Elon Musk says ‘we dug our own grave’ with the Cybertruck as he warns Tesla faces enormous production challenges::Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the Cybertruck’s unique design means the company faces immense challenges in scaling production.
“We”
When things go right, it’s “I”. When things go wrong, it’s “We”. These are Musk’s situationally preferred pronouns.
No different than Trump
I mean, with Trump it’s more like ‘They’.
Yeah, Trump won’t accept any blame for anything, even when it’s obvious to anyone with a functioning nervous system.
I mean it’s capitalism in general usually. When the company is profiting, it’s due to the CEO. When the company is failing, it’s the fault of the company as a whole
When it fails it’s because of the economy, please bail us out.
I’d dare to say no different than any of those guys in charge
Same narcissistic behavior. These are the narc pronouns
Pretty standard for a rich boi
Exactly. Who has the one promoting it? It was you, Elon.
Credit for innovation: capitalism. Credit for failures: socialism.
Must be the royal we.
Musk and the sycophants he surrounds himself with
Wasn’t he the one who made a bunch of ridiculous demands? This car seems like it was designed by Homer Simpson.
In my head it was Elon who sketched the truck and told everyone “make that exactly how I drew it”
No way this thing is soft and yielding like a nerf ball
At least it’ll be more powerful than a gorilla.
And when it catches on fire, you won’t be able to break the glass to get out!
Unless you have a steel ball to throw at it.
Yah there’s even an episode where Homer designed a car. Didn’t go well.
That’s weird, I could have sworn he said that they nearly had all the issues sorted out and that it was coming next month… Trying to remember when he said that… 2021?
Bruh that delay was because of the PLANDEMIC!!111!!
/s
Every time the stock dipped, often after intentionally driving the stock down before pumping it back up.
“When you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you’re trying to solve at scale,” he added.
does it have new technology? i thought it was just like, shockingly ugly?
It’s got a lot of new things to them
800v power train
Newer 4680 cells
~85% custom chip controllers (up from 60s on Y)
48v power electronics instead of 12v, which is fairly new to everyone and the supply chain isn’t as robust as the 12v one, but long term it’s good for industry. (Edit I’ve heard talk of how they connect everything is going to be very different too, but nothing I’ve seen confirmed)
Folding the stainless steel at scale
9000T press, biggest one made
The wheels that can turn on front and back
New assembly method (excluding stainless steel part)
I’m sure there’s more they didn’t tell us.
It went from being a weird vehicle (love or hate it) to a new technology platform.
4 wheel steering isn’t really new. (but your point is still taken)
I did say “to them”
800v isn’t new either, others use it
Edit: stainless steel aside, I have a suspicion that the 48v stuff will cause the most problems. That seems like a lot of suppliers where 1 problem halts the line.
In telecommunications at least, -48V is the standard. It will still be a massive issue but not impossible for suppliers to adapt (with delays). The biggest problem I see is the high cost associated with such low demand, unless more manufacturers start switching over.
48v is in automotive as well. Most of the cable manufacturers are using PoE Ethernet. Belden has product lines devoted to this. It vastly simplifies wiring all the systems of a car together.
AFAIK Tesla is the first mass auto manufacturer going 100% 48v.
Others have a hybrid approach
I can see that 48v head and tail lights would cause a problem. It makes sense to start that on a vehicle that won’t see high volumes, since there wouldn’t be many needed.
The biggest problem I see is the high cost associated with such low demand, unless more manufacturers start switching over.
That will be a big issue. I think the entire industry will switch, but it’s not going to be immediate.
Once the CT is fully ramped, they’ll probably start to see some of those costs come down a little, but 250k a year pales in comparison to the whole industry using something.
Teslas Gen 3 platform will add to that scale and help too, but it’ll still be smaller than the industry.
Pretty much the entire list seems like features that have existed for industrial applications.
Which, sure, is challenging to transition to a new company and scale up to consumer levels of production and down to consumer levels of cost. But I agree everything about this truck seems iterative.
What would you ever consider new in any vehicle if you look at it like that?
Solid state batteries? Not new, it’s just changing the anode but a battery is a battery so it’s just an iteration.
… Not much.
I’m not really looking to the automotive industry for completely new innovation like that. If I’m going to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a car, I’m probably going to keep it for at least a decade and I value it being reliable and easy to repair. Mature technologies have a lot of advantages over new innovations there.
I’m not the one claiming that these features are new or innovate, and I’m not the one claiming that being on the cutting-edge of technology is a good thing. Musk is.
An example of a thing which has been tried so many times, but which ultimately only increases complexity, expense, and rate of failure for very little gain.
“Ah yes, let us take one of the most finicky vehicular systems outside of the engine itself and make it literally twice as complex!”
And in return you get… slightly reduced turning radius.
Ya didn’t say I loved it lol. I miss my 2004 civic with crank windows I had that car for 14 years with 0 work done minus oil and brakes.
Ah that wasn’t my interpretation, I was just sort of “yes, and-ing” your comment
For a company with already terrible QC that’s a lot more things to go wrong for buyers unfortunately
I don’t think a lot of those things are where Tesla really struggles with quality that’ll impact the customer. Just production delays and cost.
I’d be pretty surprised if the power train is a problem as that’s their specialty.
Same with the electronics, those don’t usually have problems except the electronic door handles that the Cybertruck won’t have.
I’ll be pretty surprised if the steel doesn’t cause QC problems, and I’m half expecting that massive windshield wiper to be a problem somehow.
Maybe the air suspension will be problematic, and probably the powered tonneau cover.
How is 48v better than 24v, for example? I don’t really know much about car electronics
Higher voltage allows for fewer amps. Higher amps creates more heat and requires thicker cables which cost more and add weight. So it’s substantially less copper since the wires don’t need to be as thick.
I can’t give exact numbers, but going from a 12/24v to 48v wiring harness will reduce the harness weight. I don’t know if that’s on a linear scale or not in terms of reduction.
A thinner wiring harness would also be easier to manage and place, e.g more bendable, less space required to place it.
It also gives you more leeway if you do want to push more amps to something without having to get into the really really big unwieldy wires that are very difficult to shape.
24v would work, but I imagine the thought is, if we need to create a whole new supply chain for automotive parts at a different voltage, why go to 24v when we can go to 48v and get even more benefits? The process is already happening, others have some hybrid 48v usage.
Someone else could comment on this, but without knowing more, I would speculate that higher voltages would even allow some sort of shrinking of the components themselves since internally they wouldn’t need to support as high of amps either, but that’s just my speculation.
Edit: Just some hypothetical numbers. If a wiring harness is 150lbs and lets say 48v gets it to 50lbs, that’s a $375 cost savings in copper alone. That’s also a ton less copper used/mined across the whole auto industry once transitioned. At 67 million cars a year, that would be 6,700,000,000 lbs of copper saved per year.
ok i work in a kind of tangential industry and can kind of answer this probably
in general the higher the voltage the smaller the current, which you’re generally happy about because your 1) electrical losses and 2) cable/wire diameter are both proportional to current
the tradeoffs being 1) it gets harder and more important to isolate the circuit (e.g. your wire insulation that prevents the 12V bus from shorting out to the vehicle chassis now needs to be thicker) and 2) all the stuff people make for cars (i dunno, windshield wiper motors, radiator fans, whatever) is currently for 12V
in general this move probably makes sense, provided they’re able to figure out their supply chains, and if tesla can position themselves as being like the first company to figure out a bunch of these 48V components at scale that’s probably going to be really good for them. they did a kind of similar thing with the charging infrastructure if i understand currently, like now the tesla charging cable is the de facto north american standard
insulation
I’m no expert, but even with ordinary 12V wiring, the insulation is generally rated for up to 600V, just because it’s not really practical to make it any thinner…
So here is some information on where the 48v standard is coming from. https://www.microcontrollertips.com/what-is-the-ideal-ethernet-choice-for-automotive-applications-faq/
it’s new to Tesla but not automotive.
AFAIK Tesla is the first mass auto manufacturer to go fully 48v? Others are hybrid.
It took a lot of work to make windows that shatter so easily.
First you have to mass produce a lot of cannon balls, hire people and train them to throw the cannon ball perfectly so the broken window looks perfect.
How else are you going to get it on a shirt if it doesn’t look perfect?
Gee… telling the engineers to getting precision to below 10 microns would cause production challenges.
I’ve been doing PCB-board design recently. Here’s the manufactuering specs: https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/dkred
So that’s 0.13mm tolerances to my printed-circuit board. Or 130 microns.
Current leading theory is that Elon Musk is such an ignorant dumbass that he doesn’t know the difference between mils and microns, despite running a car company / manufacturing firm. Give that a thought. Even then, 10-mils tolerance is near this PCB design, an object that’s only a few inches in size. Cars are much larger and normally should be built to much wider tolerances than a fucking PCB board.
It’s almost like Elon Musk is a complete fucking moron and not an Engineer. The wanker has never actually designed a thing in his life. He just tells other people to design something, or buys an existing company, then struts around like he thinks he’s the smartest thing around.
If he said <10 mils, I’d might have bought the explanation that Elon actually meant millimetres. Micron is a very specific metric-based unit which to Elon might have been trying to use like a buzzword.
The moral of the story is don’t say stupid engineering stuff if you don’t want engineers to laugh at you.
And 10 microns at what temperature? Because on something the size of a car, made of mixed materials, thermal expansion of less than a degree is going to blow that figure.
They couldn’t apply paint to a tolerance of 10microns.
Ten mils is .010" or .25mm if I’m not crazy.
It’s a very standard tolerance for aircraft parts.
Yeah and that wouldn’t be too bad either… still expensive but not completely unrealistic for ALL parts of a car.
Kinda unreasonable for the number of cast parts most cars use, but for machined surfaces it shouldn’t be too bad.
I recently listened to a podcast about musk which was more on the anti side. The podcast had some parts about spacex and musks own work ethics, which told more of a story that he actually has some insights and knowledge and was a insane workoholic. Which shifted my perception of him. He isn’t dumb, he is a really good conman.
Lmao “if Lego and soda cans can do this, so can we.” At least he found materials similar to his existing vehicle build quality
Hey, don’t disrespect Lego like that
Serously folks have snapped steel rods using them.
“At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth.”
What an idiot
Flashbacks to Steve Jobs and the NeXT Cube.
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Cool. Build 10 pieces and fit them together with sub 10 micron precision.
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Scale that up to a 4 ton production-ready consumer vehicle without introducing defects, I imagine
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Which printer is giving you 1 micron precision?
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Oh I see… You’ve confused microns with Thou (aka mils)… much like Elon has.
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So does that mean that you can get 1 micron accuracy as long as the part is sized to a multiple of the pixels width on the x and y? Is that just for aligned straight edges or can that be done for curves too?
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Then take them to a different environment and measure them and then put a Lil water on them and measure them. Then get a mechanic to fix them and then shove it up your butt because any real engineer designing a car would tell you that kinda precision is just fucking stupid at production level for a car
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A car doesn’t go through environmental changes? Because we are talking about engineering a car. You are talking about your 3d printed dildo of musks cock or something that you got into microns or some shit. It’s almost like there’s a entire subspecies of moron non-engineers who exist for the sole purpose of arguing about why musks cock is microns… you asked what to do next
Bullshit.
The thermal coefficient of expansion of say… Aluminum is 23.
That means that when a 1 meter piece of Aluminum rises from 20C to 21C, just one degree Celsius, it grows by 23 microns.
Your 3D printer is not a temperature controlled precision instrument. Your tolerances are no where close to 10 microns let alone 1 micron.
There are micron-level precise instruments in the engineering world. They all come with temperature characteristics because thermal expansion is a bitch. 3D printers that literally heat up hundred degrees and cools down regularly literally can’t be this precise, the heat alone wrecks your precision.
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Your resin printer does not have the resolution of 1/15th the size of a damn white blood cell. Your blood is 15 microns per cell or so. Red blood cells are smaller at around 7 microns.
You, and Elon, have confused your units quite significantly. I’ve given you the opportunity to see your error by reminding you the difference between thou, mils, mm, and microns. But apparently you haven’t gotten the hint yet.
My university created micrometer-sized balls, gears, and other such devices. They’re called MEMS and are really cool. They’re not made with 3d printers but instead lithography (same technology as computer chips, because they’re so small its easier to make through lithography). You’ve confused your units and its clear based off of how you’ve been talking. Take a step back, and double-check the difference from thou, mil, mm, and microns.
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What is the diameter of A PHOTON? And don’t forget to answer ignorantly, in a condescending i-know-more-than-my-betters tone. No, seriously - look it up. You clearly don’t know.
Thanks for giving me more absurd examples. Your UV light is a 400nm wavelength or so. Or roughly 1/3rd a micron. The fucking wavelength of your curing light.
Now get outta here with your attempts at pretending that your $200 UV printer has the level of accuracy of three fucking wavelengths of the light it’s using.
The size of the color red? That’s 700nm wavelength, or 0.7 microns. Your resolution that you’re printing here is no where close to the size of red-light photons.
zero-width photons
Oh, so you don’t know how light works either. Good grief man… light has a size and you’re running up against the size limitation of the light itself. Especially because I know for a fact that these UV Printers are NOT using lasers, so you have no way to actually line up all the photons to hit the same location since their wavelengths are all unaligned.
In any case, car parts are not made at scales comparable to the wavelength of infrared light (ie: the “size” of a infrared-light photon).
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The problem isn’t that it can’t be done. The problem is that it is unnecessary and very expensive.
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Can you share a link? I’d love to buy me some of these.
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You’d think the guy claiming to “know more about manufacturing than anyone else on Earth” would have anticipated such issues at the start of the design process.
Good. Jump in.
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*invents stupid and logicitally impossible truck.
*Production challenges
Weird, Ford and Rivian both seem to be able to make an EV pickup truck.
And GM, the epitome of “slow and bloated legacy dinosaur”, who in the time since Tesla announced the cYbErTrUcK, managed to design AND RELEASE a truck before Tesla even had prototypes. At this rate, I think they’ll technically have 3 different trucks out before a single cYbErTrUcK is sold.
The automotive giants always could have outpaced Tesla, they just didn’t want to because until it was viable with enough consumer interest (and competition), it was cheaper to only produce fossil fuel vehicles (and lobby against electric vehicles at every turn)
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It didn’t go through, guise ah ah ah ah
What a massive dunce
Of all the cringiest things to ever happen on the internet this is one video I just can’t ever rewatch.
Just the most cringe in one video.
I remember watching this live, happy that my wife chose not to join me once they rolled it out, and ESPECIALLY after the window demo. Ugh. Cringiest night of my life.
. Cybertruck.The real story is that a million people have reserved this thing.
Given that I had dumbass coworkers at work who gleefully dropped $500 to “reserve” one of each trim, despite not even being able to even afford the cheapest trim (which will never even come close to existing with the listed price+specs), I’m not betting that it’s probably 1/4 of that, and about 1/4 of those will ever actually translate to purchases.
When I was a kid, I asked my dad why the cars on the road didn’t look like any of the prototype cars I saw in autoshows or car books.
Now Elon has given me the answer. Those cars are hard to make at scale. One is doable, but thousands is impossible.
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They? Elon Musk owns Tesla. He gets to decide what they spend the money on.
As I understand it he is still answerable to board of directors. Isn’t he?
I seriously doubt any of them have any control over him. He controls their income with a single meme tweet.
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Who could have known that traditional manufacturers who have been building cars for decades have reasons to do it the way they did?
Surely not the man who reinvented the subway (but shitty) reinvented content moderation (but shitty) and reinvented the car (but shitty).
How come “normal” Teslas with traditional coachwork are selling, well not great, but good and every time Musk thinks he’s the genius who’ll singlehandedly completely reinvent a very competitive product he just creates a worse version?
I actually thought this was an elaborate joke. The “Cybertruck” looks like a piece of shit, and apparently is a piece of shit.
