He didn't add that much to the original video this time but the Munro teardowns are fantastic and I can't believe they are posted for free. Sandy is awesome.
People who don't know should check out the rest of the channel.
They will very likely have some casting in the Semi but unlike these cars the Semi will be a Body on Frame design so these structures will be less load baring then they are in cars.
The Cybertruck will use it for the back-end but the structure will be in the exo-skelloton.
Very, very unlikely. Technologies like that don't just show up in mass production vehicles like that. Tesla want to make 1 million of those a year.
Cybertruck is already quite full of new tech. The Cell-To-Pack structural pack will still be very new. Exo-skelleton and stainless steal is totally unique (Delorian was just stainless panels). Cybertruck will have the upgraded package for 'self driving' meaning new cameras, new chips and so on. It will also have the famous security windows.
What we are not yet sure about is if it will include a higher Voltage for the internal electronics putting power and data on the same cable across the car. Tesla has been wanting to do that for quite a while.
Eco-skeleton is a unibody, no question about that. But that doesn't make it 'marketing'.
Interior unibody was just always assumed because in cars (unlike planes) nobody ever did exo.
And its not a marketing features as it has a number of real advantages. Part reduction being one and smaller easier bodyshop. Not needing any paint anymore (a modern Painshop cost 500M).
> Not sure what you mean by power and data on the same lines, sounds like a horrible plan.
Well we have this things called Ethernet and PoE. Works pretty well for me.
> Well we have this things called Ethernet and PoE. Works pretty well for me
maybe I’m just being nit picky, but Poe isn’t power over the same data lines, it a separate set of wires in the same insulation jacket carrying power. I don’t see Tesla switching away from CAN to flex ray or something custom.
speculation: tesla pivots and makes a semi-trailer-compatible variant of cybertruck
tri-motor can probably haul a 53 foot trailer right?
edit: from a brief googling, appears max tow capacity of tri-motor is approx 14,000 lbs, competitive with a F-350 dually; dry weight of 53 foot trailer happens to be around the same, sounds heavy to me but what do I know
Still, could be good for ~20 footers, nothing to sneeze at
The way Elon tell the story, Tesla approached several companies about designing the gigapress. One company said “maybe” and the rest said no, and thus the gigapress was born. So it’s not just that they bought it, but they had some hand in its creation.
He was very negative on Tesla at first, then observed their improvements first hand and realized they were rapidly improving and were willing to throw old things out no matter the investment.
It was only at that point 1-2 years after he started making Tesla content that he bought shares.
He is not delusional enough to think that he himself moves the stock price. If he thought Tesla was falling behind or stopped improving he would simply sell the stock (at lots of profit) and tell people that Tesla is going in the wrong direction.
I got the sense that Sandy was being polite, i.e. focusing on any positive things rather than pointing out any understandable flaws you’d expect from a semi-amateur garage build.
Ugh... I get that the purpose of the video is to stylistically look cool and not to convey information, but only half way through and my head hurts and I think I have motion sickness from all the spinning, tilting, speeding up, slowing down and rapid cuts. Whatever happened to just taking a slow, stabilized drone tour, dwelling/focusing on the important/interesting parts?
If you have a weak stomach, don't watch while eating breakfast, you're likely to lose it.
Anyone know how this compares to other factories? It's a brand new factory by the highest valued car company in the world, so I expect it to be cutting edge. Is it far ahead of others, or just catching up? My uneducated opinion is that it's really cool.
I have been to 3 Toyota factories and 1 Citroen. The process shown in the video is very similar.
Tesla factory looks a bit slow, I guess because it’s new.
Many steps are missing, like assembling doors/ hood before oaint shop.
Interiors assembly also missing. I assume these are the more proprietary things from Tesla. What they showed are the common processes/tools across many manufacturers.
They had too many cars parked inside the factory, normally that means defects that need to be fixed.
Herbert Deiss, the CEO of Volkswagen, recently lamented that a Model 3 is made by Tesla start to finish in approximately ten hours when an equivalent VW EV is made in a touch over thirty hours.
The biggest producing automotive factory in the world is the famed VW Wolfsburg factory.
I know teslas are valued here, however, they're very inconsistent in quality. Though I'd never buy a VW I do respect that their craftsmanship surpasses that 30hr mark. Tesla is very much a 10hr car. When I see body panels that don't line up in more than one place in more than one vehicle its not me being picky. Its a rushed product with inadequate standard for quality control.
I own a Tesla and my model S definitely has panel gaps, but it always surprises me how much people care. I feel like people complain because they became aware of the issue through the internet itself.
Makes me wonder how many people would notice if someone didn't inform them that it was possible.
As long as my car doesn't leak water and it drives straight, I'm a happy camper.
When Lexus was a new brand in the 1990s the introductory ad was one showing
Its refinement by having a ball bearing roll across the panel seams. It won some awards and is credited with pushing manufactures to better tolerances.
Their current models are ugly, but I owned an ES350 and it is absolutely the best-made car I have ever driven. And when, rarely, something breaks, it’s a Camry under the hood, and every mechanic everywhere can fix it.
I was really concerned you were talking about the old wives tale that clubbed fingers meant you were more likely to be a criminal or something… but I googled it and apparently it correlates to having lung cancer? Interesting.
You’re probably just less picky than me, but I absolutely noticed on Teslas in the wild and it’s for this same reason I also don’t buy/own any GM products. It’s just shoddy, and for a car as expensive as they are these days (and Tesla especially) it’s unacceptable.
Toyota and Honda economy cars are assembled with more rigorous quality standards than a $100k Tesla.
> Toyota and Honda economy cars are assembled with more rigorous quality standards than a $100k Tesla.
Not playing devil's advocate for Tesla here but how long have Toyota and Honda been building cars? It's true that every iteration is superior but they started out making some fairly bad cars back in the day.
Showing my age here but when Japanes cars started getting popular in the UK it was only because British cars had become so bad. Even then, it was common knowledge that a Japanes car was only good for 2 or 3 years since the bodywork couldn't cope with our weather and would just rust away.
In the original iteration of Tesla’s Fremont factory Musk insisted on automation.
Global automakers in the 80’s learned the limits and perils of automation. Musk decided he had to learn that mistake for himself, years later admitting the process needed people more than he imagined.
The collective knowledge gained in making quality automobiles since Toyota started until now is widely available, especially with someone who has the resources to hire people with that experience.
I realize that I'm in the minority as this, but if you see a Tesla as an EV and not a luxury car, you worry less. I bought it as an EV. If I wanted Luxury, I'd get a mercedes or Porsche
I once spent four hours fixing a squeaky bench in my entranceway because the sound drove me nuts. Someone else might not even notice. This kind of detail is generally what separates mass market consumer cars from luxury brands. Tesla upended that by asking luxury prices but offering lower end build quality. They succeeded because their core features were much better than the competition. This is a totally reasonable trade-off. Still, many people really, REALLY hate panel gaps, and I am one of them. Those people prefer to buy other cars without panel gaps.
I just wanted the best EV that I could get. The Porsche might be better with quality, but I wanted the biggest and best battery. Everything else came second.
My son's model 3 (delivered just before Christmas, built in Shanghai) needed all it's taillights replaced because they were getting condensation building up inside and not dissipating. We've had a record wet summer here in Sydney, but still. I think one of the door seals need looking at too. But overall he is very happy.
Not everyone cares about minor panel gaps here and there. I have a 2018 M3 and a 2022 MY and the other aspects of the car - tech, barely needing any maintenance, door handles, battery range, supercharger network - all more than negate minor panel gap issues, which I think are also overblown. The panels dont line up perfectly on my 2018 but it is barely noticeable unless you look for it
I bought a new golf 7 1.4 built in Germany and had to later spend $3k redoing the engine for what seems to be a known fault but never got a recall here. It cost me more than all the fuel savings I got from driving it. Just an anecdote but I’d rather have gappy door panels.
I had the service and maintenance plan, treated it like a baby. Happened just outside of the plan. Trust gone.
I am still amazed by people who bought smaller than 2 liter petrol engines from VW. It’s common knowledge, that VW went all in with their diesels and totally ignored petrol engines for a long time. These 1,x liter things were close to experimental model, but still being sold for a while. Mazda did same thing with some euro 5 diesels. Car manufacturers can’t be trusted.
>It’s common knowledge, that VW went all in with their diesels and totally ignored petrol engines for a long time.
Sorry, but that "common knowledge" is wrong. Source: I know people working in the VW engine research and design lab, and they can be very talkative (probably to the point where they broke NDAs while a little drunk).
What is true is that VW, at a certain point, did invest significantly more in diesel engine tech than in petrol engine tech. But not to the point where they ignored petrol engines. They couldn't afford to do so, as they were serving many markets where diesel is rather uncommon (for personal cars). And at that point in time, they already had petrol engines that were very competitive and often even leading the pack (depending on the model). Not that any of this matters a lot today, as all that is quite a bit in the past now.
That isn't to say that some VW models are rather shit when it comes to reliability. The VW Jetta, which isn't even sold in Europe I believe, has a particularly bad rep in that regard.
Specially for petrol engines, the 2006/2007 EA111 TSI (1.2l and 1.4l) have a particular bad rep for reliability, and later EA111s are a mixed bag at best. Earlier EA111s and the successor, the EA211 (1.0 to 1.4l), do not have the same bad rep, and in fact got at least decent reliability rep and favorable mpg rep. The "bigger" EA888 (1.8l/2.0l) initially had a design flaw that caused excessive oil consumption in a lot of cases, which was later fixed in future iterations of the engine.
> Herbert Deiss, the CEO of Volkswagen, recently lamented that a Model 3 is made by Tesla start to finish in approximately ten hours when an equivalent VW EV is made in a touch over thirty hours.
Nobody really cares about this. Esp if Tesla build quality is poor and VW is great I'd think the fast build is doing them no favors.
The reason this matters is that they make more cars in less time so they make more money. The build quality hype is pretty overrated IMO. Tesla build quality is actually pretty good now.
This seems a meaningless comparison unless we know what is actually done in these factories vs what is sourced. Diess is known for pushing his staff by doing all sorts of benchmarks
I'm surprised that's a concern. I would have thought latency is almost irrelevant, unless it affects throughput. I suppose longer production time requires more floor space?
I think it is more they can make the same number of vehicles in a smaller space, thereby doing it faster and more profitably. Tesla's gross margin (profit per car essentially) is 10-15% higher than most all of the rest of the industry. He is pointing out that doing it better makes them more competitive.
Currently, the Volkswagen Wolfsburg Plant is the biggest automotive factory in the world by number of vehicles produced by a single factory. That number is 815,000 vehicles per year. The tesla factories that are currently built are in theory capable of 1 million vehicles per factory apiece, but are not there yet. If tesla can out-manufacturer VW, obviously they'll be more likely to sell more vehicles, and further erode VW's business.
I think the Tesla machinery may be running slower during filming to allow for some of the trick drone shots, else they catch it on something and damage a $200k press
It seems pretty similar. The only interesting aspects were the perspectives of the drone zooming through the assemblies, and Tesla's use of very complex castings; but I grew up around manufacturing/factories and was also lucky enough to see the NUMMI factory (Toyota/GM, now Tesla) before it closed. And that was over a decade ago, in a factory that was already decades old.
The video from Honda is so much better than the one from Tesla if you are actually looking to understand what is happening. It's also crazy how much faster the Honda machinery seems to operate at (it feels as if the video is sped up).
Parts of it definitely are including the machinery. It's obvious during certain human assembly clips- humans don't move that fast. Any clips that include a swinging tool aren't sped up because the false pendulum motion would be too obvious.
The classic in this genre is "Master Hands".[1] (1936) The assembly machinery shown starting here[2] is clearly the direct ancestor of what you see today.
Do you know how those welding arms know where to weld? Are there some special markers on the metal? Or vision? Or it's precise enough they know the actual location and just go assume it'll be correctly aligned?
Robots like that use servo motors to precisely locate their arms. No vision is required. They’re basically going to preprogrammed positions in 3 space.
I would expect some corrections within some tolerance to be made.
These are fine operations and the piece being worked on may not be placed in the correct place to the mm, otherwise there will be constant stops and damaged parts
Parts are made to only fit in the correct spot with registration points (holes, edges, posts) that need to match the jig they are loaded into. Even home 3D printer servos easily position the tool heads to within 0.1mm.
Furthermore, the spot welds do not need sub-millimeter precision. The spot welders were once guided by hand and placed randomly along the panel joints.
servos are very precise, that's why get get used for this sort of operation. they might need to be recalibrated as the parts inside them or attatched to them get physically worn down, but that's the sort of thing that would happen during a maintenance shutdown, not inbetween each workpiece.
Why would you not want basic feedback loop built into a control system so it is not high maintenance?
Adding a say simple laser distance measurement sensor to make sure the piece is at the distance it is supposed to be is not difficult, computer vision and AI maybe overkill but a simple sensor ?
Also a lot of inspection seems to done by hand, while good inspectors can be smart about finding issues , Why not scan the entire car and see if there are abnormalities over accepted range ? it is like manual QA, I rather have automation suite rather that inconsistency of a manual process.
I am sure people are already thinking about it, Musk certainly was making a big push for more automation (and ran into a ton of difficulties )
Some of them compensate for wear if the wear rate is known (eg: 1000 welds cause .5mm erosion on the electrodes). You can only do this until the tool geometry becomes unsuitable for that particular operation.
In theory. Has that actually played out in reality yet? Teslas aren't exactly the pinnacle of reliability, and other EVs are produced in low enough volumes that it may be difficult to draw real comparisons yet.
Also, most of the parts of a car that wear out are shared between EV and ICE. Modern ICE drivetrains rarely break and routinely last the lifetime of the car.
I mean there are very detailed overviews of Model S taxis with 400k miles on them. There are many many Model 3s with 150-200k miles on them. Anecdotally, teslas seem to last a very long time.
Things that break on ICE vehicles commonly EVs don’t have:
* fanbelts
* flywheels
* alternators
* starters
* spark plugs
* transmissions
* etc
In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
There are countless examples of ICE cars going hundreds of thousands of miles, too.
> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
Have you been to a service center? They're packed, especially when compared to Tesla's market penetration. And none of the cars I saw there were wrecked. Just broken.
Tesla cars will most likely last about the same length of time as a current ICE vehicle, because what mostly kills vehicles is body rot. I'm even open to the argument that Teslas will have lower average lifespan, to be honest, due to the rate of change in the EV marketplace.
I’ve owned a Tesla model 3 since 2018, and I’ve been to service centers in two states. The recommended Tesla scheduled maintenance is every two years. The drive trains are actually engineered to last “approximately a million miles” per Musk. Even the 500,000 mile Teslas owned by taxi services have only had battery replacements, never drive train replacements, so this isn’t a lie. The battery research team includes one of the principal inventors of the lithium ion battery and he’s patented what others are calling a million mile battery. No, I don’t think Toyota drive trains are designed with quite the same longevity, though Toyotas are excellent. I had a Scion tC for years.
Service centers are packed because there aren’t enough of them. If you look at the ratio of service centers to teslas on the road you’ll see the problem rather starkly… there aren’t enough of them.
Tesla supplants this problem by heavily leaning on mobile service, which is awesome, but fundamentally, the service org has scaled at maybe 20-30% the speed of the manufacturing org.
I’ve personally owned 3 Toyotas with over 150k miles on them with very little maintenance. One of them was from 1994. One(my wife’s current car) has almost 200k on it.
The tech in the Model 3s tends to be significantly better than these old model s cars mind you and they still hold up to 400,000+ miles. I bet you’d get an engine rebuild or two and maybe a new transmission or two after 400k miles on a gas car as well.
I have no links or whatever but as a persistent Toyota owner most of them, particularly the smaller engines, have not required engine rebuilds. Prius' are notoriously reliable in that mileage range, also with taxi drivers for whatever reason.
I have a 2RZ-FE (2.4 I4) Tacoma (the vintage where half were recalled due to rusty frames) with 390k and 3UZ-FE (4.3 V8) LS430 with 300k, both requiring just normal maintenance. If you change the oil, many Toyotas will just keep going. A large portion of car owners simply neglect their vehicles, though. I've always read that keeping a car on the road is a net win for the environment versus creating a new one, as long as it isn't some unreliable gas guzzler. That isn't to say that Toyota doesn't have bad cars, like the 2nd gen Scion XBs that had bad rings and would eat oil, or even LS460s with their control arm bushings being a $15k repair. Their modern quality probably isn't as high as it was in the 90's or early 2000's, as their focus has been on bigger vehicles for us fat Americans instead of better quality.
The existence of individual vehicles with very high mileage doesn't feel like a good signal for overall reliability or maintenance req's over a lifespan. I did some brief searches and it seems there's a lot of "record-holding" gas vehicles with several million miles on them, some even claiming to be using original engines. Again though, I'm not sure this is a good representation of how reliable the vehicles are in aggregate.
The vast majority of cars are not scrapped because mechanical failures in their ICE engines. Typically, materials in parts (rubber, gaskets, hoses, electric switches, interior, body/chassi rust) degrade to the point of stopping peripherals from working, creaking/rattling/vibrations, and the user experience starts to feel like junk. Replacing these parts then costs more than the value of the car.
Median mileage has more relevance than any single machine , that entirely depends on how well the owner maintains it and a bit of luck.
Gasoline car engines are more complex while that can in theory mean lesser reliability, we should also consider that they been around a lot longer , we have had a lot of time to develop manufacturing process and mature them .
Battery vehicles are very very fast evolving, also Tesla is not exactly known for well manufactured vehicles
Finally also the availability of know how and feasibility to fix a motor is lot harder than gasoline engines , there maybe a tendency to replace the motor than fix it because cheaper or easier for Tesla like how phones do it.
> Do you have a Toyota with higher than 300k miles on it? If not, why?
Both cases where I sold my Toyota were because I was moving cross country and had to downsize to a single car, at least temporarily. We still have the other one.
Belts are maintenance parts, and are extremely unlikely to break if changed on schedule.
> flywheels
You would need a shaped charge warhead to break a flywheel.
> alternators and starters
Electric motors and servos exist in electric cars as well, to drive fans, pumps, brake servos, and so on.
> spark plugs
It is extremely rare for spark plugs on fuel injected engines to break, but they degrade and are cheap and easy to replace. Much easier than brake pads or tires.
> transmissions
Very rarely break, but the transmissions in electric cars share the same basic components.
> In practice, Teslas break most when other drivers hit them.
If this was true, it would mean teslas are babied and only used sparingly in forgiving environments. But there are still too few old teslas around to produce meaningful statistics about drive train/chassi failure modes, which usually happen much later in the cars lives. The oldest ones are essentially babied "boutique" individuals.
Maintenance changes on cars are: tires, brake pads, fluids (oil, cooling, hydraulics), and some belts, shock absorbers and suspension parts.
It is true that electric cars don't need oil changes.
Most of those internal combustion engine maintenance parts simply do not exist one electric vehicles. You still need maintenance to fix / replace them, and that does not exist for most of those. The transmission on say a Tesla is a single speed and significantly simpler as a result.
As an example, the tesla model 3 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 8 yr/100,000 mi powertrain.
By comparison, the BMW M4 warranty is 4 yr/50,000 mi basic, 4 yr/50,000 mi powertrain.
Now the powertrain warranty being twice that of BMWs tells me they expect it to last at least that long. Perhaps I'm misreading something here?
The oldest teslas with the most miles are primarily taxis. I'm not sure I'd call a taxicab a "babied" vehicle.
I've had an ICE car where the electronics broke down way before anything in the drive train. What's particularly annoying is that most auto shops, especially the dealership have no idea how to fix the part in question. They just replace the entire thing and everything that is attached to it for 2000€ and charge labor on top when replacing just the specific component should cost 1000€ or less including labor. What's especially egregious is that the auto shop needs licensed diagnostics tools from the car manufacturer for something as simple as a part swap. I had to go to 4 different places before I found one that wasn't trying to screw me over.
Keep in mind Tesla’s factory makes the batteries and motors in the same building, it’s vertically integrated. For Ford I know these are imported from Europe and China.
I visited the BMW factory in Munich and saw the 3-series production line in 2015; it looks to be essentially the same level of automation as I saw then. The BMW factory has these cool rolling robots that move the partially constructed chassis around the factory rather than it having to move along a linear belt though; which is cooler IMO.
I have seen Mercedes and Porsche factories. They look pretty similar. Some are new and look shinier but over time they get outdated. In production the devil is in the details anyways. You can have cutting edge processes with old equipment or bad processes with new equipment.
The Berlin factory is already significantly outpaced by the Tesla factory in Texas. The Texas cars have a more modern architecture. The Berlin factory still uses a number of old process the same as the Fremont factory and the Shanghai factory.
The aluminum stamping on that scale is basically unique to Tesla but other companies are now slowly starting to copying that approach. However Tesla seems to be moving forward faster then others are catching up. In total this reduces the size of the bodyshop considerably.
That said their traditional welding lines seem to still not be as perfect as those from other manufactures. This is mostly true for Fremont, Shanghai has a better reputation. Berlin will hopefully follow that. In that department Tesla has no advantage.
The painting line is state of the art but not unique to Telsa, and new major expensive car factory would something similar. Most such factories are of course older so Tesla is ahead but there is certainty no moat there.
In terms of the motors, electronics/wiring and body I would consider Tesla ahead. The battery packs currently made in Berlin I would still consider state of the art but nothing that special. The packs made in Texas are actually significantly ahead (for High-Nickel cells at least).
In terms of final assembly and and interiors they are somewhat behind.
What is also interesting is that it is about the same size as the Tesla Berlin factory, the "Giga"factory doesn't seem to be anything special. What is different is that I don't remember environmental protests when the BMW factory was built.
The BMW factory in question is not new, the foundation was laid in 2003. So unless you followed local Leipzig nwes back then I am not sure much will show up.
I did, my parents house (built in the 90s) is on the other side of the highway.
When I visit I often do runs around the factory which gives a good impression of the size of the area: Its a 10k run.
They did some landscaping around the factory to offset the alterations, the factory also has 3 large wind turbines and a battery storage farm made from used EV batteries.
The Tesla factory should be a bit bigger once fully scaled. BMW Leipzig produces around 350,000 vehicles per year while Tesla is aiming for 500,000. Tesla will also manufacture battery cells on site, which BMW doesn’t do.
This factory looks no different from any other big German auto facility. Maybe a little sparsely populated right now, probably because it's still growing.
If you visit any Mercedes or BMW or Audi plant, you'll see the same big orange robots, too. They are KUKA arms, probably implemented by the same system integrators.
Munro Live, who's video was linked to earlier in the thread, commented that Tesla line is shorter and more efficient as it takes only 12 hours to make one Model Y vs over 30 for VW EV.
High assembly efficacy is mainly due to large front and read aluminum castings, new battery format 4680, and unique structural battery pack onto which, floor, seats and console are mounted and later integrated, in one go, into the chassis through the bottom of the vehicle.[0]
From what I have seen Munro is quite objective in his views and has impressive team of experts. As to the claim, Herbert Diess, CEO of VG group had said it himself: Tesla needs 10 hours while VW 30[1]. Diess is planning on improving VW efficacy to 20 hours per vehicle next year:
Tesla's QC issues speak to being rushed through. Note that Diess never talks about getting down to 10 hours. "We still plan on taking twice as long as Tesla..." because they have run the numbers on QC and service costs.
Its nonsense that Tesla has far higher service cost. And QC doesn't take 10 hours and its also not really the bottle neck as you can easily scale that.
VW has already announced a next generation platform where they are copying many aspects of Tesla architecture.
Really? Hundreds, thousands of stories of new Teslas going repeatedly to service centers for things like panel alignment, missing brake pads, unglued windshields, leaks, unexplained rattles and so on... things that could have been detected on the line...
that's "nonsense that that results in higher service costs" to Tesla?
Tesla is in a media hype where everything is vastly overblown and published and gets shared like crazy.
We don't have actual comparative data on issue. You can't just look at social media and distill facts from that. Have we really not learned this yet?
Other car makers have dealers that take the cars first. We don't know how often people go back to those dealers or how many issues get fixed at the dealer. So we don't know if manufacturing mistakes are more common with Tesla.
Service cost has not been holding back Tesla and its already turning profitable despite the majority of cars being under warranty. If it was as bad as you have made it up in your imagination this would not be happening.
In fact having complete control over service and having to cover the cost of that makes sure Tesla has financial intensive to not build broken cars, arguably more so then OEMs with a dealership model. And in fact, in the major categories like motors, batteries, electronics and software have done very, very well in terms of quality, fare better then other EV.
Tesla Mobile service can fix many issues without the owner ever having to interact with Tesla Service. This is an experience that is actually better then the majority of cars and it massively reduces the cost of fixing small and medium issues.
But I am sure Diess will take 10 extra hours in production to check the panel gaps.
I saw the Ford F-150 assembly in Dearborn, and it was similar. Very extensive use of industrial robots. Vacuum manipulators to hold glass and quarter panels. Funny chair-lifts to support personnel who drop into the chassis to install the fabric liner.
There's a gazillion "how cars are made" videos on YT but they are all full of irritating voiceovers and interviews. This one is a lot more just fun to watch.
There's also plenty FPV quadcopters flying through tight spaces vids that are quite good.
Most of what makes the Tesla video interesting is the FPV perspective negotiating all the close calls. The factory and vehicle assembly shown otherwise didn't strike me as particularly interesting, but I'm probably not the target audience.
I wish the footage wasn't sped up so much. I know they speed these videos up to make it more "interesting" but honestly it's so fast I lost interest because I couldn't focus on anything.
It a cool to see the inside of the factory tho, hopefully we can get a more detailed look sometime.
Pretty awesome footage. I see the level of automation in these types of factories and I'm blown away. And then it always makes me wonder - sometimes you see people at stations - why are they there? Too hard to automate - (what scenario could be too hard to automate given all the insane automation already)? Or, haven't had time to automate? The ingenuity all around is crazy.
People have automation backwards - automation doesn't solve problems. In order to automate, you have to solve all the problems. The machine has to know how to detect and handle any variation it encounters - or summon human help. If it has to summon human help too often, or fails to detect a problem too often, it is simply not worth it to automate.
I run into this all the time in my day job with software automation. Everyone thinks you wave some kind of magic wand when you say 'automate' that makes it just work. I have to put out the speed brakes once in a while when chatting with my VP to remind him that automation doesn't necessarily mean accurate, as much as it means fast. Sure, I can provision a bunch of network gear quickly, but if the automation is wrong, that just means I'll wipe out an entire portion of the infrastructure in seconds.
Typically not worth the cost of automation. Automated tasks need parts with certain levels of precision, among other requirements. That precision can some times make parts excessively expensive, heavy, etc etc.
One example of this that you don't see mentioned often, is that stamped door assemblies frequently need "adjustment", aka bending and beating, in to position to make them fit properly. You can see some examples of it in this video: https://youtu.be/iPhwBUnR_XA?t=216
Huh, fascinating! I always imagined that, if adjustments were needed, they'd be done on some sort of off-line jig where deflection could be precisely controlled. But no, it's just some guy using his body weight to bend the door into shape.
- Material handling - moving a part from A to B. Many of the parts looked too heavy for a human to lift. Some could probably be lifted by two humans working together, but that's a really bad use for humans and easy enough to automate.
- The presses and possibly some kind of moulding/pouring process, which obviously need to be done by a machine
- Spot (?) welding
- The coating/painting
So I'd turn the question around and say: It seems like they automated only a few key processes, and many of them because human labor isn't really an option. The presses replace many different production techniques, some of which could probably be done manually, so replacing those other techniques with "just put it in the press" is an advancement and it implies automation. The painting could be done by humans but the overall process would again be a lot more complicated. Automation for the welding is well established, and you want the consistency of robots.
It's a pretty well-know story that Tesla's model 3, their first mass production car, was almost fully automated. It ended up making a ton of problems and Tesla moved some of the production to humans. It seems machines are very good at certain things, but not everything. Yet.
It's basically too hard to automate, yes. These may be mundane sounding tasks like checking if a screw is properly secure, we're still far from full automation, the robots simply do preprogrammed tasks, they have no sentience or intelligence.
Checking things like bolt tightness is a hybrid automation. There are machines which know where all the bolts are within a given area, and can test each one and adjust as necessary to make sure they are torqued. But that machine is itself handled by a human that gets it to the right spot.
Elon mentioned [0] it is easy for a human to grab a dangling cable. The cable may not always be in the exact same place on each car, so you need a robot with a vision system.
I can also imagine that it minimises the tail-risk, because a human can come and fix it. If he would not be there and a critical error occurs, it could take down the whole factory in time before help arrives (maybe even something trivial as a misplaced item on the belt).
I assume this was done with a FPV piloted drone. I just got into FPV flying and this was pretty impressive! My stomach lurched a few times recalling times I've tried to squeeze into tight spaces only to drift where I shouldn't be.
There's lots of cuts and morphs, so it's not continuous. Also lots of speed adjustments. Many of the shots were probably done very slowly and sped up after.
No reason that it needs to be FPV - if they have a 3D model of the factory they could have created a path for it to fly. I don't think Ardupilot or Betaflight is up to that(?), but a small team of engineers working for a couple of months would be able to make it work.
This is almost certainly FPV as the cost of building an autonomous solution would be incredible. It's more likely parts are CG than that the camera vehicle flew autonomously, and I think neither are likely, this looks like "top 5% FPV pilot" work to me.
Inside-out indoor 3D positioning is an _exceptionally hard_ problem. Like, really hard. It parallels inside-out road positioning enough that there is crossover (and IIRC there is a lot of employee motion between Tesla and DJI and other drone autonomy makers), but I don't think this would be an easy "few months" project and certainly not cost effective.
Picture drawing lines in 3d space in something a little more sophisticated than SketchUp, and then having the drone follow those paths. What's tricky about that? Indoors you have no weather, and could use a beacon system to pinpoint location.
And this is the typical dismissive rebuttal of an HN post.
They built a factory using a high degree of automation in a 3D space - i.e. they have a significant staff of automation engineers.
Intel has been doing tight formation drone light shows outdoors (in weather) since at least 2014, if not earlier. Positioning drones precisely enough (i.e. within N centimeters) is therefore objectively possible if you have the right feedback system (and as a sibling comment points out, IR sensors could work for that). Offload all the processing to a computer rather than the drone, and it isn't an insurpassable problem.
A small team of engineers for a few months is <$1m, which for a marketing campaign this splashy is nothing. Granted, per one of the sibling comments they did use an FPV pilot for at least some of the shots, but there's nothing stopping them from having automated other parts of it.
yeah or it could take a week of planning a week of shooting and a week of editing with a crew of people that make drone videos for a living… they’re not pulling automation engineers off of their projects to work on something completely unrelated for a one-time promo shoot, especially not for an entire month
An array of active IR cameras in fixed, known positions, plus IR reflector markers on the UAV works well out of the box over ranges of a few meters. Eg. Vicon. Same tech as motion capture for movies.
I don’t have experience using it in volumes as large as the video, but in moderate sized lab space it works very well, and at high frame rates.
The trick is to invert the problem and have the active sensors off-board and the robot is the (reflected energy) beacon.
How do you propose you use outside-in to fly through an operating robot? There are too many sources of occlusion for off the shelf outside-in solutions to work at all in this video.
It sure was a nice video, and I found it insightful to see what goes on in a car factory. But I have honestly quickly gotten spoiled by seeing some really good FPV videos, recently, it seems that every self-respecting company wants/gets one, these days. And with that in my memory, I found the cuts surprisingly off-putting, as silly as that is, I realize that. On the flip side, how close they were allowed to go into the molding and other machines, I found very impressive, imagining that a steering mistake could cause disruption and cleanup, although it might also speak to how much buy-in you can get from the people on the floor for making a cool video.
I'm just getting into FPV RC cars! I was pretty blown away that there are basically two choices: low res analog or DGI's digital system. Side by side here: https://youtu.be/1POaGs99y-M?t=79
I always assumed there were some neat tricks to get HD from multiple analog channels, after all these years, but none are remotely affordable.
I'm tempted to slap an old 4g android phone onto the car (or two), and turn the cars max speed down, and use that for highish latency, but nearly infinite control range. With a little solar panel stopped on, infinite battery life, with some long, periodic, naps!
Hobbyist: RubyHD, OpenHD (make your own system using raspberrypi zero/jetson nano etc..) and get a decent connection by using off the shelf wifi hardware in monitor mode. Can cost up to $100 - $150. (2 raspberrypis, 1 camera, wifi dongles) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFGsZ_d3KBw
Commercial: HDZero (proprietary low latency HD system that is fairly popular with FPV quadcopter racers these days). Can cost up to $300. ($50 for camera, $50 for vtx, $150-250 for receiver with hdmi out).: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHa08sdKoGs . They recently released a 1Watt vtx that costs about $100, and can give you a fairly good range.
If analog is potato, then those systems look more like yams. Their effective resolution, in the optical sense rather than the image size sense, seems to be really low, compared to DJI: https://youtu.be/llRaTs3bVuE?t=12
Definitely cheaper though!
disclaimer: I just bought a DJI headset. I may be biased and trying to justify my purchase to myself. ;)
Yeah on paper HDZero and DJI both do 720p, but i think that's just the number of pixels. HDZero does seem to lose more quality than DJI due to the way it encodes data. There's also 1080p30 mode on HDZero - but there don't seem to be any cameras that make use of it. For now I am disappointed with my HDZero system: I still can't see ghost branches and electric cables in time.
The video you linked doesn't represent HDZero fairly though, because they're 2 different cameras - with different settings. Here's a more accurate representation: https://youtu.be/SmfbMTe80Uc?t=126 . (So far, of all the HDZero cameras I have tested, I liked Digisight V3 the best)
RubyHD seems pretty good - except for latency. On a better hardware I think RubyHD would be as good as DJI.
Also do check out the recent root exploit for DJI goggles. It will soon bring you "Canvas mode" (OSD like we had on Analog systems). Happy Flying!
I am still waiting for Orqa to come out with their HD system.
I definitely had some uncanny valley vibes watching it, but I think it might be a combination of the camera's perspective (distorting distances away from center) and the footage being sped up/slowed down.
More like footage being stabilized in software like Reelsteady / Gyroflow . Typically fpv videos are a little more "jerky" and these software remove the lens distortion and then stabilize the footage.
Wow I'm impressed ... I've heard the claim that big pieces of software like an operating system, web browser, or maybe Google search are the most complex things that humans have created.
I have no idea how to judge those claims, but various factories creating cars, aircraft carriers, submarines, or space shuttles certainly seem like they should be candidates. Especially since they're software-controlled!
Any other candidates?
----
As an aside, I find this a lot more impressive than the Dall-E 2 illustrations on the front page right now. Because at the end of the day the cars being produced here have to run, and be sold.
In contrast, I believe our minds are largely "filling in the blanks" for the images generated by Dall-E 2. They don't have to "work" or make money ... just be sufficiently "interesting".
An OS kernel alone like Linux is around 28 million lines of code, plus around 30,000 packages available, each with thousands or more LOC. All hand written and interacting.
A vehicle might have only a few thousand physical parts, but if you start counting the computing hardware on board you might count transistors on its computers which are now in the billions; plus to be fair you'd count all its software as well.
Think about this. Think about where we got, as a people. This is out of this world. I don't want to get into if you like it or not or think it's good or not, no. Anyway you feel about Tesla, Musk, mass production, automation, whatever, just stop for a moment and think how the heck did we get here? I was amazed. I know some folks are used to these kinds of environments, but me? It looks straight from a 80s or 90s big sci-fi movie. It's mesmerizing.
I mean - that's definitely a specialized robot we've not yet built, but I think all the components exist to do it if someone actually bothered to put it together. Scanning a lego instruction booklet to assemble a 3D model of the desired outcome seems extremely reasonable - and assembling legos is clearly within the realm of possibility.
Now, we don't have a general AI that you could just hand a pile of legos and a booklet to and we almost certainly won't have one of those for a number of years - but that task isn't out of the realm of reason for a specialized solution.
I'm not so sure about that because meanwhile, Amazon is struggling to build a robot that can pick and place orders, and so they still have many humans in the loop.
I believe the hard part would be the reading of the booklet - operation robots or similar should be able to build with LEGO given that simple LEGO robots can build simple LEGO sets.
The robot itself. One could build a gripper meant specifically for LEGO pieces, but a general grasper like the human hand is still out of reach (ha) of robotic design (for now).
Leave money out of it for a moment and recognize that this is a monumental step toward cessation of use of fossil fuels by humankind. I cheer for ITER with the same fervor.
Nobody else gave a shit about EVs until Tesla did it on a large scale. I don't own a single share of TSLA or one of their vehicles (yet) and I am happy for this and will benefit from it, because I am a human living on Earth.
This has nothing to do with the claim that we, as a people, got somewhere with this factory, when it is the shareholders that own and control the IP that made it possible, along with the physical machinery. It's not a public service that we, as a people, are responsible for in that sense.
I think that's being a little unfair. Tesla's factory isn't particularly special, it's like every other car plant out there. They're building on centuries of industrial development. Heck, the biggest 'cool toy' in the Tesla factory is made by an Italian company. So 'we' did get to this level if industrial capability.
I would have made a similar
comment if the same claim was made about another car company's factory. That biggest machine is also likely the IP of the Italian company's shareholders, as well.
Its an Italian company that design and built the machine special on Tesla request for Tesla specification. The machine was quite a bit larger then other machines they had done before. It was first installed in the US and produced cars for export and the domestic market.
Its not like Tesla went down to the local market and picked up a few toys and put a factory together.
By your standard no company in history would be 'particularly special'.
It's an impressive thing they have built. Everyone involved should be commended for their hard work and achievements.
However, Tesla and all of its operations, including the factory in the video, is part of a broader context. They don't exist in a vacuum. None of this would have happened without that broader context.
What about all the people employed by Tesla and all the people who are buying Tesla cars? And the planet benefits from getting closer to sustainable transport.
There's a drone flythrough of an Australian Plywood Factory from a year ago on YouTube[1], and it made me think: why would managers Segway around a factory in future[2] when they could have FPV drones with cameras and speakers and microphones to oversee everything that's happening from above, from the comfort of their office far away? Drones could have pre-set waypoints to fly to the interesting places or supervisor stations automatically, come back to charging stations automatically, do hourly flythroughs of preset routes for regular audit and inspections of production lines or warehouses, like CCTV cameras that can move.
It's going to be a no-fun future for a lot of people.
Because the primary purpose of managers walking of the floor isn’t observation and control, but rather understanding, communication, and very rarely changing something.
There’s nothing wrong with automated QC activities, but it’s not going to replacing walking the floor (assuming the floor isn’t a lights-out facility.)
generally re: Tesla, I hope we can manage to throw similar enthusiasm and expertise behind promethean engineering projects slightly more imaginative than the self-propelled carriage and a bit more pragmatic than a mars colony
Mars colony involves all space technology, much of it is pragmatic. Self-propelled carriages involve battery research/production and transitioning from ICE to EV. So its really far better then you make it seem.
What problems would you like solved?
For me, I would like nuclear energy to get attention but the world has decided to be dumb and its not changing its mind anytime soon.
on board with space technology in general, agreed also on energy storage, no qualms with these
mars colony however seems untenable as an economic enterprise barring unforeseen developments, and makes no sense as an existential hedge until we demonstrate the capacity to reliably shape and maintain natural and artificial life support systems on this planet
I would love to see more nuclear energy
Gigafactory is a name for a place that builds mega- up to gigawatt (micro-)reactors fit for any municipality or mobile habitat, not some car
What Musk actually says is that they don't do advertisement and that case by the comment definition of 'paying somebody to run ads'. As far as I know, please provide sources if you know otherwise, that Musk or Tesla said 'we don't have a PR department'.
Rather the media around Tesla stopped getting answers for requests and some of the personal contacts from inside Tesla that they had left the company. This lead the media concluding that Tesla had fired its PR department. Or at least those people that responded to media requests. We know that some people that were part of that moved to other position inside Tesla.
Tesla always had events and produced various kinds of media that they put out on their own channel. They clearly have a marketing or media team of some kind. The also clearly have people preparing communication for governments and shareholders, so they do have some kind of PR department, even if they internally don't call it that and those people work inside other departments.
I think you are mixing up what Musk claims and what media companies say about Tesla.
- PR - handling traditional and perhaps social media channels like TV, journals, magazines etc answer press questions, arrange interviews , make sure journalists covering them have access, in smaller orgs get journalist to cover them.
- media planning - figures out where to place advertisements and when and may handle also the buy operations . Digital is in-house in large orgs, but for traditional media like print it is external[1]
- creative agencies usually external and produce advertising content like Super Bowl ads to boring flyers
- Marcom - Marketing communications usually is responsible for Corporate communication and content that is not advertising stuff like this video.
- few other like lobbying ,crisis control etc may work in the same group or work with legal or other depts
Tesla seems to have other three depts in some form, they did say they fire PR team and stopped engaging with traditional press
——-
[1] this still requires relationship building unlike digital as there is no targeting , limited inches airtime available and getting the slots you want can be tricky everyone wants best prime time /first page etc for their campaigns, it is not always top price sale. As slots are sold in complex packages clubbed with less attractive media properties that don’t sell as well with the attractive ones you do want to buy .
This is why we have media groups they are more efficient, as they can better monetize properties by clubbing them in sales and are able to acquire independent publications/channels to make more money than they were making on their own.
> Musk or Tesla said 'we don't have a PR department'.
From an article titled "Elon Musk says no to a new Tesla PR department, doesn’t believe ‘manipulating public opinion’"[1]:
> Elon Musk rejected the idea of Tesla going back to having a PR department, and his reasoning behind it is quite revealing: He doesn’t believe in “manipulating public opinion.”
Other companies spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion, Tesla focuses on the product.
I trust the people.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2021
That's the actual quote and the question was from a media member who used to have a lot of contact with the PR team and was referring to people responding to requests from him. Fred knows very well that Tesla still has a marketing team in general.
I think most peoples' definition is clearly about "push-based" paid advertising, rather than "pull-based" marketing videos that they don't pay any platform to promote.
I for one, am grateful that a company is showing the power of organic marketing like that, as opposed to constantly having to see Doritos ads injected into my friends' Instagram stories on iOS. (jk, I only use desktop Firefox w/ uBlock now)
> I think most peoples' definition is clearly about "push-based" paid advertising
That's got nothing to do with it. All that's going on here is that people have bought into a false narrative that Tesla doesn't do advertising. And instead of recognizing it as false they desperately defend the falsehood to avoid feeling foolish.
Making the claim that something which is plainly an ad is not an ad by way of silly semantics is farcical.
You’re the one obsessed with a word. Tesla markets. They have marketing. They made marketing videos. They do not advertise. They do not have commercials, or buy ad space in newspapers or magazines, buy space on billboards, or banner ads, use Facebook’s targeted ad campaigns, or any other form of advertising.
This video is promotional marketing. It is not advertising. Those are two different things. You can die on that hill if you want to, but it’s fucking weird. Tesla makes some people go completely batshit insane, and I do not get it. At all.
Suck my fat hog, cunt. None of those are ads. They are promotional marketing. I’m sorry you are so possessed by this need to hate and ridicule, but Tesla doesn’t advertise. That does not mean they do not promote their product. But — and here is what you are too willfully stupid to understand — advertising and marketing are not the same thing. Post all the YouTube links you want. Unless one of those is an ad that shows up before other videos on YT, it’s not an ad. It’s promotional marketing.
It's the same kind of radicalization you see with QAnon adherents. The more the objective reality of the world contradicts their beliefs, the more strongly they cling to those beliefs.
Unlike you, I don’t give two shits about Tesla. We could put Musk, Bezos, Putin, and a random Saudi prince in a line and shoot them all, execution style, and I would not give a fuck.
What I do care about is truth. I worship truth. It is my god. And you are a liar. You have an axe to grind against Tesla, and will pursue it in bad faith, by which I mean regardless of what facts are presented to you.
Tesla does not advertise. This is a truth. You are obsessed with Tesla. This is also a truth. But know what? You’re my project. I’m a zealot when it comes to the truth. It is, as I mentioned, my God. I want to do my holy duty. I want to fight some fuck stick on the Internet. So please continue to bring it on. Continue to use your rhetorical tricks, shift blame, and all the other tiresome tactics that trolls like you resort to.
Tesla does not advertise. They promote their products, but not through advertisements.
By the way: Ford uses WPP as their ad agency. Toyota uses Saatchi & Saatchi. Target uses Merkle.
Which advertising agency does Tesla use? For these advertisements you swear exist somewhere?
About what? What evidence is not being considered?
Or… maybe my zealotry is for objectivity. To not using language as a tool to achieve predetermined outcomes.
So, I noticed you didn’t answer the Question about which ad agency it is Tesla uses. Is this the point where you just abandon all pretense, and avoid having a discussion? Instead choosing to evolve into ad hominem and other rhetorical tricks? That’s usually the pattern here, right. The discussion goes into a direction that you can no longer a fan, so instead of admitting any kind of change of opinion based upon new information - like people who are discussing things in good faith do — they simply resort to short quips that divert from the real conversation and allow them to have the final word.
> So, I noticed you didn’t answer the Question about which ad agency it is Tesla uses.
You're only noticing my boredom. Just try to think logically. Your claim is that Tesla can make its own cars but it cannot make its own ads?
> avoid having a discussion?
There is no discussion. There is only your inability to see the obvious.
Tesla's advertising has worked well on you. You've been trained in what to parrot and you parrot it desperately and for free. You like to think of yourself as sophisticated but in reality Tesla's manipulation of you is total. You can't see the obvious even when it's right in front of you.
- What ad agency does Tesla use?
- what networks have they advertised on?
- Multiple people in this thread have pointed out to you the difference between advertising and marketing. Do you still claim they are one and the same?
Finally:
- How to you live with yourself? Don’t you ever get tired of, you know, being you?
My reply had nothing to do with Tesla. If a definition says “ad” is basically any piece of text on the internet, the definition is wrong. That seems uncontroversial.
I'm no Tesla fan, but I maintain that the standard understanding of an "advertisement" implies paid. Just because a company puts something out there into the world doesn't make it an advertisement. (Things like classified job posting "ads" notwithstanding.)
Is that kind of hostile/dismissive language actually necessary or helpful do you think? What if instead we investigate the disagreement in good faith?
One of the two definitions of an "advertisement" from Webster was quoted. The other is this:
> the act or process of advertising something
Which links to "advertising":
> the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements
Emphasis mine. So perhaps we have some middle ground here. I would argue that this is the advertising definition we're talking about when we're discussing whether something is an "advertisement", not the sort of public event or job posting, commonly referred to as a "classified ad", referred to by the other definition. Maybe that's where we disagree. Or maybe it's the salience of this "especially by paid announcements". In my experience, that is the general understanding of the term: advertisements are generally paid. But I acknowledge that it says "especially by", not "only by", so some room for interpretation is left.
So, given all that, I figure if you want to label this an ad, that's reasonable. What I find less reasonable is declaring anyone who disagrees to be objectively wrong, and then using dismissive language like the above to try and win an unnecessary argument.
No, you are objectively wrong. It's advertising, straight up and down.
The lengths you're going to to defend an obvious lie are strange. That's the odd psychology of it where you're more willing to keep going down the rabbit hole than you are to simply admit you're wrong.
It works wonderfully, too. Look how many people in this thread are just now realizing how incredibly automated manufacturing has become; they think Tesla invented all this.
Very cool. Elon said "raw materials go in, cars come out" at the GigaTexas opening yesterday. What's included in the raw materials and how does that compare to other car factories?
The only thing they really show manufactured on site in the video is the frame and body. I'd expect most other things to be shipped in from elsewhere. At the very least the electronics and motors are going to come from elsewhere. It doesn't look much different from most other car factories to be honest.
It depends, lots of variation. Thinks like interior components (plastics, fabrics), seats, battery cells are often not made on site. Or sometimes its on site but by a supplier directly integrated in your factory. Some companies make the battery packs in different location then the cars. Sometimes electric motors are made of site as well.
One difference is that Tesla uses aluminum castings on a large scale. So they basically get raw aluminum melt it down and then cast it. But that is not so different the stamping parts locally.
The real difference will be in terms of batteries. Texas and Berlin both have battery cell production on site. In Texas its literally in the same building. No other manufacture has that yet as far as I am aware.
Tesla is also doing cathode and anode manufacturing in house. They seem to even be moving cathode materials production in house as well but I am not sure if that's already included in the current buildings.
I think Tesla Texas will be the most complete end to end car done in one building. Stamping, casting, plastics, seats, fabrics, glass, panting, battery cells, battery packs, motors and more besides in on big building. Thins that are still missing is of course computer chips, electronics.
If they actually do cathode materials manufacture there nobody else is even close.
The way drone pilots these days fly around so skillfully makes me wonder if there’s any black market for a sort of corporate espionage program where a pilot can sneak in to a factory through some small gap, quickly fly around gathering footage and as much sensitive details as possible, and then escape back out, before anyone has a chance to even do anything or maybe even realize what has happened.
> The way drone pilots these days fly around so skillfully makes me wonder if there’s any black market for a sort of corporate espionage program where a pilot can sneak in to a factory through some small gap
It's far easier to have people with impressive resumes interview at the victim organization and directly ask questions. Fishing for information isn't difficult "I designed the Foo process and know to work around the disadvantages, and can apply that knowledge here", "Oh, we don't do that here, we have Bar, which is superior..."
FPV drones are incredibly loud and dissonant, especially in an enclosed space. You'd have to have a lot of very consistent and loud background noise for this to go unnoticed.
- We shouldn’t look to cars for the future of transportation. They don’t scale especially in large cities (Dallas, Atlanta). Fly me a drone though a bus or train factory! I’m not saying for everyone to stop using cars completely, but city and suburb design shouldn’t make cars the only option…and Elon’s tunnels are the opposite of a transit solution.
- Tesla is potentially getting its lunch eaten by competitors like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and BMW i4. They need to improve their interior fit and finish to compete. Tesla’s advantage will evaporate very quickly when faced with motivated and giant rivals. Hyundai and VW in particular should scare the crap out of them.
Considering both of them are still around 1/20th the scale and not profitable, while Tesla has 30% margins on vehicles, I don't think there is much fear.
The goal was always to cause the transition away from ICE, not stop competition. Every EV is one less ICE car
> Elon’s tunnels are the opposite of a transit solution.
A high capacity electric bus threw a tunnel is theoretically as efficient and far more dynamic, cheaper and easier to maintain and upgrade then any Subway. Its a mistake to draw conclusion from first generation products.
Really its just like a subway but each subway-car is a bit shorter and has its own propulsion system. Each car is no longer forced to stop at each station (clearly highly ineffective) and the network can do far more complex routing and more point to point transport.
You take advantage of the millions of EV battery and motors produced to get low cost and you make the tunnels cheap and dumb.
I don't understand why people are so resistant to this.
> Tesla is potentially getting its lunch eaten by competitors
If I had a penny for every-time I have heard this since 2014 I literally be a millionaire right now. Its a complete misunderstand of the EV business and what it takes to scale EV production. Had other companies gone all in on this in 2014-2016 range it might have been true.
VW who is one of he two biggest manufactures and was pushing for EV far earlier and harder then all non-Tesla competitors has clearly stated they hope to overtake Tesla in 2024 at best.
Others like BMW or Hyundai simply don't have the battery capacity or secured battery supply-chain to produce the number of vehicles to 'eat Tesla lunch'. You can look at those companies own projects for the next few years, even the optimistic projects are not close to those of Tesla.
> evaporate very quickly when faced with motivated and giant rivals.
Actually the major advantage that these 'rivals' have, having a profitable ICE business to subsidies their EV buildup is about to disappear faster.
And if you pay attention to Tesla growth you will see that they are really not that much smaller anymore. Tesla is on track to produce about 1.5 million vehicles this year and all of them pretty premium priced.
BMW Group is aiming to produce like ~2.6 million vehicles. And of course they have a massive legacy ICE business and are nowhere near able to invest what Tesla is in EV and Battery technology. Its very likely that in 2023 Tesla will outsell BMW already.
And in terms of being 'giant' what matters is how many EV you make. That dedicates of how large you can make your supply contracts with the large battery materials producers. Tesla is both the largest buyer of batteries but they are also dealing with the raw supply of materials themselves, having major contracts with the largest lithium, nickel and cobalt producers that other companies can only dream. Tesla buys more lithium then the rest of the German and US industry combined.
Tesla is the largest battery consumer of Panasonic and also one of the largest costumers of CATL and LG (ie largest manufactures of Japan, Korea and China). Plus Tesla themselves are on track to be largest battery producer from Europe/US themselves.
Given the Gas prices now, EV demand in general and Tesla demand in particular are constrained by production. Hyundai will sell ever Ionic they can make but they simply can't make enough even if it was 10x more popular then Tesla (and they are not based on any measure).
You also only mention interiors (matter of taste) while ignoring far more important things like charging that is far more relevant when it comes to EV sales.
Don't get me wrong, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 is a great product. But the idea that because of that they are gone eat Tesla launch anytime in the next couple years will simply not hold up. The reality is 98% of the market is still non EV and every additional EV produced will not be one less EV produced by a competitor but one less ICE produced by a competitor.
The companies who you need to be afraid for is those that don't have large supply of battery and supply chains locked up over the next 4-5 years. The depreciation of ICE vehicles will be incredibly once EV hit a critical point and those manufacturers with lots of ICE exposure will be the once suffering the most.
It's a fun watch but flying a drone through currently operating heavy machinery seems like a terrible idea...
The video gamer in me though did want to mash the forward key when they waited for the second machine to finish a round before continuing though... you could've made that jump!
I mean, what's the worst that can realistically happen? I assume the presses, for example, would completely ignore the drone. You might want to scrap that one part just in case but I doubt it'd damage the press.
The cost of a few spare drones is likely negligible compared to the overall production cost of the video.
I’m not a manufacturing person at all, but I was surprised to a bit falling off a larger bit (at 1:10). Guessing that’s an intentional part of the process, not a whoopsie?
Looks like mold flash (unwanted material that's squeezed out from the narrow gap where the pieces of a mold fit together due to the high injection pressure) and it's normal for some to come off. There's doubtless a cleanup step later where any leftover material is removed.
Having been to many other car factories professionally, this one looks rather strange to me. It's dirty and ramshackle, things are standing around randomly, you see parts falling off during production steps where it's weird (to me), some status displays seem to be down, the density of the space usage is very low. Even for a barely operational plant with much to come it feels rushed together.
Edit: Quite surprised/curious why this is getting downvoted so aggressively ...
It's all an opinion, of course. I think I maybe wrote it in a way that came across as incendiary, but I was mostly wondering if this was shot weeks ago during trial or calibration runs and just doesn't represent a line working at full pace.
Re dirty and ramshackle, there's just a lot of stuff standing around in what seems like temporary locations, including discarded packaging materials. Things also do frankly look a bit dusty and bruised in ways I'm just not used to seeing in these high-end factories. It may not be to levels of functional relevance, but I think it's interesting. The factories I'm used to are nearly antiseptically clean and the people who run them take great pride in them being so.
> You haven't seen entire subframes being molded before, so it would be strange to see that much mold flash falling off.
Yep. That's a front (I think) subframe, fresh off the presses. A little mold flash is to be expected, it's operating around 5,600 to 6,200 tf, more than any industrial mold on the planet. I am friends with an excellent moldmaker, and he's in awe that it works at all.
> It may not be to levels of functional relevance, but I think it's interesting.
This makes more sense, and doesn't fit with your original tone.
> wondering if this was shot weeks ago during trial or calibration runs
Large groups of manufacturing engineers. It's a specific discipline, and they work closely with the design engineers of the vehicles to make sure the vehicles can actually be manufactured efficiently at scale.
