chess with everytime and covfefe was on purpose.
Covfefe is a pretty good contribution to the language though.
You can’t be serious
“Theory” is “a supposition or system of ideas indended to explain something”. I didn’t say that it was the most likely theory
Lol no one that replied to you is replying to your first sentence dude. Elon doesn’t want to save the world.
Here is a video showing why tech billionaires are idiots. They only care about $$$, not the world.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/oVj4kZF-Fgk?feature=shared
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Electric vehicles aren’t meant to save humanity. They are meant to save the car. If we removed all gas vehicles off the road right that wouldn’t even stop 30 percent of emissions. The only way to save humanity at this point is to stop capitalism. As long as we continue to expect the market to find a solution to a problem that has no profit motivator we will never save humanity. Elon included.
Ahem, if we removed all gas vehicles from the road right now, including farm vehicles, humanity would starve to death within a few months. Some subsistence farmers in developing countries that don’t need fertilizer would survive.
But it would definitely be the end of industrial society.
Emissions from transportation are a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, so it absolutely does make sense to decarbonize them. This isn’t really debatable.
Lmao
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“Bad news guys… We’re gonna have to delay production for just TWO MORE YEARS because of these woke microns! The good news though, you can get re-premium upgraded waitlist VIP positioning with a renewal deposit of only $500”
