Prices start at $49K, but tax credits bring that down to $40K. Cheapest performance Model 3 is $64K. White seats costs $1,500 as does a color besides black. Add $8K for self driving.
They need to figure out how to produce cars with good fit and finish and without other various flaws that fanbois overlook but a traditional car shopper would be critical of first.
That is just spreading FUD. Show me where it says that in TMC forum? There are individual cases, just like any car has. And there was an abundance of issues early on. You can decline a car on initial inspection if you don’t like what you see.
Keep in mind that Tesla Model S has highest owner satisfaction of any car, second is Porsche.
IDK I read the same QC issues when I was trying to decide on the 3 too. Some of the gaps and paint defects were really bad. There is a reason people take a 4 page checklist when taking delivery. I know I did when I picked up my X. I was pleasantly suprised for the most part, except the phantom ghosting or whatever they call it on the front windshield. It still bothers me.
Production times were also slashed…by slashing 300 welds per car, among other shortcuts. Lol
At Tesla, safety is priority #1! Who wants car #5,000 that rolled off the line (a few hours after the deadline) in the middle of the night on 1 July produced by workers at the end of a 12 hour shift?
There was a reddit thread with the same kind of title, cutting corners with the 300 welds, but I thought this post was enlightening
This is basic practice in mid-volume manufacturing. I work in commercial aerospace - the first thing we do is build something that works by the entry into service deadline. Thats usually so close that we don’t have time to optimized each little piece. I design something with 300 bolts, the analyst says that its not going to come unglued and kill anyone, since each fastener is worst case loaded to 20% of its failure strength. If it didn’t fail, I don’t change it. By that point, there’s no time to go take 4 outta 5 bolts out, so the initial production starts. That gets us into production and while we may lose money (cost exceeds sale price), it keeps our customer commitments. We buy 100 unit worth of parts. Then we make a second or third pass - removing extra fasteners, switching to less exotic materials, removing weight, observing assembly and seeing what’s hard to produce or generates scrap. We fix all this and at unit 101, we switch over to the newer, profitable design. We make sure everything is reverse compatible, and if its not we know who has the old and who has the new and stock both.
Sometimes its unit 800 (for parts we build 30-40 a month of). Sometimes its unit 6 (for parts we build 2-3 a year of).
The reality is Telsa is a small volume manufacturer, and the staffing is lower, experience lower, and turn time faster than most OEM. I’m not shocked, or even bothered, by this blurb. As an engineer, the thought that every piece is well thought out and crafted is a myth. 90% of the time, I’m just trying to get something out the door that’s functional, meets requirements, is cheap, and manufacturable.
What I can’t get over is the fact GM and Toyota could push out 450k cars a year there. Elon says the existing lines can’t handle it and builds a tent outside to get to 5k/wk, or half of NUMMIs production.
No matter what - Musk has done what GM could not do. Produce 5k EV a week. There will be problems, the road is long but his next step is to post a profitable quarter.
…By building more than 5,000 of the sedans in the last week of the second quarter, Tesla “just became a real car company,” the chief executive said in an internal email Sunday obtained by Bloomberg News.
I’m not overshadowing the fact he finally got to 5k, albeit a few minutes late, but what happened to the upped 6k figure he promised during his shitshow quarterly conference call? Seems that’s been quietly swept under the rug the last couple weeks.
In other news, this is what BMW (German EV Engineering) is doing
…Remember that matte gold Lamborghini Aventador from Canada? Seems like gold is in fashion these days as BMW just made their own golden version of the i3 and i8. However, if you think that gold can be limited to just color in cars, well, it’s not. In fact, the Bavarian marque put actual 24-carat gold onto the paint job of its electrified vehicles to create the BMW i3 and i8 Starlight Edition.
Except this is not mid-volume manufacturing. The modern R&D and assembly process produces hundreds of thousands of units (annual production) per plant per manufacturer. In terms of numbers produced, the auto industry (75 to 80 million per year) is easily magnitudes larger than commercial aviation.
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