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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Tesla Recalls All Cybertrucks for Faulty Accelerator Pedals
throwaway5959 wrote 18 hours 30 min ago:
Stick a fork in it. Itâs done.
greenish_shores wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
Unapproved lubricant... well. Exactly the same, and also in throttle
control input, caused (albeit together with software having problems
handling the issue) a total control loss in Airbus A320, during a
training flight in 2018 in Estonia. It resulted in a crash landing -
they barely landed the plane in a way in which they could walk away
from the landing, and the plane got destroyed.
Incident report: [1] Also Mentour Pilot did a pretty good video
explaining all causes, including the software issues:
URI [1]: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/...
URI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04M63B1sv_Y
djcannabiz wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
I second the video recommendation, mentor makes some of the better
documentary style content on the app. the fact that itâs completely
free makes it even crazier!
greenish_shores wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
Yeah I like his content too, but I'm far from revering him this way
(and I see a lot of comments like yours). By the way I also respect
how good he is at monetizing this, however... Internet both as a
technology and even more as a community was founded by scientists
whom were a bit later joined by (also often same people were doing
both) people doing and creating things non-commercially, as a
hobby, because they simply enjoy them, and so on (I'm speaking
mostly of Usenet newsgroups in the latter part, as the early form
of that). I don't see how (consensually) sharing content for free
is "crazy". That's just the way, the Internet way. Maybe it's just
the demographic cohort of enjoyers of his content largely overlaps
with the cohort of customers of commercial video streaming
platforms which creates a feeling like that.
CatWChainsaw wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
At this point I wonder if Musk is so insecure about anyone being him at
anything that he decided to pick on Boeing.
aaroninsf wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha whew.
Move fast and break things, ketamine-fueled edition!
cdme wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
Is it surprising that a company that thought a vehicle this absurd was
a good idea to build would also suffer from quality control issues?
hacker_88 wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
Relax , it is just an OTA .
not this time
JohnMakin wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
It's truly wild to me that people will pay upwards of $100k to be
beta-testers for a several thousand pound machine easily capable of
killing them or others
cs702 wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
See also [1] To repeat what I wrote on that post, this is all 100%
explainable by Tesla's sacred five-step algorithm for manufacturing[a]:
1. Make the requirements less dumb: "All designs are wrong, itâs just
a matter of how wrong." - Musk
2. Try and delete parts (that seem unnecessary): "If parts are not
being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough
parts are being deleted." - Musk
3. Simplify or optimize: "The most common error of a smart engineer is
to optimize something that should not exist." - Musk
4. Accelerate cycle time: "You're moving too slowly, go faster! But
donât go faster until youâve worked on the other three things
first." - Musk
5. Finally, as a last step, automate. "I've made the mistake of going
backwards on all five steps." - Musk
Evidently the accelerator pedal issue was caused by step #2: At some
point, the Cybertruck team at Tesla questioned the requirement to
securely tighten the metal plate covering the accelerator pedal, and
somehow concluded it seemed unnecessary. Now they have to add it back!
---
[a]
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40040100
URI [2]: https://evannex.com/blogs/news/elon-musk-reveals-his-5-step-pr...
CamperBob2 wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
And from somewhere far above or below us, 'Mad Man' Muntz, wire
cutters still in his hand, smiles at Elon.
cs702 wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
Thanks for that. I laughed out loud at "far above or below us".
royaltjames wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
My dad lives by using dish soap to lube up hoses and other connectors.
This has that vibe.
ccorcos wrote 1 day ago:
Ironically, they couldâve used glue instead of soap with no delay in
assembly time
MBCook wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Or designed it with simple snaps.
leesec wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing bad happened here and they caught an issue without any incident
or injury. I wonder if there will ever be a day where Hackernews isn't
actively rooting for the downfall of innovative technology companies
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 1 day ago:
It's schadenfreude. I think the Edison Truck guy is also a little bit
of a jerk but I prefer how they're planning to do things - just make
a hybrid version of a regular truck. You don't have to re invent
every little bit of metal and computerize everything and make it into
a privacy nightmare just to stick a battery into a vehicle
In fact the Toyota hybrids are quite similar to regular cars.
Ground-up rewrites are great resume filler but there are other ways
to innovate
throwaway5959 wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla is no longer a leader in innovation, their vehicles couldnât
even do V2L/V2G until the CyberTruck.
misiti3780 wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
Yes, they are.
jsight wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
In some ways, Tesla gets too much credit for innovation. Their cars
aren't the cheapest, their charging curves aren't the fastest, and
their range isn't the highest.
But the balance of all three attributes often makes them the best
choice within their segment.
CT is an exception at the moment. It'd be really hard to pick it
over the Silverado EV.
throwaway5959 wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
The charging network being open to everyone will mitigate a
massive advantage they had in terms of selling cars.
leesec wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
Don't even know how to respond to this lol. Their EV's are head and
shoulders above the competition
throwaway5959 wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
Donât even know how to respond to this because no facts were
presented.
jacktribe wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
48v is a pretty big leap forward that I bet other automakers will
replicate. So is assembling the interior (seats, console, etc.)
onto the battery and lifting it into the vehicle. Also, the rigid
wire harness that can be snapped in by robotic arms. The list goes
on. I recommend watching some of the teardown videos.
throwaway5959 wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
Munro is transparently biased at this point.
ryzvonusef wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
So don't listen to them, listen to Caresoft, their competitor
in teardown and benchmarking:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRRDEVpCHPI
wunderland wrote 1 day ago:
A guy posted a video of his accelerator pedal getting stuck in the
fully down position to all of the relevant subreddits (r/tesla, etc)
and was banned from posting in all of them. [1] These forums are all
moderated by Tesla, or is it Elon fanboys who refuse to accept any
criticism?
URI [1]: https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1779600432085819708?s=46
speedgoose wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
Tesla private investors is my guess.
Here is a message they use to spam regularly on the main
r/teslamotors subreddit:
> To the critics, we ask you to remember that many people in this sub
not only believe in what Tesla is doing, but have voted with their
money.
URI [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/wiki/automoderator-sche...
steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
It's a cult, worst than peak Steve Jobs distortion field era for
those that lived through both. I say this as an Apple user and
former Tesla driver..
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Friction fit handlebar grips for mountain bikes, cruisers and kids
bikes have a similar installation problem. Bike mechanics use hairspray
to solve it.
Slick when initially sprayed, tacky when dry. Also the solvent in more
hairspray can be used to subsequently remove them.
timemct wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
The air compressor trick works great.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6SsqBcpXZU
jtriangle wrote 1 day ago:
I've always prefered spit and yelling... so this is a good tip
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Mountain bikes tend to be ridden wet, so soap is a big no no.
But yes, saliva if you canât figure out where the can of AquaNet
went.
ck2 wrote 1 day ago:
btw whatever happened with Toyota's "Spaghetti Code" accelerator?
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration#S...
smokedetector1 wrote 1 day ago:
interesting that this hasn't caused a significant stock slide. Does
that mean that the expectation for failures and mishaps is already
priced in?
jsight wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
Even if Tesla's rosiest projections for CT were true, it'd be less
than 20% of unit volume. Reality might be under 15%.
It doesn't really move the needle either way.
darkwizard42 wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
Car manufacturers have quite a few recalls like this. Some of Tesla's
are even OTA fixes but require a "recall" to be announced. I think
given the small volume of Cybertrucks in circulation AND the low
volume being produced this has negligible effect on their bottom line
of deliveries and revenues.
DudeOpotomus wrote 1 day ago:
The videos of this issue are telling.
Extremely poor design. With something as simple as a peddle, its almost
unfathomable.
mig39 wrote 1 day ago:
"Recall all Cybertrucks" isn't a huge deal. How many have they sold?
3000? 4000?
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
Huge, no. But "all" is where it becomes halfway newsworthy.
Other manufacturers have made the news for smaller recalls, so this
is pretty normal. Toyota, for example, when they recalled the bz4x.
kernal wrote 1 day ago:
This would not have been a serious problem had the lower back of the
pedal footwell section been flush with the upper back section. How this
design was able to pass QA is baffling.
wnevets wrote 1 day ago:
Will there be a recall for a car wash being able to destroy the
cybertruck? [1]
URI [1]: https://twitter.com/StonkKing4/status/1780306557538050532
jsight wrote 22 hours 4 min ago:
Why link to that guy instead of the original source? [1] There was
never a claim made of a denied warranty.
URI [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@captian.ad/video/7358236474321505578
wnevets wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
> Why link to that guy instead of the original source?
1. Its what google showed
2. TikTokphobia on HN
jsight wrote 19 hours 21 min ago:
I get that, but the twitter post completely mischaracterized the
issue.
felixg3 wrote 20 hours 16 min ago:
-phobia implies irrational fear, while any hate for TikTok is
very much warranted. ;)
wnevets wrote 19 hours 36 min ago:
Did you visit tiktok and watch the video?
bugbuddy wrote 1 day ago:
If this problem is real and serious, meaning the damage is expensive
to repair, this could destroy Teslaâs reputation and valuation.
wnevets wrote 1 day ago:
Supposedly it broke the entire truck and they voided his warranty.
[1]
URI [1]: https://twitter.com/StonkKing4/status/1780303955811278884
nightshadetrie wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
I can imagine someone being in a rush and forgetting to put on
Car Wash mode. 100k down is a rough way to go.
ceejayoz wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
Seems like detecting "hey, I'm in a car wash..." would be
substantially easier for AI than full self-driving.
klyrs wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
It is! It always was! But how does the AI decide when to
launch the car wash detector app?
morkalork wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
I love how they prioritized gimmicks like bullet proof doors and
"bioweapon defense mode" but simply driving through a carwash can
fuck your car.
klyrs wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
Bullets: no worries
Squirt gun: oh shit, hide the jewels!
Weirdest goddamn timeline
bugbuddy wrote 1 day ago:
I am glad I canceled my Cybertruck reservation. Getting margin
called and a bricked $100k tin can at the same time would
probably be too much. Now about that margin call, I have to deal
withâ¦
walthamstow wrote 1 day ago:
Jesus... "Do not wash in direct sunlight"
tpmoney wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
Thatâs pretty standard advice for washing any car. A lot of
the chemicals in the soaps and polishes and waxes you use you
donât want drying on the surface of your paint, or at least
not in the quantities you apply it in. But if youâre washing
in direct sunlight, thereâs a high chance the water will
evaporate and leave dried residues before you get to rinsing /
buffing it away.
walthamstow wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
In US desert states that makes sense. I've never heard of it
in NW Europe.
jsight wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
Yep, just standard detailer wisdom. Washing in direct
sunlight requires extra care, especially when using chemicals
that aren't ph-neutral.
klyrs wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
This... actually makes sense. But I think the stakes are
higher with brushed steel. And when it comes to lampooning
bad decisions in car design, Cybertruck is in good company
with DeLorean which had similar issues and enjoyed a
similar comedic reception.
jsight wrote 19 hours 22 min ago:
There are a few DeLoreans in my area. They look really
nice. I've owned one before, the finish was a little
finnicky and very fingerprint prone, but ultimately held
up better than painted finishes from the era. The
plastics on them tended to degrade pretty badly, though.
For a truck, stainless might turn out to be a pretty good
choice. Fingerprints will always be problematic, though.
klyrs wrote 17 hours 22 min ago:
> For a truck, stainless might turn out to be a pretty
good choice. Fingerprints will always be problematic,
though.
I dunno, I've never been much of a gearhead but the few
times I've owned a truck I didn't really care if there
was moss* growing on the damned thing. But those were
pickups, and I used them for pickup things. I dunno
how to square that with the notion that a truck is
ruined by a fingerprint.
* for those of you who don't live in the rainy bits of
the pacific northwest, this is not an exaggeration
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Didnât listen to the blind old Chinese man that sold it to
him I guess.
1970-01-01 wrote 1 day ago:
>Tesla is recalling all 3,878
So one of the smallest recalls in recent history? I understand that
this company, its CEO, and this vehicle in question are all
controversial, however the levels of attention coming from media are
getting to be a bit too much. If you look at NHTSA's data and take a
data-driven approach (just sort by potentially affected), you will find
this to be quite normal.
URI [1]: https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls-b...
post_break wrote 1 day ago:
Suzuki recalled a single car:
URI [1]: https://japanesenostalgiccar.com/news-suzuki-issues-recall-f...
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
Suzuki recalled a single 21 year old car because it was missing a
single stamp on the engine block and replaced the entire engine.
fullshark wrote 1 day ago:
So they shouldn't have published a story on this? Shouldn't have used
the word "all?" What exactly are you complaining about? Just that
the "lol Musk" media clickbait factory is lame? Cause this seems
newsworthy to me and I don't find fault with the story published
here.
1970-01-01 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, it's the clickbait. Every step and mis-step Tesla has is
criticized beyond what I think is reasonable amounts. It's just
sloppy journalism and clickbait.
kredd wrote 1 day ago:
I have absolutely no skin in the game, but to my understanding
Teslaâs entire valuation heavily depends on being constant news
cycles. It has positive impacts (like gigantic growth rate with
limited marketing in the past 10 years) and negatives (any
mistake gets chewed by the media).
fullshark wrote 1 day ago:
There's a ton of that crap no doubt, and I'm sure this recall
will produce more of it, but this news story and headline seems
totally fine to me.
vzaliva wrote 1 day ago:
The most interesting part of this news is that it gives is the exact
number of Cybertrucks sold so far. It is under 4000.
jejeyyy77 wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
thats the number produced, which is the bottleneck
offsky wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
This is surprising to me too because I saw 3 different Cybertrucks on
the road yesterday. I guess I live in a hot zone.
hacker_88 wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
Are these all 100k$ above
jsight wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
Yes, all foundation series at >$100k.
jtriangle wrote 1 day ago:
Are all 4000 of those even delivered?
Last I checked they were basically bespoke at this point.
dazc wrote 1 day ago:
For context, worse things happen at sea...
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/01/royal-navy-ord...
phkahler wrote 1 day ago:
This is why having a dealer network is important, if annoying. Tesla
has been a leader in having a "software defined car" so lots of
problems can be fixed via over the air updates. They should be glad
this issue was found early and not after 5 years and 2 million vehicles
on the road.
TheBigSalad wrote 1 day ago:
but it wouldn't be a big issue if it went 5 years unnoticed.
rstupek wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla has service centers to deal with these do they not? Not sure
how dealers makes it any easier to manage the recall
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Traditional automakers have more dealers than Tesla has service
centers. Tesla service is known for long wait times. Ford, for
example, has 15x as many locations to get your vehicle serviced.
bink wrote 1 day ago:
A bit unfair to compare Tesla to a company that's built a dealer
network over 100+ years.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Fairness has nothing to do with anything here. First of all,
it's the reality of having a Tesla worked on, regardless of
blame. Second, Tesla's lack of a US dealer network is very
intentional and they've fought very hard against the legal
status quo to avoid having one at all.
Qwertious wrote 1 day ago:
They're competing in the same market, people expect the same
quality.
aynyc wrote 1 day ago:
Can you put cybertruck in neutral? That's the SOP for ICE cars if
accelerator is stuck.
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
> That's the SOP for ICE cars if accelerator is stuck.
That is totally wrong. Most/all cars won't even go into neutral if
the throttle is pinned. Your best option, always, is to mash the
brake pedal as hard as you possibly can. It will win every time,
even if the car doesn't have throttle cutoff.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Shifting into reverse on most modern automatic transmissions
requires the brake pedal to be depressed at least a tiny bit.
Neutral has no pin.
In fact this is a somewhat little advertised boon to three point
turns, in that you can go from reverse to drive without depressing
the release button on floor mounted shifters or pulling the stalk
in on steering wheel mounted units. You can just slap the car into
D from R.
ectospheno wrote 1 day ago:
Car and Driver disagrees with you regarding shifting to neutral.
Can you provide additional info?
ksherlock wrote 1 day ago:
Yes; there's no gearstalk but you can set p/r/n/d via the buttons on
the overhead console, or on the touchscreen.
lucianbr wrote 1 day ago:
Granted, this isn't a usual occurence so maybe not a reasonable use
case for the design.
But man, when accelerating at max power due to a glitch, you need
to look at the touchscreen to find the right place to slide your
finger to switch to neutral... I thougt having touch controls for
climate was bad.
voidUpdate wrote 1 day ago:
Electric cars don't have a gearbox that you can put into neutral
martin_ wrote 1 day ago:
No but the brake pedal overrides the accelerator. Of course, EVâs
accelerate fast so you likely donât have much time to react
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
The video in thread says park also overrides the accelerator.
somenameforme wrote 1 day ago:
I was curious how frequently automakers have recalls, because it seems
to me that Elon linked companies tend to get treated 'differently' by
the media. The answer was extremely surprising. Here is a list. [1]
Just in 2022:
Ford - 67
Volkswagen - 46
Daimler Trucks North America - 42
Chrysler - 38
Mercedes Benz - 34
GM - 32
Kia - 24
Hyundai - 22
Tesla - 20
BMW - 20
Pretty wild, because these rarely if ever make the news. [1] -
URI [1]: https://www.carpro.com/blog/automakers-with-the-most-recalls-i...
mvdtnz wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
Here we go. The inevitable post in every single thread about a Tesla
recall. We get it, other manufacturers have recalls too. We get it,
other manufacturers' recalls don't get as much news coverage or HN
discussion. Please. No one cares.
okdood64 wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
Doesn't mean much without a breakdown of volume & model year.
daveguy wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
And you also need to see percent of production. Of course Ford is
going to have more trucks recalled than Tesla. Tesla has only put a
few thousand on the road (trucks ie cybertruck, not cars).
wcunning wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
I work in automotive and have had to handle the procedures after a
recall was decided against code I owned (though had not written). The
important distinction here is in how many vehicles are affected by
the recall and the severity of it. Also, potentially in the party at
fault (Takata vs every single OEM, for example). The thing to note
here is that Tesla had to recall every single Tesla with FSD or
Autopilot because NHTSA demanded it, over Tesla's express wishes.
That is much worse than pretty much any other recall.
The other component to this is that many of those other recalls are
probably software/calibration recalls, with no parts touched, and
Tesla has been doing OTA updates for years longer than the other
OEMs. In some ways that's good, since they can fix things without the
need to issue a full recall and get the fix out to customers much
faster. In some ways that's really really really bad because they
push fixes to a range of hardware with limited customer ability to
opt out, and I have zero reason to believe that they're managing the
complexity/testing problem on that orders of magnitude better than
the rest of the OEMs, since I sat through a lot of meetings trying to
come up with a way to really thoroughly handle it to no avail. I
distrust that kind of operation immensely and it's probably the
primary reason I won't own a Tesla and have little interest in
anything being produced today. Maybe a Mazda, maybe.
That said, I spent 5 years at Ford and I can't say I'm at all
surprised that they lead this list...
Jtsummers wrote 1 day ago:
A major reason they don't make the news is that many aren't that
critical.
The most serious recall I had was for an electric harness that could
catch fire (or cause a fire?), one of the least serious was a light
(not a headlight or taillight, a light in the door that illuminated
the ground and lower part of the vehicle when you opened it) would
just stop working.
The former may have made the news, I don't know, the latter had no
reason to. I've even had a couple (specifics forgotten) that were
entirely aesthetic (interior, not exterior like issues with paint
peeling, that was on a car from the 90s).
SkyPuncher wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
My Ford truck currently has a recall with an unknown fix. Axle
bolts can sheer off, leaving only the rotors and caliper mount to
keep the wheels on the car.
But, you're right, most of these recalls are not "instant death
machine you can't stop". While a fire can be dangerous, you will
have time to react to that one.
Jtsummers wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
True, but in the case of the one I had (and I forgot to mention)
it was a fire when the vehicle was off. Definitely an urgent
problem since this meant it could happen when no one was around.
PurelyApplied wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
> A major reason they don't make the news is that many aren't that
critical.
My favorite recall was the letter I got last year for 23V048000.
The instructions for how to engage the defroster in my car manual
were suboptimal. You actually _don't_ want it to be on full-blast.
Please report to your nearest Nissan dealer to get a piece of paper
to put in your car manual.
iknowstuff wrote 1 day ago:
Right, but do you feel tesla changing icon sizes was critical?
0cf8612b2e1e wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
Information impacting safety features is critical. Either the
font was complaint with the specs or it was not.
iknowstuff wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Haha yes and the world is black and white
seanhunter wrote 1 day ago:
I am not knowledgeable about cars so please correct me if I'm
mistaken but surely that number isn't useful unless we also have the
number of models and vintages are in service? I would think Ford have
way more models in play than Tesla for example, and additionally
brands with a long history would have multiple years of models. I
mean BMW and Ford have been building cars since before WWI and have a
very wide range so there are probably at least 10 or 20 years of
models that might conceivably have a recall. It's not fair to
compare them directly I would think.
bdcravens wrote 1 day ago:
Probably because these other manufacturers have more than 4-5 models.
tibbydudeza wrote 1 day ago:
The Ford one was the worst - we had cases of people cars burning out
and one person died.
It was due to the Kuga 1.4 Ecoboost 4 cylinder - there were a design
defect that caused cracks that caused fuel to leak onto a hot
cylinder head and then your car broke into flames.
Thanks to social media pressure think Ford bought back all models or
offered generous trade in values - the resale value of the 1.4
Ecoboost tanked in our markets.
Ford discontinued the 1.4 Ecoboost completely.
cameronh90 wrote 1 day ago:
In the UK, lots of people are finding their 1.0 Ecoboost engines
are catastrophically failing at 50,000 miles or less (hence the
nickname Ecoboom). Ford have been useless. This has been going on
for years now, and they have finally said they'll help, but only if
the repair was done at the dealer, you have a FSH and the car is
less than 7 years old. Outside of that you're SOL. They've refused
to recall and fix the underlying issue. Obviously this tanks their
resale value but Ford do not care.
JangoSteve wrote 1 day ago:
First, I agree it's important to put Tesla recalls in context with
the greater automotive industry, so I think what you posted is great
info. The only thing I'd disagree with is that the numbers compared
to Tesla, and relative media coverage, is surprising. It seems
expected to me.
Tesla bills itself not as an automaker, but a tech company. So, it
makes sense they'd have a larger media footprint, which covers not
just the automotive industry, but the tech industry media as well.
This isn't unfair, considering they get the benefit of a tech-based
market cap to go with it [1].
They also put themselves in headlines more often than other car
companies with outlandish claims such as Musk saying, "At this point,
I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive
on earth." [2] When Musk and the company put themselves in headlines
so often, it makes sense that the media would cover them more. This
is likely a direct result of their advertising strategy, to create
buzz [3], so I think media coverage of failures is a direct result.
You could argue that's Musk, not the company, but they made the
strategic decision that Musk is their PR function when they became
the only car company to dissolve their PR department in 2020 [4].
One last thing I noticed was that the source of the recall data comes
from the NHTSA [5], and they don't seem to distinguish recalls
between different brands owned by the same company (for example,
Ford's recalls seem like they would include both Ford and Lincoln, GM
includes Chevrolet, GMC, etc.) Tesla's 20 recalls in 2022 cover I
believe the four models they made in 2022, while Ford's 67 recalls
are across the 39 models under the Ford brand and five models under
Lincoln (I counted these by looking at the drop-down selectors on
KBB's value estimator [6]).
In short, Tesla exploits the hype machine; is it surprising that
their recalls are hyped as well? [1] [2] [3] [4] [4] [5] [5] [6]
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
URI [2]: https://www.thestreet.com/markets/elon-musk-ted-talk
URI [3]: https://fourweekmba.com/tesla-marketing-strategy/
URI [4]: https://electrek.co/2020/10/06/tesla-dissolves-pr-department...
URI [5]: https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...
URI [6]: https://www.kbb.com/car-prices/
aredox wrote 1 day ago:
A company with a good QA (that doesn't stop at the vendor's gate) and
putting safety above all will have more recalls.
This is the wrong metric to compare.
7e wrote 1 day ago:
Um, all of these manufacturers make more varieties of models and have
sold, cumulatively, a lot more cars than Tesla. This means more
opportunity for recall.
You need to normalize by total sales over the past ten years.
Tesla also has a monopoly on the service of their cars, so they can
hide recalls. Most Tesla recalls only started to occur during the
Biden administration, as regulatory bodies became less impotent.
athorax wrote 1 day ago:
These numbers are pretty meaningless without more context, Ford
manufactures ~3x more vehicles per year than Tesla
mkipper wrote 1 day ago:
Also not all recalls are created equal. I have a VW that was
recalled a few years ago for this: [1] > If the build-up happens,
it may be possible to remove the key from the ignition switch
without the shift lever being in the âPâ park position because
the system is unable to recognize that the vehicle is not in
âPâ park
That's obviously not a good thing and I'm glad it was caught, but
it's not quite as dangerous to the public as a 7000lb truck's
accelerator getting stuck or a car catching on fire when it gets
rear-ended.
That's not to say those other automakers haven't had recent recalls
just as bad as the Cybertruck's -- I have no idea.
URI [1]: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2019/RIONL-19V615-0655.pd...
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
I had a vehicle recalled because it was missing a single sentence
in the owners manual. It was resolved my mailing me a sticker
with the sentence on it, and instructions on where it should be
applied in the manual.
hyperdimension wrote 1 day ago:
I'm intensely curious: what was the sentence and did you
actually do it?
I would've.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
I forget what it was, some statement about a safety system or
something. I put the sticker in there.
neogodless wrote 1 day ago:
Number of models would also be relevant.
schiffern wrote 1 day ago:
"Models" is a marketing distinction, which is subject to fudging.
For instance Ford lumps their F-150 / F-250 / F-350 models
together, calling them all "F Series."
Many other manufacturers would have classified them as separate
models sharing a platform, but that decision shouldn't influence
the recall performance.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
phatfish wrote 1 day ago:
The amount of attention "the media" gives a company is correlated to
the number of shit posts per day the CEO makes on Twitter.
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
They rarely make the tech news. There's plenty reporting on recalls
in traditional media[1][2][3][4][etc]. I think a lot of Tesla fans
have a persecution complex when it comes to reporting on Tesla. [1]
[2] [3] [1] [4]
URI [1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-toyota-cana...
URI [2]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-busin...
URI [3]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-toyota-cana...
URI [4]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ford-recalls-...
trust_bt_verify wrote 1 day ago:
At least the fanboys seem ok with using the word ârecallâ this
time!
jsight wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
To be fair, software recalls are just a scam by big post office.
/s
(more seriously, software updates trigger a required mailed
notification, even if the work has already been done. physical
recalls do not trigger the same requirement)
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
I think the issue was that the headlines omitted the fact that it
was a software update changing the size of some icons in the
car's UI. And instead just stated that millions of Tesla cars
were recalled, the default assumption being they were recalled to
a service dealership instead of an OTA update at home.
The oil lobbyists and Tesla haters absolutely don't want the
phrase 'software' in any of the media headlines or HN titles
relating to Tesla software recalls and vehemently argued against
it. The media grants their wishes.
It's hardly surprising that Tesla fans are not demanding that the
word recall not be used for this car hardware issue, even they're
more rational and less delusional about car recall phrasing than
Tesla haters who seem to be agenda driven to create negative
perception about Tesla, and the media happily accommodates them
all the time.
root_axis wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
A recall is a recall. It might be convenient for the customer
that the problem can be fixed via software, but it's ultimately
irrelevant with respect to the fact that a safety related issue
needed to be corrected.
ripjaygn wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
Ultimately irrelevant things are added to headlines all the
time, like all the stories about the Lincoln recall in this
comment. [1] See how they don't just say it's a recall and
remove context like it's done with Tesla?
Why are the media and some people so against including
similar context for an OTA software when it comes to Tesla?
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089379
trust_bt_verify wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
When I do a simple search for âTesla recallâ in my
favorite search engine I get a bunch of results for the
recent Tesla recalls. Many of the headlines call out the
reasons, I see no persecution of Tesla in the way you
describe. There is an easy way for Tesla to avoid all of
this though, and itâs to design their vehicles better in
the first place.
Looks like the media cares about facts and the fact is,
Tesla has had _another_ recall. Tesla is slipping and there
seems to be some who are more sensitive to that being
discussed than others.
FireBeyond wrote 1 day ago:
This spin on things is hilarious. It wasnât the âTesla
hatersâ screaming âdonât mention our precious software!
Itâs just a recall!â, it was the Tesla fans. âHow can it
be a recall if it can be fixed without my car going anywhere?
The media just wants to make Tesla look bad! This isnât a
recall because Tesla can update it OTA, something the dinosaurs
canât!â
(Which ignores that while Tesla can update more than most other
manufacturers, my car gets regular OTA updates too.)
Meanwhile Lincoln sent me a âfixâ for a recall that
involved neither software or my car moving an inch.
âWe identified an issue in your vehicles user guide that
could lead to improper seat operation. Please place this piece
of paper between pages 168 and 169 of your guide.â
That was a recall, too.
ripjaygn wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
> Meanwhile Lincoln sent me a âfixâ for a recall that
involved neither software or my car moving an inch.
> âWe identified an issue in your vehicles user guide that
could lead to improper seat operation. Please place this
piece of paper between pages 168 and 169 of your guide.â
Great and perfect example, thanks for bringing that up.
I searched for that issue and every single news article I
could find [1] had "missing owner's manual information" or
the equivalent right in the headline.
Only Ford or Lincoln haters would argue that removing that
information in the headline is a fair and acceptable thing to
do.
Are you still going to argue that Tesla is treated the same
as Lincoln by the media and on HN? Is hoping for more context
in the headlines a bad and unreasonable thing? [1] [2] [3]
[4] [5] [6] [7]
URI [1]: https://www.motor1.com/news/672511/ford-recalls-truc...
URI [2]: https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/recall-alert-nea...
URI [3]: https://www.ksstradio.com/2023/06/ford-recalls-nearl...
URI [4]: https://www.auto123.com/en/news/ford-recall-million-...
URI [5]: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/ford-recalls-1-mi...
URI [6]: https://fordauthority.com/2023/06/1-million-ford-veh...
URI [7]: https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/recall-alert-near...
URI [8]: https://dallasexpress.com/business-markets/ford-reca...
FireBeyond wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
> Only Ford or Lincoln haters
Your mistake here is assuming that people are comprised of
"haters" and others.
I couldn't care less about Lincoln. I own a Navigator. My
partner drives it 99% of the time. It was just the first
example that came to mind.
I think Tesla's are overrated for their price - the Model S
has (I haven't been in one in 18 months, to be clear)
luxury euro pricing for a build quality that is in many
cases worse than an econobox Hyundai or Mazda. I lean on
the dash in my Audi and it doesn't bow or flex or creak or
make me worried that some plastic is about to break. It did
in the S. My butt fell asleep after a few hours in a Tesla
passenger seat. "Do not use a car wash if the vehicle will
be in direct sunlight". Windshields not glued on, at all.
Entire brakes missing. Different tires on all four wheels.
These aren't teething issues, Tesla is more than two
decades old at this point. And doubly so when your CEO
gives interviews that have him saying with a straight face,
"At this point, I know more about manufacturing than any
person living on the planet."
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
This was the article headline from NYPost(yay oil lobby
funding anti-EV right wing media posted on HN):
"Latest recall at Elon Muskâs Tesla affecting 2.2M vehicles
over warning lights"
The recall over "warning lights" turned out be a font size
increase in the UI on the screen. I guess it's a light
because pixels glow.
This was CNN's headline:
"Tesla recalls nearly all 2 million of its vehicles on US
roads"
CNN doesn't like Tesla as well.
Do you think NYPost or the CNN shouldn't have added
'software' in the headline, perhaps before the word recall?
Why or why not?
Not even saying it should be 'over-the-air software recall'.
It can't be a space issue, NYPost found the space to add
"Elon Musk" to the headline to fuel extra negativity and the
CNN's headline is short.
FireBeyond wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
There is a straw man that you have concocted that says that
"Tesla haters" (and I will own my bias here, despite being
the target audience[1] for Tesla, I am a fan neither of the
vehicles or the CEO) who are in the software industry are
pressing for these recalls to be called out as recalls and
not "just a software update".
Some of these are "recalls that can be fixed with software,
often OTA". They're still recalls, no matter how you spin
it. Because they affect safety. Maybe in a minor way, in an
edge case, in some cases, but nonetheless, despite your
sarcastic pouting of "I guess it's a light because pixels
glow".
Just like it's a recall when Lincoln says "insert this page
into your owner's handbook", or Toyota says "affix this
sticker at the bottom of p 232".
> Do you think NYPost or the CNN shouldn't have added
'software' in the headline, perhaps before the word recall?
I, personally could not care less whether the word software
appears or does not appear in the headline. I care that
it's called a recall. I'm sorry that that hurts some Tesla
fans feelings in that they think it makes things sound less
safer. OTA updates for safety issues were still a safety
issue. And I have zero sympathy when I listen, as I have
here on HN, to same fans insisting that its a conspiracy to
insist on it, while pretzeling themselves into saying that
my user manual examples are still recalls "because I still
had to do something about them, while their issue was fixed
in their sleep".
Sorry. No. If placing a sticker in an owner's manual is a
safety recall, so is your OTA update.
[1] liberal, environmentally conscious, heavy tech
fascination gadget geek who likes adrenaline and
acceleration.
klyrs wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
> yay oil lobby funding anti-EV right wing media posted on
HN
But we must blame the left whenever the right eats itself!
Or maybe we live in a multipolar world?
....nah
ripjaygn wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
The oil lobby pays the right wing, Musk does not. So they
demonize Tesla and EVs and the left has joined them since
a few years, to my disgust.
I used to be a die hard liberal, I only lately realized
that liberal media and many liberals don't care two hoots
about climate change. I used to defend them all the time.
They've been publishing hit pieces and even fake news
about Tesla just because they don't like Musk. They lost
the moral high ground about fake news. Those are heavily
upvoted on liberal social media like HN and Reddit. I
don't like what Musk has been doing lately but I do care
about the environment and don't hate Tesla and SpaceX
like people on here. I was going to buy an EV even at a
price premium but now I don't care. I'll buy a gas
guzzler like the rest.
I am too old for climate change to affect me and it turns
out the young ones don't care enough about it themselves.
I used to be very liberal but seeing how Tesla is
maligned on HN and Reddit changed me. I don't think I
will vote red but I will never vote blue from now on. And
then more liberals will wonder why the vote is so close
come November.
FireBeyond wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
> I used to be a die hard liberal
I have such skepticism on these things. I don't think
you alter your fundamental world view on things like
human rights, the environment and such because of
"liberal media".
I think exposure to viewpoints that either validate
your biases or contradict your worldview strengthen
your position, and rarely change it.
In short, I am always skeptical about "I used to be a
liberal, but..." (and for clarity, "I used to be
conservative, but...") - it's almost exclusively a
weird argument to authority. "I know, I understand, I
got you. But I saw the light." No, you were probably
always conservative, deep down.
This can also differ if you're talking exclusively the
political parties, who generally fall under "all suck"
in my view.
iknowstuff wrote 1 day ago:
What kind of updates have you received? New maps? Or do you
have to pay for those
FireBeyond wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
On my Audi? MMI updates being an easy one, who cares, but
updates to the HUD, to the digital cluster.
theatrus2 wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
Lots of continual updates, some release notes aggregated at
third party sites like this:
URI [1]: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/
ripjaygn wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
Those are Tesla updates. They were asking about non-Tesla
OTA updates, for the Lincoln cars I think.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
You're saying tech news and the articles that make HN's front page
make a lot of tech people wrongly assume that Tesla is way worse
with recalls than other car companies? Like we are seeing all over
the comments here.
Looks like "a lot of Tesla fans" are right then. Now add the fact
that headlines and HN post titles about Tesla software recalls
omitting that it's a software update and just stating that millions
of Tesla cars are being recalled. A neutral observer would agree
but not Tesla haters.
croes wrote 1 day ago:
How many recalls of the other manufacturers are software updates
just without the possibility, of OTA?
How many different models do the other manufacturers have, how
many has Tesla?
And don't forget that Musk acts like Tesla is special and doesn't
have the same problems as the old lame boring companies.
iknowstuff wrote 1 day ago:
Tf are you arguing?
The OTA is the crucial point because as a customer you just
donât care that you wake up one day and your tesla starts
displaying PARK instead of an icon after a ârecallâ. With
other vehicles you gotta schedule service and leave it there.
croes wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
My point is that other manufacturers' recalls could also be
simple software updates but without OTA you need to visit a
garage.
So just because Tesla could fix most of their problem oer OTA
doesn't mean other manufacturers have more severe
malfunctions, just a more complicated way of fixing it.
And OTA is nice until someone finds an unfixable bug and
changes your brake setting per malicious OTA.
As a customer, I do care if someone can change important
systems in my car without me noticing or being able to
prevent it.
ripjaygn wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
If it's a software update that only a service center can
fix then few folks are going to take their time out to do
that expeditiously, like with hardware recalls. Assuming
their address is current and they even know about it.
Whereas an OTA update is either automatically done or in
their face the next time they drive.
croes wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
But the method of fixing doesn't say anything about the
severity.
If the breaks on a Tesla don't work but it's fixable per
OTA it's still worse than a less severe bug that needs to
be fixed in a garage.
mynameisvlad wrote 1 day ago:
For clarity, the specific recall talked about in this article
is not a software update. You canât software update a stuck
accelerator pedal.
abadpoli wrote 1 day ago:
Of course Elon gets treated differently. No other car company CEO is
on Twitter drawing attention to himself like Elon. Tesla itself is
also the darling car company of the decade, with the highest market
cap. And the Cybertruck, by design, is basically a celebrity on
wheels on every road/parking lot it traverses.
Iâd be blown away if a full recall of the cybertruck wasnât top
headline news.
fransje26 wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
No other car company is as overvalued on the stock market.
And an accelerator pedal stuck in full acceleration state, on a
vehicle that can go from 0-100 in 3 seconds, allegedly because of
an unapproved, amateuristic change on the production line, is an
excellent case-in-point of how detached from reality that valuation
is.
Mistakes happen, but when such a life-threatening mistake happens,
yet again, because of corner cutting and because the basics of
quality control of car production are not mastered, it deserves all
the bad press it gets.
llamaimperative wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
This is one of those things that makes no sense about the
Elon/Trump fanbase(s): they engage in absolutely incessant,
flamboyant exuberance at every word out of their mouth to the
degree it is nearly impossible to escape it, short of unplugging
the internet and TV. Then they act shocked when negative news is
also amplified.
Like yeah, there are both rewards and hazards to placing yourself
in the spotlight 24/7/365. As there should be.
danparsonson wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think that single number by itself says very much though as
it's not normalised, for example by the number of different product
lines a manufacturer produces or the total number of vehicles
manufactured.
schiffern wrote 1 day ago:
Why would you normalize by number of vehicles sold?
If a large-volume vehicle gets recalled, it should be a bigger news
story than a niche car.
danparsonson wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
Maybe you wouldn't - my thought was that (to exaggerate) if
company A produces 10 vehicles and issues 5 recalls, whereas
company B produces 1,000,000 vehicles and issues 10 recalls, then
company B isn't doing twice as badly as company A despite issuing
twice as many recalls, because they've manufactured 100,000 times
as many vehicles, and we probably need to factor that in somehow.
Likewise the number of vehicles affected by each recall.
As the other commenter said, I also think number of SKUs is
important as each one represents a different design and BOM.
_aavaa_ wrote 1 day ago:
It sounds like they're talking about normalizing by number of
models (SKUs) not number of units.
But in the case of Tesla, I would still want to know normalized
since those niche cars are being trumpeted as mroe revolutionary
and better than everyone else.
schiffern wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
Actually their post suggested both normalizations (notice the
word "or"), however both are flawed.
"Being trumpeted as [more] revolutionary" still has nothing to
do with number of models and/or units. If you only give extra
attention to certain brands because of their marketing, just
say so. There's no need to connect it to unrelated factors, and
there's no need to introduce 'normalizations' that don't
normalize for anything.
ronnier wrote 1 day ago:
Most of the Tesla recalls are just software updates that are done
from home over the air
croes wrote 1 day ago:
How many of the others are software updates but without the
possibility of OTA?
mynameisvlad wrote 1 day ago:
âMostâ is pulling a lot of undeserved weight there.
Some recalls have been software updates. There have been plenty
(like rear camera harnesses failing, the media CPU overheating,
rear seatbelts being incorrectly attached, faulty MMC modules, and
the incident being talked about here) that have required hardware
fixes.
jsight wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
I've had several recalls done on my Model Y. 100% of them were
OTA software updates.
It seems like that most of them are software, regardless of the
metric chosen (number of units recalled or number of recalls).
yreg wrote 1 day ago:
>âMostâ is pulling a lot of undeserved weight there.
So were most OTA updates or not? That is either objectively true
or objectively false, not "pulling a lot of undeserved weight".
jrflowers wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
This is a good point. As long as Tesla continuously churns out
software that breaks the car the percentage of âwoops the
accelerator stuck because they mixed soap with the pedal
glueâ issues gets smaller and thus less relevant
yreg wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
Then there wouldn't be 20 recalls in total. But there were 20
in total in that year.
jrflowers wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
Exactly
albertopv wrote 1 day ago:
Source?
vitaliyf wrote 1 day ago:
[1] The article has a chart that sources NHTSA data.
URI [1]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-recalls-262ec9a7
dymk wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone who owns a Tesla knows this
croes wrote 1 day ago:
But is the difference that it's just a software update or that
it's OTA?
bingbingbing777 wrote 1 day ago:
A minority of people own Tesla's.
jandrese wrote 1 day ago:
It should also be noted that most of those Tesla "recalls" are over
the air software updates that happen automatically. This one is
noteworthy because the owners have to physically bring their vehicle
to the service center.
athorax wrote 1 day ago:
That is objectively not true
URI [1]: https://www.tesla.com/support/annual-and-recall-service
jandrese wrote 1 day ago:
You are right. This makes it 9 of the 20 that were just software
updates.
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
Well that puts a damper on the oft-stated claim that Tesla
makes superior software. Sounds like they are relying on their
frequent OTA updates to allow them to half-ass the initial
design and just fix it later.
jandrese wrote 1 day ago:
True, but that ends up comparing not so bad to traditional
car makers that half-ass their software and then never update
it.
helsinkiandrew wrote 1 day ago:
One of the most frightening moments of my early life was when the
accelerator peddle got stuck (actually one of the connecting rods)
going into a roundabout, fairly recently after passing my driving test.
I couldn't figure out why I was speeding up even when breaking hard.
But somehow I managed to maintain control and put the gear into neutral
- and then sat at the edge of the roundabout with the engine screaming
at full throttle before I figured out what was wrong and turned off the
ignition. Wouldn't want to be in a Cybertruck with that happening.
cameronh90 wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
Stuck throttles used to be quite a common problem in the pre-ECU
days.
I've had two cars that had a stuck throttle in the past, both where
the accelerator cable connects to the throttle body on the top of the
engine. In both cases, lubing it up solved the problem and it never
reoccurred. It is a bit of a shocking thing to happen, but with a
manual it's instinctive to just jam the clutch down.
What worries me about modern cars, in particular electrics, is the
lack of any kind of kill-switch. Motorbikes have them, cars used to
just have an ignition switch, but now everything from the ignition to
the accelerator pedals is electric. Wouldn't it be a good idea to
have a switch that kills the car if all else fails?
HaZeust wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
Shifting the car into neutral is your best bet, as well as a pumped
parking/emergency brakes. However, I will always believe that
turning secondary brakes into a button/lever was a bad idea.
callalex wrote 19 hours 41 min ago:
In cyber trucks shifting to neutral requires a tap and a gesture
on the touch screen. Itâs a really great and safe idea.
GhostVII wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
Putting shifting controls on the screen was dumb for many
reasons, but doesn't really cause a problem in this case - the
cybertruck will disable the accelerator when you hit the
brakes, accomplishing the same thing as putting it into
neutral.
e44858 wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
In some cars the transmission is also controlled electrically.
HaZeust wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
Don't buy a car that can't manually go into neutral. Ever.
iknowstuff wrote 1 day ago:
FWIW, even if the accelerator pedal is stuck or misread in the
Cybertruck, the brake pedal immediately overrides any input from it
and stops accelerating.
MBCook wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
So Iâm going to wildly speculate here:
Iâm guessing most CTs have sold to big Tesla fans who already had
Teslas. Iâm going to assume those kind of fans also like
one-pedal driving (many people do).
So if youâve been using one-pedal for years youâre used to
releasing the accelerator stopping you.
Could the driver who hit a pole have stopped themselves with the
brake? Yes. If they were used to one-pedal for years, would they
have thought of that? In a split-second panic scenario perhaps not.
I know millions of people love one-pedal and many (most?) electric
cars have done version of it. But I wonder if stuff like this has
been studied. How well to people used to it handle using the brake
in a panic if they donât often drive two pedal mode/cars?
Iâd love to know the results of such a study.
yazaddaruvala wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
Single pedal driving still requires me to use the brake pedal
often.
In reality, there might be a 3-5x reduction to brake pedal usage.
That still means on any given trip, every 5th stop sign/red light
will require break pedal usage.
If anything the single pedal driving causes me to let off of the
accelerator earlier than I normally would in an ICE car, and
therefore I have more time to react with the break pedal if
needed.
I doubt I'm unique in these things.
kcb wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
That's surprising. I've definitely driven 100s of miles without
ever hitting the brake peddle.
zormino wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
I rarely hit the brake pedal in my car at all with one pedal
driving. In fact I'd say 80% of drives I don't hit it at all,
and the rest i might use it once or twice. I'm sure I'd still
hit the brake in an emergency since it's so ingrained in me
from driving normal cars for so long, but I'm not sure how long
that will be true for, especially for new younger drivers that
have really only driven EVs.
MBCook wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
Thatâs a good point too. Maybe itâs not much of an issue
for us âolderâ drivers but as we start to get
ânativeâ one-pedal drivers it could start to be.
hacker_88 wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
If one was aware what was happening, they would be able to
stop/Slow but lifting the brake would immediately cause the car
to accelerate . This would be instantaneous acceleration enough
to cause damage before you could hit the brakes at which it would
stop.
echoangle wrote 1 day ago:
What car was this in? I was always told that the brake of a modern
car is much stronger than the engine so you can always come to a
stop, even with a stuck accelerator
topspin wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
While it is the case, by design and typically by regulation, that
brakes have more braking force on paper than the engine and
drivetrain can produce, in the real world it is not so
straightforward.
ICE engines have active heat rejection and conventional brakes
don't. So ultimately in any prolonged fight between an engine and
brakes the engine will win.
Hot brakes have a lower coefficient of friction. This is the brake
"fade" experienced on long downhill runs or heavy use, such as
while towing heavy loads. In extreme cases brake pad outgassing,
brake pad glazing and boiling brake fluid, all a consequence of
heat, will degrade brake power.
Traditionally vacuum assist is used to amplify brake force in
passenger cars. The vacuum reserve is, however, finite and little
vacuum is available from an engine with a stuck open throttle.
When the throttle is even partially open and the engine RPM is kept
low (such as when fighting it with the brakes) the vacuum drops
severely. When boost runs out brake force is greatly reduced.
This all changes in heavier vehicles where more robust systems are
employed, such as compressed air brakes with large pressure
reserves.
Some vehicles have enough power to overcome the brakes on driven
wheels. Some vehicles have "low range" gearing that can also
easily overcome the brakes.
The situation described by helsinkiandrew was probably a
combination of brake fade that emerged while fighting the engine
and lack of brake boost due to low vacuum because the throttle was
somehow stuck. But there isn't enough information to say for
certain.
blake1 wrote 1 day ago:
In most modern cars, there is a pressure booster in the power brake
system, enabling braking force that can overcome the engineâs
horsepower and quickly stop the car. But they are designed to
continually maintain the braking force for a limited amount of
timeâ30 seconds or soâafter which this boosting ability is
depleted. Once that happens, braking must be fully supplied by
muscle power via the mechanical backup.
This is challenging if the engine is stuck in a wide open throttle
(WOT) state, because the driver must overcome the cars weight in
addition to the engine.
For a small car like a Toyota Corolla, this requires a few hundred
pounds of downforce on the pedal. For a large 300hp SUV, this could
require a thousand pounds of downforce.
As you said, the brakes can bring the car to a stop, but the car
will start reaccelerating if the engine isnât shut off.
(Sorry for mixing physical units.)
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
While the breaks physically will be ABLE to overcome the engine in
anything that isn't a dodge hellcat, if the peddle is stuck to the
floor and the engine is at full throttle, you won't have much or
any vacuum boosting effects! You will have to quite literally STAND
on the brake peddle like the bad old days, and a lot of people
driving today have never experienced unassisted braking.
brandonagr2 wrote 1 day ago:
You would want to be in a Cybertruck, when you press the brake pedal
it auto overrides the accelerator pedal. Being in a Cybertruck with a
stuck accel pedal is way safer than in a traditional truck
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Traditional automakers have been programming their vehicles to work
exactly the same way for a decade+, ever since the Toyota stuck
accelerator debacle. My last two cars both ignored throttle input
when the brake was depressed.
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
> Being in a Cybertruck with a stuck accel pedal is way safer than
in a traditional truck
I'd bet there isn't a current truck on the market that doesn't cut
the throttle when you hit the brake. Basically all cars now.
matja wrote 1 day ago:
Until the brake pedal falls off as well
IshKebab wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah except it has a 0-60mph time of 2.6 seconds. You're probably
already travelling at at least 20 so you have 1-2 seconds to figure
out what's going on before you crash. Good luck.
helsinkiandrew wrote 1 day ago:
I was more referring to its power and size, you need to figure out
that your still accelerating when you've released pressure on the
accelerator and you need to switch pedals to break.
Where are you going to be after half a second of maximum
acceleration in a 6600lb cybertruck?
tnmom wrote 1 day ago:
0-60 time is 2.6 seconds, or 10.32m/s^2 if itâs evenly
distributed. So from zero youâd be doing 11.5mph in 0.5s (and
travelled a little over four feet).
But importantly, it looks like this is more of a ratchet
effect⦠so if your pedal is stuck at 100%, itâs because you
pressed it that far (even if intending it to be momentary).
Thatâs not something youâd normally do in a parking lot full
of nuns, youâre probably on a highway with some time to react
and press the brake. My guess is thatâs why we havenât seen a
tragic accident out of this.
danparsonson wrote 1 day ago:
Except it's all fly by wire so you're relying on the software to be
bug free and I'd honestly rather trust physics.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Fly by wire throttles have been commonplace in cars since the
early-to-mid 00s.
lucianbr wrote 1 day ago:
There is no "physics", unless you're relying on falling fast
without a parachute or something like that.
In this case you're relying on mechanics to be bug free as
opposed to software. To imply that any car is designed and built
in such a way that it can only fail if physics itself fails is
rather arrogant. There are comments here in the thread pointing
to the long lists of bugs with non-drive-by-wire cars.
Mechanics may well be easier to design correctly and test, sure.
But get out with "physics".
danparsonson wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
> To imply that any car is designed and built in such a way
that it can only fail if physics itself fails is rather
arrogant
You're putting words in my mouth. All I'm saying is that direct
physical connections between things are much more reliable and
straightforward than software connections between things. Of
course no system is perfect.
Too wrote 10 hours 20 min ago:
Source?
This very case itself, of the accelerator pedal coming loose
and jamming, was in fact a mechanical problem.
Other comments above have more examples of stuck accelerator
wires and more.
Mechanics wear and tear and allow for human override and
human error, software introduces complexity. Both have their
own set of issues, neither are perfect, one canât say
either of them is inherently more reliable.
superultra wrote 1 day ago:
It feels like web communityâs reponse to Elon Inc businesses,
including Tesla and SpaceX, is frequently a double standard. By that I
mean that Tesla gets a hall pass on crucial QC detail work because
theyâre iterating or ironing out the detail as if itâs a web app.
Meanwhile Iâm not so sure the same leniency applies to Chevy or
Toyota or whatever.
I donât deny that iteration is a crucial process. Also Iâm not
advocating for a hall pass for big auto. I just think this is a really
big oversight and mistake. When youâre dealing with software that
doesnât directly impact lives, go ahead: break stuff. But when
weâre talking about big ass trucks on roads, there should be a harsh
response to a recall like this.
jsight wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
That's been a problem in the auto industry in general, not just with
Musk.
Honda's shipped a whole generation of Accord with a bad transmission.
Civic clear coat failures were horrible for a while. Nissan has had
huge issues with CVTs.
Chevy or Ford would be treated much worse for similar situations.
There are patterns, and real disconnects between the reputational
damage that is done and underlying vehicle reliability.
maxerickson wrote 1 day ago:
There's not any universal treatment.
There does seem to be a borderline cult of personality around the
guy, composed of people that more or less seem motivated to come up
with a reason to excuse anything. But that isn't that big a group of
people, they are just loud.
There's also plenty of people that are loud because they don't like
his politics/attitude.
gnfargbl wrote 1 day ago:
It's just the halo/horns effect. If you think (Tesla|SpaceX) is an
innovative company doing some great envelope-pushing stuff then you
probably empathise with their engineers more than usual and you're
willing to give them a pass. If you think Elon is a (bigoted
man-child|burgeoning danger to western democracy) then you probably
think negatively about his companies and you're more likely to do the
opposite.
At the risk of sounding trite, it's incredibly difficult to form a
balanced opinion on any situation because the little lizard brain
inside always wants to steer you one way or another.
robin_reala wrote 1 day ago:
The best bit is that both is true, as Tesla / SpaceX arenât the
same thing as Elon.
brandonagr2 wrote 1 day ago:
What hall pass? It's the opposite, the media blows a minor issue at
Tesla out of proportion, while there are no national headlines about
Fords or Jeeps getting recalled for bursting into flames
URI [1]: https://www.powernationtv.com/post/auto-brands-with-the-most...
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
We heard a lot about Toyota bz4x lug nuts and that recall was
smaller than this cybertruck recall.
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote 1 day ago:
How long did it take Toyota to troubleshoot the issue, fix it and
restart the problem? How does that compare?
superultra wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure that's true. I have a Chevy Bolt and when those were
exploding (lol), it was all over the news. So much so that there
are still parking garages that won't let you park a Bolt in the
garage.
blindstitch wrote 1 day ago:
Good thing this shit isn't street legal in the EU. They at least have
some amount of will to enforce basic car design safety.
IshKebab wrote 1 day ago:
Don't worry, Tesla's next car will be a lot safer:
URI [1]: https://www.imcdb.org/i733450.jpg
chollida1 wrote 1 day ago:
> . After performing a series of tests, it decided on April 12 to issue
a recall after determining that an â[a]n unapproved change introduced
lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the
accelerator pedal,â and that â[r]esidual lubricant reduced the
retention of the pad to the pedal.â
How do you have so little quality control and insight into your
manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can
introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one
noticed?
I guess when analysts said the incumbent auto manufacturers would have
a large advantage over Tesla in manufacturing, this is what they meant?
Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made for a
company that has done well up until now.
dhosek wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
âfor a company that has done well up until now.â
Havenât there been widespread complaints about manufacturing
defects (poorly-fit panels, unexpected braking, wheels falling off,
suspensions collapsing, axles breaking). They tend to rank at or near
the bottom in quality surveys. Alfa Romeo comes out ahead of them.
Even before Elon Muskâs antics turned me off the idea of buying a
Tesla, I held off the possibility of buying one because the
price/quality proposition was not great.
traviswingo wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
I picked up a car from a mechanic the other day and we got to riffing
about my own Tesla. He admitted to having friends that worked at
Tesla on the manufacturing line. In his own words, these guys are
âcomplete idiots,â and âdo shrooms before assembling cars.â
I want to take his words with a grain of salt, butâ¦I kinda believe
it. Obviously hearsay means nothing, though.
roflchoppa wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
I mean I donât doubt that the some people working the assembly
lines are getting a little messed-up before their shifts.
Our classic mini from Australia has other production anomalies, you
kinda just chock it up to the workers being a little drunk during
its construction.
jameslevy wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
"Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome". I do not know
anything of the culture of Tesla and am not commenting on it
specifically, and that quote could apply just as much to a company
like Boeing. But at companies working on safety-critical products,
the problems usually arise from employees acting in their own self
interest to do what will get them rewarded for shipping on time, or
to avoid punishment for causing delays.
FredPret wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
Manufacturing is super complex - employees and robots performing
thousands of interconnected tasks, sometimes requiring a little bit
of judgement, and never 100% supervised.
Even a mature operation like Toyota and Ford can blunder.
fuzzfactor wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
For me it was a situation where I've never heard of another case,
so I guess highly anecdotal, but can see how it might have applied
to millions of regular old Ford ICE cars that were on the road.
At one end of the accelerator linkage is the "user interface" (gas
pedal) and at the other end it's the entire V8 engine. Where the
linkage connects directly to the throttle using optimized leverage
and failure-mitigating springs that can overcome a number of
foreseeable failure scenarios. Which had gradually been improved
since the Model T and through the entire Space Age.
Runaway acceleration wasn't a problem with the pedal.
Engine was running properly too. And the linkage was perfect.
Well the engine is heavy and is not bolted directly to the frame of
the car, instead it uses motor mounts, which consist of a metal
plate which bolts to the motor, and an opposite plate that bolts to
the frame, separated by a thick hard rubber shock absorbing pad.
Motor mounts are doing some of their isolation duty when you see an
idling engine under the hood shimmying a little while the fenders
and hood are nicely stationary.
Anyway it took years to figure out because it happened so seldom,
and the cause & effect were so widely separated in time, but one
day while navigating a jeep trail the engine had bottomed out, and
that must have been the time one of the motor mounts separated,
while the engine was momentarily forced an inch or more away from
its normal position.
Nothing ever seemed any different, but every once in while when I
would accelerate from a stop, the pedal would drop almost to the
floor and it would really take off until I got my foot under the
pedal and pulled it back.
Turns out the torque was occasionally capable of twisting the
engine in the direction away from the broken mount, enough to be
pulling on the linkage, opening the throttle further, and resulting
in more torque. Might have had something to do with the octane of
the gasoline in use.
I guess at either end of the linkage you want the rubber to be
bonded to the metal a lot better than you might think at first.
assimpleaspossi wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
In the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, design engineers have
their offices next to the manufacturing line. So they see and hear
everything going on. It probably wasn't just "someone on the
production line".
misiti3780 wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
You're aware the other legacy manufactures have recalls all the time,
right?
red-iron-pine wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
> Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made
for a company that has done well up until now.
bro their QA has been garbage since day 1. they've gotten better but
this isn't really a surprise.
Phanyxx wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
I just took my car in and there were 4 active recalls to address
(Hyundai). This is hardly unique to Tesla.
asddubs wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
I'm kind of uneasy about this being possible at all. Obviously this
is just because of the power of hindsight, but should things that can
wedge the accelerator in full throttle position be using adhesive for
fixation at all?
voidmain0001 wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
This reminds me of the supposed factory floor modification to include
a battery heat sink on the Model Y.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424567
jacktribe wrote 1 day ago:
The pedals are manufactured (and likely assembled with the pad) by a
supplier in Canada, according to
URI [1]: https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/nhtsa-off...
Moto7451 wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm not a Tesla-stan but I can give this one a âit could have
happened to any manufacturerâ explanation.
Soap is a common method for getting rubber pads onto metal pedals in
the aftermarket world. Dish soap dries out and becomes less slippery,
unlike lithium grease or other options. It is possible it was carried
over from an appropriate and approved installation method for top
hinged pedals, where pressing down will push the rubber padâs grove
deeper into the metal shoe and not cause removal. For bottom hinged
pedals, preferred for performance cars, I wouldnât recommend that
at all.
One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its way to
Tesla ownership.
I donât disagree with the takeaway though. If they were trying to
Toyota Method/Six Sigma this assembly line properly, theyâd have
reviewed and approved the change as part of a periodic process and it
wouldnât have been âunapprovedâ and probably would not be the
process they used.
Adding to my âit could have happened to any manufacturerâ my EV
Porsche comes with a NEMA 14-50 plug/pigtale that was previously only
approved for use in 16 Amp EVSEs. The wire says 16A only (10 or 12ga
wire is in use). However, they kept using these on 40 amp capable
EVSEs. Over the years many 14-50 outlets and these plugs have melted.
Through that time Porsche blamed low quality outlets and recommended
an industrial model, but the plugs then melted instead of the outlet.
Only this year did they issue a recall. This is extremely similar to
an issue that happened with Teslaâs EVSE plug adapters. Porsche
managed to make the same exact mistake years later despite that being
an easy situation to reference. [1]
URI [1]: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2023/RCMN-23V841-8821.pdf
URI [2]: https://www.tesla.com/support/adapter-recall
jsight wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
> One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its way
to Tesla ownership.
Good point. While this was in Texas instead of there, it likely
still applies. Given that this is early production, they were
likely using some of their most experienced workers, possibly even
as transfers from the other plant.
It is easy to imagine them transferring an approach like this ("it
was approved before") without realizing that the consequences might
be different.
ChuckMcM wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many reasons
that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which benefit
production speed and/or reduce errors.
What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis. In a
different organization such a change would go in, and at the same
time kick off an engineering investigation to verify that it doesn't
make anything worse. If that analysis comes up clean, there is no
change. If it finds a problem though, then the change is
reverted/changed to something else. In regular car companies you see
things like "We're recalling all cars between VINxxxx and VINyyyy"
which basically delineate that time between when the change was made
and the time the analysis suggesting it wasn't a good thing. If its a
minor thing there won't be a recall, just a bit of extra "warranty
work" at the next service opportunity which the dealer does.
chrisjj wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
> I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many
reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line which
benefit production speed and/or reduce errors.
I think you missed "unapproved".
tw04 wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
> What they missed was the after action surveillance and analysis.
Isnât that literally an unprofessional error? The big three
already have this as standard operating procedure. Tesla still
seems to be treating building cars like devops: move fast and break
things, but donât worry about the break things part until itâs
bad enough that end users start complaining in a public forum.
ChuckMcM wrote 1 day ago:
As a followup to this, in this Techcrunch article[1] it says that
all 3,878 Cybertrucks shipped to date have been recalled. That
isn't a lot of cars. Apart from what it says about sales of the
Cybertruck, that suggests they haven't had enough customer miles on
these things yet to flesh out the more subtle issues.
URI [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttl...
KennyBlanken wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
For a halo vehicle that's typical volume.
There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales
numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues,
mostly because they aren't stupid enough to make their own stuff.
Rolls Royce doesn't make their own gas pedal; they go to a
company that makes them.
Nearly every problem Tesla has can be attributed to Musk's
insistence that he knows better than an industry that is
extremely cutthroat and has learned lessons from a century of
being in business. He has been propped up by customers and VCs
who think that means the auto industry is "stodgy", when really
they didn't understand all the reasons things are done the way
they are.
It's like the fresh college grad who comes onto the SW eng team
having made some clever app while he was a sophomore...and says
"oh you're doing it all wrong" to senior engineers.
One major mistake Musk made is confusing "big five" (GM, Ford,
Stellantis, Toyota, VAG) ambivalence toward electric cars with
incompetence. In Ford's case that is fairly accurate - the Mach E
is an engineering embarrassment, the Lightning less so, probably
because there is enormous organizational pressure to not fuck up
in the product line that is their bread and butter.
VAG has demonstrated great competency at EVs (Porsche and Audi
mostly) at the high end of the market...and once GM really gets
its Ultium platform going, Tesla is well and truly fucked if they
intend to keep making cars instead of just shifting to being an
'electric gas station' company...but they're on their heels there
too, having slept while CCS surpassed their charging standard
years ago.
philistine wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
A gas station is one of the least glamorous, and lowest margin
business out there.
Youâre basically making no money from the gas or electricity,
and all your profits comes from the chips and other stuff you
sell inside.
Tesla is severely problematic as a company, but its salvation
does not come from pivoting to selling vapes while people wait
for their charge to finish.
ajross wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
> There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales
numbers on a particular model and they don't have these issues
Recalls are absolutely routine in this industry, though. This
sounds like a semantic argument hiding behind "these issues" as
being somehow different from "those" issues?
ethbr1 wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
I don't think anyone thinks traditional auto is incompetent at
manufacturing.
I think lots of people have their doubts about the strategic
product vision of big auto executives, who traditionally have
tactically chased short-term profit margins with tunnel vision
that would make GE cringe.
slowhadoken wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
Also isnât a recall is a good thing for consumers? It means
Tesla is fixing an error, not ignoring it.
sonicanatidae wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
Yes and no.
Yes, because recalls are a good thing, because the manuf. has
acknowledged the issue and is trying to address it.
No, because what glue sniffing idiot thought glue would be the
best option, instead of just riveting the damn thing down, and
never worrying about the pretty little piece of garbage coming
loose and sticking the accel pedal down.
jordanb wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
Fasteners are very expensive from a production perspective
because they take a long time to install. This is why
products these days are designed to be assemble with
conformal, friction, or snap fit as much as possible.
Deciding to sub in fasteners in the production line would
have involved addition of at least one new position in the
line to install the fasteners.
rcpt wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
Yes I would love it if Honda would admit that the transmission
on the Odyssey is bonkers but seems like they'll claim it's WAI
until a lawsuit happens
bennyhill wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
Seems pretty scary to me that the supposed error causing
uncontrolled acceleration is a little soap near interior matts.
I guess I've been called a pig for not being extremely reckless
with the cars I've owned.
wongarsu wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
Soap in the glue joint between the accelerator pedal and its
cover. You won't cause this by cleaning your car with soap
ChuckMcM wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
Absolutely, its good they are proactively fixing things, this
particular issue with uncontrolled acceleration was
particularly dangerous.
In the US, consumer liability laws make these fixes mandatory
but it is always better when a manufacturer voluntarily recalls
a product than when it is ordered to by some oversight agency.
ilovetux wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
Would this not classify as reactive since it is happening 3
weeks after hearing about it from a customer?
filoleg wrote 19 hours 15 min ago:
Proactive, in this case, means âbefore they are legally
required to.â
If they waited until NHTSA performed their investigation
and made a recall request (which is how the heavy majority
of the recalls in the US are performed), that would be
reactive.
chrisjj wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
> Proactive, in this case, means âbefore they are
legally required to.â
Actually not.
"creating or controlling a situation rather than just
responding to it after it has happened."
Sohcahtoa82 wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
> Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck,
What? It says nothing about Cybertruck sales and everything
about how slow they've been to ramp up production.
Tesla has a well-known history of being slow to put a new model
into production. I find it odd that you would assume less than
4,000 Cybertrucks have been sold because of lack of interest.
asadotzler wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
Musk said last November they had capacity then for 125,000
trucks a year. Are you saying he lied to us?
11thEarlOfMar wrote 1 day ago:
Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated manufacturing
escape. Given the perspective of the rapid growth in capacity, with
3 factories coming online in 5 years and 2 million+ total capacity,
wouldn't we expect to see more escapes, even from a top performing
auto company?
JohnFen wrote 1 day ago:
If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects,
whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too rapid
and needs to be considered a fault.
valianteffort wrote 1 day ago:
Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You
can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high
quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and
more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent
throughout the day.
Draiken wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
> You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent
high quality of throughput.
Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize
safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes.
Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at
the very least have good procedures and quality control to
ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the
factory.
FloatArtifact wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon
for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do
seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.
JohnFen wrote 23 hours 37 min ago:
True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of
defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of
defects than is normal, then something about that expansion
is likely the root cause.
In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.
Libcat99 wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts...
If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run
shorter shifts.
Freedom2 wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the
time...
ragestorm wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
Apples to oranges. Tesla manufactures cars with much more
liability.
littlestymaar wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they
were still in the same league, and except on the week
before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the
place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams
who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).
llamaimperative wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they
actually do it
2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited
bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink
breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head
breaks]"
3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any
consistency, it's a laughable example of poor
self-management and company leadership
4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership
for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it
produces bad work
5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're
putting out onto public roads
stonogo wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
YC startup founders do not work shifts.
gopher_space wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project
and it can be hard to do, but I donât think Iâd
label the effort âworkâ for the same reasons I
donât think of home improvements as a duty or chore.
FiberBundle wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th
century.
sonicanatidae wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the
work force.
AnthonyMouse wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and
your commuting expense per hour of work goes down.
The alternative is that someone who wants to make more
money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're
working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16
hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
asa400 wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour
shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute
mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck
drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working
more than a certain amount of hours in a given period
because if their performance suffers, people die.
Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens
to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car.
Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they
possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone
other than those workers and the companies that employ
them is going to pay the externalities for all of their
quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because
people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck
driver.
AnthonyMouse wrote 21 hours 5 min ago:
> There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research
that bears this out.
Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a
physically fit and healthy person has more endurance
than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can
work more hours than the latter in actual fact.
> Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from
working more than a certain amount of hours in a given
period because if their performance suffers, people
die.
Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from
working more than a certain number of hours because
some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones
were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and
that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists
to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
asa400 wrote 20 hours 37 min ago:
It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier
than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point
isn't that healthy people can work more than
unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy
people, even young people, even experts - have a much
lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they
think they do, and their performance at the limit
degrades quickly.
AnthonyMouse wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
The issue is that the limit is in a different place
for different people. One person's performance is
degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour
10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8
hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be
working 6.
There is also the question of where to stop.
Suppose that the average person's performance is
degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop
after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance
anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe
90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe
75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8
hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a
different kind of work and then the same person is
still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85%
after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of
coffee.
There is no one size fits all.
slowhadoken wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
I wouldnât have believed this when I was a teenager but
as an adult I know it to be true. Iâve worked with guys
who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute
to and from work. I could only keep it up for three
months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the
military are machines.
gopher_space wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s?
You know how youâre mentally checked out of a job after
4 to 6 hours? That doesnât get better after 8.
A 12 hour shift means youâre in a bit of a mental fog
half the day.
AnthonyMouse wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of
shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than
others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you
can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone
who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
gopher_space wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
What kind of work are you imagining where there's no
brainwork involved and no danger to the project or
other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes?
I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals
and not quite enough personal experience.
AnthonyMouse wrote 19 hours 41 min ago:
Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g.
textiles, and being tired means you occasionally
produce something that gets tossed out by quality
control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone
so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material
vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer
hours.
Many types of emergency response or on-call work.
You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency
happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being
tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours
before responding to the emergency or leaving it to
someone unqualified.
Generically anything where the cost of occasional
mistakes is low or they can be detected before they
have a major impact.
But also, the point is that different people have
different levels of endurance. Some people will be
making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone
else would be making after 12.
gopher_space wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
> Many types of manufacturing. If you're making
e.g. textiles, and being tired means you
occasionally produce something that gets tossed
out by quality control, this is not obviously a
danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in
wasted material vs. benefits of operating the
factory for longer hours.
Do you have any idea how much those machines
cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how
quickly they'll remove the skin from your body?
If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how
long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare
parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
> Many types of emergency response or on-call
work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an
emergency happens.
That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour
shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone
involved in your scenario is fully aware that
they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to
an emergency.
> But also, the point is that different people
have different levels of endurance. Some people
will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than
someone else would be making after 12.
I'm assuming everyone has the same level of
endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my
livelihood on the self-awareness of some random
asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how
much they want to work if their output isn't
making us money.
AnthonyMouse wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
> Do you have any idea how much those machines
cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how
quickly they'll remove the skin from your body?
If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how
long will it take for repairs? Do you have
spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
Sewing machines? Not that expensive, not that
easy to destroy and the typical injury would be
that you get stuck with a sewing needle.
It seems like you want to assume that every job
involves some kind of delicate yet
fatality-inducing industrial equipment. It
doesn't.
> That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour
shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone
involved in your scenario is fully aware that
they're rolling the dice on people's lives due
to an emergency.
It's a person working for 12 contiguous hours,
because the benefits outweigh the costs.
> I'm assuming everyone has the same level of
endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my
livelihood on the self-awareness of some random
asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how
much they want to work if their output isn't
making us money.
And if they're willing to work and the output
is making you money?
The proposal is to ban people from working for
more than 8 hours. You don't need a law for any
of the cases where it isn't in the employer's
interests to do it anyway. They just won't
choose to do it in those cases then.
gopher_space wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
So far your thought experiment involves
someone with an athleteâs endurance whoâs
willing to spend half of their day on a
menial task for three days out of five? A
little unclear on the last part since you
donât seem to understand how overtime is
calculated.
Your concerns are a corner case.
askonomm wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
So because someone can take more of a beating than I
can, it makes it somehow okay?
AnthonyMouse wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to
because they'd make more money, what right do you
have to prohibit them from doing it just because
you can't?
pixiemaster wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family
with that?
AnthonyMouse wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an
hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of
labor by magic; employers are operating in a
competitive market. You can get more money by working
more hours.
jjav wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
> employers are operating in a competitive market
Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him
a 56B pay package.
Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could
afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk
still gets a fortune from the left over money.
So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's
just that greed demands that a single person gets it
all.
FiberBundle wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package
by having their shares diluted. It's not as if
Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's
not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
jjav wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
> so it's not really comparable to giving
employees a raise
Employees can (and most often are) paid in those
company shares as well, so no difference.
AnthonyMouse wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
Money is money. In theory they could dilute the
shareholders by issuing new shares into the
market and use the money to pay employees more.
But this fails to identify what magic is to be
used to cause them to want to do that.
Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty
good idea what the market price is for a
particular job. If they have to fill 100
positions and offering $25/hour causes them to
get 100 qualified applicants who accept the
position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is
like saying that the employees could accept
$15/hour when another employer is offering $25.
Some explanation is required for why they would.
AnthonyMouse wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't
think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they
don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive
not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the
money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of
money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a
major social media company that can influence the
public perception of the company. That could very
well be worth that amount of money to the company
over a period of years -- and it isn't a single
year's compensation.
So then we're back to it being a competitive
market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from
having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands
$56B, the company can either pay the market price
or have a net loss of $4B relative to the
alternative. And then have even less money to pay
employees.
Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the
shareholders give it to him then it's costing the
company money. But then that's maladaptive and the
company will lose business to some other company
that pays its executives less and uses the money to
lower the price of their cars and gain a
competitive advantage while still paying the market
rate for other types of labor.
Either way it doesn't change the market price for
those other types of labor, which are much easier
to estimate than the value of certain unusual
executives.
jjav wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
> If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth
that amount of money, they don't have to pay it
to him
Well, if you're following that drama, that is how
it is supposed to work and how the Delaware judge
said it needs to work.
So, now Musk just want to move the incorporation
to TX, where he can order the board to pay him
whatever he wants without oversight.
AnthonyMouse wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
The compensation package was approved by the
shareholders, not just the board, but then the
judge didn't like the disclosures for the
shareholder vote and invalidated it. Musk
obviously didn't like that and is now behaving
in the usual way, but whatever. He's going to
put it up for another vote and the shareholders
are going to approve it again or they won't.
jajko wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he
views workers and at this point we know how he treats them
too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy
obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from
high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a
love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse.
Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those
early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take
also with them but they are always calculated and control
is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup
mentality scales well into giga factories level.
ChuckMcM wrote 1 day ago:
I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they
expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating fabs
because they didn't want an increase in defects.
For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory online
that didn't produce exactly the same level of quality would be
red flag to re-evaluate how they brought on new capacity.
bastawhiz wrote 1 day ago:
> Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made
for a company that has done well up until now.
I can't tell if this is a serious comment, because in the past there
have been many weird problems, like wood trim in Model Ys: [1] (and
yes, I know it's not exactly the same, but it's certainly still very
bad to be using home renovation materials in the face of part
shortages)
URI [1]: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/36274/tesla-model-y-owners-fin...
sonicanatidae wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
When you consider who's running it, it makes perfect sense.
Only a moron of the scope of Musk would own an EV company, and then
become a literal Nazi online alienating the left leaning people,
you know, the kind of people interested in climate change,
technology and EVs, and cater non-stop to right wingers, the kind
of people who think climate change is a hoax, "EVs are for
pussies", and love coal rolling.
throitallaway wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
Or the Cybertruck's wheel covers coming off, or the lack of ridge
next to the windshield that causes any moisture on the windshield
to hit the side windows (and intrude if they're open), or the
extremely failure prone Model S door handles, the cost
optimizations that have lead to stalk-less steering columns, etc.
You could write a book about all of the quirky little problems that
Teslas have.
Incumbent manufacturers have most of this stuff figured out; Tesla
seems to want to "be different" on the most minute and boring of
things. They keep stubbing their toe along the way.
t0mas88 wrote 19 hours 43 min ago:
Don't forget saving a few dollars on a rain sensor... Tesla tried
to use the cameras to detect rain in the early model S. The
result was no automatic wipers for a long time.
The rest of the industry all use a standard sensor that works
well.
m463 wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
Older model S cars have horrible intermittent wipers.
Turn them on, and invariably slow intermittent, becomes slow
continuous, becomes annoying fast continuous. Really really
just needed manual intermittent.
shepherdjerred wrote 1 day ago:
What's the problem with using trim? It doesn't seem like it'd have
any impact at all, aside from being funny.
bastawhiz wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
Whether or not you're comfortable with it, it shows that they
bent their own manufacturing standards by using nonstandard parts
that weren't purpose-built. When I buy a new Dell computer I
don't expect to open it up to find parts taped together with
electrical tape and wire nuts on connections. I similarly don't
expect parts in my new Model Y to be made from materials that
someone bought at Home Depot.
gamblor956 wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
Trim has different heat tolerances than automotive-grade
plastics, especially those physically attached to heat sources.
Also, the glue used in wood trim has a fairly low combustion
temperature...
llamaimperative wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
Would you be okay with your child driving a car where critical
systems were assembled with whatever ad-hoc materials were
available in local home renovation stores?
shepherdjerred wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
My question was literally asking if/why this was unsafe.
> The trim appears to be providing some strain relief for the
strap holding the LCC in place, perhaps to keep the tension
from providing unnecessary stress on the condenser during
vibration or flexing, or to prevent any sharp corners from
severing the strap itself.
Can you explain to me why wood trim would be less safe than
plastic for this?
llamaimperative wrote 18 hours 22 min ago:
Are the performance characteristics of that (presumably)
random piece of wood well-established for a usecase like
this?
If so: Sure, no problem!
If no: Then that's why.
A key part of engineering pretty much anything is
understanding the characteristics of the materials. Plastics
are extremely highly-engineered and well-understood (which is
why they're everywhere now). Wood can be the same, but by
default is not, especially in mass-production contexts where
performance can vary dramatically between individual pieces
of wood, which is one of many reasons you don't see it used
in these contexts.
This could be totally fine, but there's absolutely no reason
that should be the default assumption, especially when we
know for a fact that was not the typical assembly plan and
this is a company and culture known for cutting corners.
jsight wrote 22 hours 24 min ago:
Given that I've never heard of an issue with that particular
part after years of extended use...
Yes.
llamaimperative wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
"Given the benefit of hindsight, I sure would!"
Gee good point.
How confident are you that you not hearing about such a
failure means they haven't happened? How confident are you
that this is the only component that's been hacked together
like this?
jsight wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
Oh, there's plenty of cobbled together stuff. But we were
talking about strain relief. That's boring compared to some
of the dumb stuff that I've seen come out of that factory.
:-)
bastawhiz wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
Are you willing to bet the safety of your family on the
efficacy of some wood trim that someone bought at Home Depot
to meet their manufacturing quota just because none of them
have spectacularly failed yet? Really?
jsight wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
Given my knowledge of the part involved and the materials
used, absolutely. I'd be doing it in the same way that I'm
betting "the safety of [my] family on the efficacy" of the
cheap little shim that I bought to make water bottles fit
in the cup holders better.
Despite the high language involved here, there is no risk.
Although if you want to take up a career as a service
advisor at a dealer, you might make good commissions from
that style of rhetoric.
hn_throwaway_99 wrote 1 day ago:
I think Tesla has tons of problems, and I think the Cybertruck is a
ghastly creation, and I think there have been many worse examples of
QA problems at Tesla in the past (e.g. steering wheels falling off).
But at this point, this just feels like piling on. "OMG, how can
their processes be so immature that something like this happened?!?!"
Nearly all new models have significant recalls, and I'm not surprised
for a vehicle as soup-to-nuts different as the Cybertruck. These are
incredibly complicated engineering processes, so it's always easy to
point out one thing (out of potentially millions) and yell "How could
this happen?!"
I'm certainly not excusing Tesla for their overall QA issues, but at
the same time this pearl clutching and what seems like undue
attention every time there is a Tesla recall just seems over the top
at this point.
ivix wrote 1 day ago:
You have written this as if this doesn't routinely happen to every
auto manufacturer. Why?
chollida1 wrote 1 day ago:
> You have written this as if this doesn't routinely happen to
every auto manufacturer. Why?
Does it?
Which auto manufacturer's have had recalls due to unapproved
changes made on the assembly line?
I've seen design flaws force a recall but i'm not certain that
unapproved change s on the assembly line is something that
routinely happens.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Do we have public post mortems for all the thousands of recalls
over the years?
For example, what happened with Toyota's wheels falling off a
couple a years ago.
Workaccount2 wrote 1 day ago:
I work in manufacturing and sometimes stuff like this happens despite
controls in place. You can get technicians/assemblers who just take
it upon themselves to fix a problem rather than notifying anyone. To
them it is no big deal (i.e. doesn't warrant mentioning to
engineering), so it must be "no big deal".
enaaem wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
The fact that Musk publicly blames the fault on workers, shows that
Tesla is already behind Toyota in philosophical thinking.
germinator wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing, you run
into small problems and ambiguities all the time.
By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give
you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build?
If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first
place.
We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the
worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if
they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing
would ever get done.
In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off
and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an
assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your
designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a
squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?
Melatonic wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
Exactly - especially in a TRUCK of all things. The pedal area
should be expected to get getting all kinds of crud and crap in
it and be cleaned regularly and be extra durable.
downrightmike wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
Definitely not the Total Quality Management model. If management
and engineers can't be bothered, this shit happens.
themaninthedark wrote 1 day ago:
Same, I work in manufacturing(not automotive but heavy construction
equipment) and see things like this all the time. Workers think
they understand/ don't think engineers understand or want to do it
faster/easier than what they were shown.
I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess:
Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area
and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on.
Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and runs
but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not releasing. further
troubleshoot and find it is due to pressure not getting to
brakes(configuration is such that brakes come on if there is loss
of hydraulic pressure). Replace hydraulic line, machine is working.
Remove contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly
pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the assembly
area, I find that paint decided to use packing peanuts to mask
holes that the hydraulic fitting go in instead of masking tape as
directed. The packing peanut tore while being removed and the
assembly working inserting the fittings did not notice.
jsight wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
> Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly
area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip
it on.
TBH, something like this might even get approved by a foreman.
"Thanks for coming up with a clever way to save a few seconds on
assembly!"
nabilhat wrote 1 day ago:
It's a design error from the start. The workaround shouldn't have
happened, but is only one of countless ways this would have
inevitably happened anyway. Glue has a lot of failure modes.
Correct application can't be reliably tested non-destructively.
Product variances are often very hard to detect. Degradation with
age and physical use can't be reliably forecast.
Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push into
starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than the
appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more reliable,
trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and that's why it's a
common solution that auto manufacturers use in this exact
application. This was a confoundingly stupid place to rely on glue.
FredPret wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
Correct - a great design is also easy / automatic to build
correctly. This is vastly easier said than done when you have a
complex product with many components.
I remember reading about the original iPhone's manufacturing
operations in China - how the Apple engineers spent a ton of time
making sure that the right way is also the easy way for the
factory workers.
Draiken wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
This is an underrated point. A lot of focus has been put on
manufacturing procedures when this could've been avoided entirely
in design.
IDK anything about manufacturing so I wonder if this was due to
incompetence, to save costs, ignorance or something else?
sonicanatidae wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
Why not all of the above?
ncr100 wrote 1 day ago:
I speculate in a Musk company, this "I will fix it" attitude would
be promoted.
"I sleep on the floor" .. "You're fired for not proactively fixing
a problem I just thought of a solution to". Is my speculation
off-base?
jsight wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
There's an old story about toothpaste boxes and solving the empty
box problem: [1] I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But
just think, if the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we
might be reading a story about how important workers are at
solving little production problems.
Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix problems is
great, until they use soap to put glued parts on.
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/2o9dho/the...
HarryHirsch wrote 1 day ago:
An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical article is
"no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like safety culture.
michaelsshaw wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Tesla desperately wishes it could have the safety culture of
Boeing.
jmspring wrote 1 day ago:
It seems typical Elon Musk to me.
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count of
the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not just mention
this was not working right and you are working around it? We could
have fixed this, but if you do not say anything it might be a while
before someone on the dev team notices."
77pt77 wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
> Why did you not just mention this was not working right and you
are working around it?
Because in the real world messengers get shot.
JohnFen wrote 1 day ago:
I think that devs often underestimate just how difficult it is
for users to report problems. The most common problems are that
the users feel ignored, like they're being a burden on the devs,
or scolded (for not reporting it correctly, for "not holding it
right", etc.). It's even common for there not to be an easy way
to report such problems ("use Discord", "sign up for an account
on this website and report there", etc.)
Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant it can
be. If I can come up with a workaround without having to report
the issue, that's what I'll tend to do. And if I have to talk to
tech support rather than the devs? That's simply not going to
happen unless I'm trapped into using the product.
We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.
sonicanatidae wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev?
This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be
working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with the
code, so the Devs can address.
You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your
experience is not how support is supposed to work.
Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work arounds
by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over a given
system, trying 107 different versions of some framework,
causing lots of downtime, and working nights/weekends, just to
learn that some UNDOCUMENTED cludge fucking bullshit is what's
actually causing the issue.
Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the users.
fouc wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Ironically you're just making the point of the post you're
replying to.
JohnFen wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
> Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev?
With open source, you're usually reporting to devs. With
commercial software, usually to tech support or to nobody.
> You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your
experience is not how support is supposed to work.
Yes, I know -- but it is how the majority of support actually
is, if there is even support available at all. In a whole lot
of cases, there is none.
I'm talking about software meant for consumer use. Software
for business use is much better on these issues, although you
still do find them. At my workplace, we recently took a large
financial hit (and almost lost an important customer) because
of bad and unresponsive tech support from a supplier. It
happens.
rurp wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
To make things worse the largest consumer tech companies, like
Google and Apple, have a well deserved reputation for caring
very little about customer feedback. It's a normal thing to
lookup how to fix an annoyance or regression, finding hundreds
of people posting about the same complaint, without ever
getting any sort of response or reaction from the company.
Heck the only support Google offers for many products is a
community forum that their own employees never post on, and I
assume few even look at. People have largely been conditioned
to think that tech companies don't care about their feedback.
JohnMakin wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
Very true, but funny enough, AWS has some of the best support
of any product I have ever used.
IshKebab wrote 1 day ago:
Have you tried thinking of the reasons? I can think of several:
* There's probably a small chance it actually would get fixed,
and therefore a decent probability that reporting it would be a
waste of their time.
* They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and waiting for
fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the workaround was in place
there was no need for a fix.
* Sometimes the people running projects you use can be hostile,
which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and even stressful.
Much better to avoid interacting with them if at all possible.
* They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report it.
* They simply didn't have time to report it.
throwway120385 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah our support people at my company do the same thing. Then
you'll get a report 6 months later that "[big critically
important feature] is not working" and you'll look into it and
support has adopted a process that essentially disables that
feature or they have a workaround for a bug that was fixed 4
years ago and because they never entered the conversation at that
time they still do the workaround.
We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one point
because they did a big round of updates and "none of them
worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each of those
components and 95% of what they claimed didn't work actually did.
But meanwhile you've got product managers and other people wading
into the conversation to try to tell you to fix something that
isn't actually the problem.
We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop
excluding people from the conversation about product problems.
I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality management system
of some sort before the company's product implodes.
JohnMakin wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
There was a poorly implemented customer support system that I
worked with once that due to the way the app worked, support
could run a query that would essentially scan the entire
database, predictably it'd hit a proxy timeout. So what
happened instead was they would open 10+ tabs doing the exact
same query hoping one would get lucky and succeed, and we had
to figure out why our database was getting ddos'd. Trying to
explain that they were actually making the issue worse with the
workaround was very painful, saying stuff like "well what did
you change, it was working fine for months."
agumonkey wrote 1 day ago:
There's something difficult about notifying problems. You might
make people angry, you might feel like a moron because you
misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how they feel.
singleshot_ wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
Wait, donât car assembly lines have a big red button you can
push if you find a defect? Havenât they for many years? Does
pushing that button really make everyone angry?
Thatâs not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
agumonkey wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
You're right, in some settings there's everything in place to
ease communicating issues. But what if it's not something
clear enough to trigger it ?
singleshot_ wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
I completely agree with you that some errors could be
missed if no one noticed them. This seems entirely separate
from the idea that people could become angry if the line
were stopped, but of course you are right.
bgirard wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the contact
to notify, start a conversation, update the conversation, wait
for the issue to be picked up, wait for the software to be
updated. Now repeat for everything you notice.
If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my
core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to
work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
danielfoster wrote 1 day ago:
Pressure to perform?
brabel wrote 1 day ago:
No... I've been a maintenance worker.
If you needed "Engineering" to help you fix every problem you
faced everyday in a production line, the Engineer would need to
come to work with you every day.
If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up" came
down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a
strong reason to do so as the company will be losing millions
while you wait :).
You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's really
up to the technician to know when something requires notifying
Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll get rid of you
for being annoying... notify too little and shit like this can
happen, but in the very large majority of cases, it doesn't.
Freedom2 wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
> If you stopped the production line until "someone higher up"
came down to approve your changes, you'd better make sure you
have a strong reason to do so as the company will be losing
millions while you wait
Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that
American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?
throwway120385 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have a problem with technicians solving problems. But
as an engineer I would like to codify the solution so that A)
we're implementing a controlled process and B) if there's a
better solution out there I can make that recommendation or fix
the system. When you take it upon yourself then problems only
happen if you don't communicate.
er4hn wrote 1 day ago:
I haven't been a maintenance worker, but I've worked as an SWE
in a company with a large IT dept. Sometimes it's faster to
work around them to find solutions to doing your job. Both
sides have good intentions but the IT dept. cannot move nimbly.
Same story everywhere.
Workaccount2 wrote 1 day ago:
At least in the instances I have encountered, it came from a
place of well meaning combined with overconfidence.
ncr100 wrote 1 day ago:
Is "Irresponsibility" I feel -- without any true blame / shame
though.
Complex work is hard.
Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that.
So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's
shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the risky
challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex job.
?
EDIT: here is the flaw [1] yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame,
seems like an obvious design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on
'soap' to keep a flat pedal cover attached to another flat
pedal.
URI [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/735775817...
Workaccount2 wrote 1 day ago:
Right, it's always dependant on circumstances. I try to
stress as much as possible that you always need to design
things in such a way that even the dumbest, newest assembler
will still be able to build it correctly. And often times we
review drawings/instructions and find lots of poorly outlined
procedures.
But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran out,
but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just used that
instead". It can be a killer.
cogman10 wrote 1 day ago:
I actually blame the engineering/design department for this
one.
The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a
single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them?
Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin gets
too hot or the factory has too much dust in it?
If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including mine, a
Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a single
piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker glued for
style.
ProllyInfamous wrote 1 day ago:
I would suspect more "get'r'dun".
bottlepalm wrote 1 day ago:
Work instructions are kind of like programming - at âruntimeâ
youâll find out all the different ways the technicians can
misinterpret them, or âfill in the blanksâ for things you
overlooked.
forgetfreeman wrote 1 day ago:
And yet every other major auto manufacturer on the planet seems to
avoid this problem, so clearly Tesla's missing something.
Workaccount2 wrote 1 day ago:
This is so far off the mark that it must be sarcasm.
forgetfreeman wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
I'm prepared to change my stance on the matter the moment
someone produces evidence that suggests other manufacturers
have had instances of on-the-fly changes made on their
production lines.
skellington wrote 1 day ago:
The hate is so deep that people lose their minds when it comes
to a minor Tesla issue and conveniently forget the HUGE list of
problems and recalls from all manufacturers over the years.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
In many cases they just don't know about them because they're
not pushed so hard in the media and people don't upvote
negative stories about other car manufacturers like they do
with negative Tesla stories on HN and Reddit.
It's very affective, that's why the oil lobby pushes negative
EV news so hard in the media, especially right wing media.
mimikatz wrote 1 day ago:
This exact same thing was seen a Boeing, which isn't a model of good
manufacturing, but it is semi-commmonplace for the line to have
unapproved fixes.
URI [1]: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/faa-found-staff-boeings-supplier-0...
xethos wrote 1 day ago:
If I may clarify: Unapproved here would typically mean engineering
hasn't signed off. It does not mean engineering was asked and said
"Hell no".
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
And additionally, using dish soap to lubricate parts for assembly
is standard procedure elsewhere in many industries. It's
sometimes even recommended in the standard manuals as part of a
repair procedure (I've had refrigerator gaskets that call out
using a bit of soap on them before installation).
dns_snek wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
A crucial difference being that there's no risk of your
refrigerator gasket sending a 3 tonne metal box into a crowd of
people if it comes loose, unlike the gas pedal on a truck.
Playing fast and loose with the processes surrounding something
as important (and dangerous) as the gas pedal is recklessness
of the highest order.
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
> someone on your own production line can introduce a new step to
your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?
That's actually not unusual at all.
It's perfectly common for an engineer to order that a hole be made in
a given location on a given part without specifying that coolant
should be used, or the spindle speed of the drill, or how the part
should be held in the machine, or that the hole should be deburred.
Manufacturing is skilled work.
trust_bt_verify wrote 1 day ago:
Bespoke manufacturing and machining is where this kind of change
would be introduced. Not in a flushed out design being produced on
a line. It becomes an expensive mistake when these types of
decisions are made this late in the process. Seems like they rushed
the design in a number of places.
jrmg wrote 1 day ago:
An âunapproved changeâ getting in to the process seems way worse
to me than just the [âapprovedâ] production process having an
unforeseen flaw thatâs being corrected now itâs been found.
bitexploder wrote 1 day ago:
I am generally mildly negative on many Tesla decisions, but this has
happened to the big manufacturers as well. Stock floor mats that
caused stuck accelerator. Toyotas infamous stuck accelerator code
that actually hurt people. Their code was reputedly a giant mess.
m463 wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
tesla also has floor mat issues (that it has tried to cover up)
itsoktocry wrote 1 day ago:
I imagine some of the schadenfreude comes from the Tesla bulls
proudly proclaiming "and unlike the other OEMs, Tesla has never had
a recall" for years, when it was just a matter of time.
skellington wrote 1 day ago:
Except this has nothing to do with those things.
This is just the f'n rubber pad on the accelerator can come off
which isn't great, but harms nothing.
What is wrong with the people here?
Qwertious wrote 1 day ago:
The pad can get wedged under a sill in front of the pedal, making
the car accelerate even when you release the pedal. This could
kill people.
MisterBastahrd wrote 1 day ago:
That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those
vehicles.
You can void your warranty by driving them through car washes.
What exactly is the point of a bulletproof truck that can't get
wet?
jsight wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
No, you can't void your warranty that way. That was hyperbole.
bsagdiyev wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
"Damage caused by car washes is not covered by the warranty."
in the owners manual seems to contradict that statement.
jsight wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
The preceding sentence explained why. Car wash damage is
surprisingly common. I've known people who have had side
mirrors damaged (not Teslas) and seeing damage to rear
wipers is common enough that I've seen the results of it.
This whole story was essentially made up by
mischaracterizing some guy's tiktok. :facepalm
Freedom2 wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
Except everyone I've spoken to has had car wash damage
covered by their dealer, except Teslas.
jsight wrote 16 hours 42 min ago:
That seems unbelievable to be honest. You mean if the
car wash breaks a wiper the dealer just replaced it?
I had a hard time getting my dealer to replace what was
clearly warranty work (engine issues) due to them
pretending the factory warranty extension didn't apply.
And here you have dealers replacing things that are
explicitly excluded? Weird.
tibbydudeza wrote 1 day ago:
My Corolla was also recalled - code was a mess as with most
embedded projects but no obvious bugs related to unintended
acceleration - think the cases reported were less than a 300.
Never encountered the issue.
They replaced my floor mats and installed a new pedal assembly and
updated to the ECU with "brake override" ability - meaning if I
pressed the brake pedal it would ignore input from the throttle.
delfinom wrote 1 day ago:
Yea many things point to it having been mass hysteria and people
too stupid to shift their cars in neutral if the throttle really
did fail.
danielfoster wrote 1 day ago:
That's what I thought until I saw the video. The top metal panel
that covers the accelerator literally falls off, wedging itself
between the accelerator and the car. It's not a fabric cover.
mschuster91 wrote 1 day ago:
Or the Takata airbag scandal [1]. A decade worth of airbags that
were compromised, over 100 million vehicles that had to have all
airbags replaced, likely 100+ injured and dozens of deaths. The
sheer scale of that is absolutely mind-blowing, there is virtually
no car manufacturer (except Tesla, ironically - I think they
manufacture in-house?) that did not get hit.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takata_Corporation#Defective...
delfinom wrote 1 day ago:
It just means Tesla bought air bags from the other manufacturers
for airbags. Takata just happened to be the biggest supplier. My
old v6 Honda was unaffected by airbag recalls because they used
airbags from Autoliv. There is also Daicel and Nippon Kayaku and
ZF.
diydsp wrote 1 day ago:
wrt to the code: Although NASA found many aesthetic issues with
the Toyota code, it did not find a smoking gun. [1] Presumably many
other of their other products are running successfully with similar
code. To put the comparison bt Toyota and Tesla in perspective:
Toyota is an 85 year old company which ships about 10 million
vehicles per year. Tesla has shipped almost 5 million vehicles
total as of July 2023.[2] [1] "In conducting their report, NASA
engineers evaluated the electronic circuitry in Toyota vehicles and
analyzed more than 280,000 lines of software code for any potential
flaws that could initiate an unintended acceleration incident. "
"NASA engineers found no electronic flaws in Toyota vehicles
capable of producing the large throttle openings required to create
dangerous high-speed unintended acceleration incidents."
"The two mechanical safety defects identified by NHTSA more than a
year ago â âstickingâ accelerator pedals and a design flaw
that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by floor mats â
remain the only known causes for these kinds of unsafe unintended
acceleration incidents." [1]
URI [1]: https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-department...
URI [2]: https://www.licarco.com/news/how-many-tesla-cars-have-been...
donkers wrote 1 day ago:
That Toyota code was a total mess and NASA missed a few things.
Take a look at this report from a CMU prof.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236303
SilasX wrote 1 day ago:
Correct, but, to bring it back to the original point, there's a
difference between "sloppy code" and "sloppy code that cascades
into unintended acceleration". The fact that it didn't actually
cascade isn't a reason to keep writing sloppy code, of course.
But such sloppiness also remains a red herring until they can
actually find a concrete way that code could have contributed.
matthewdgreen wrote 16 hours 18 min ago:
An analysis by expert witnesses in the trial found that a
small amount of memory corruption could trigger task death
and unintended acceleration. The report did not find the
cause of the memory corruption, but many software errors can
corrupt memory.
URI [1]: https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FI...
warcher wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
Last I heard there was speculation that the CPU was
vulnerable to an alpha particle flipped bit error and fixing
that was the eventual patch. A one in a million shot happens
ten times a year (sic) when you ship ten million cars a year
covering many billions of miles.
chollida1 wrote 1 day ago:
If Telsa and the article are telling the truth then these aren't
anywhere near the same.
The mat was a design flaw from the beginning that missed QA, that
happens in any large scale manufacturing as you can't just get
everything right from the start.
If the article is telling the truth, this was a change made on the
build line that wasnt' approved, that's a huge f$ck up if true and
an incredible show of incompetence if someone can just start making
design changes without approval on the build line.
bitexploder wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a
production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple bug
is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught at design
time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a production bug.
toast0 wrote 1 day ago:
A design error leaves a papertrail for future study and
redress.
An unapproved/undocumented production change may leave only the
misproduced items. Mistakes happen, but this sounds more like
changing the process without review.
chollida1 wrote 1 day ago:
> Itâs better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a
production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple bug
is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught at
design time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a
production bug.
:) I think you're missing my point, or I 've failed to explain
it clearly.
A design flaw is bad, but we can't eliminate those. According
to this article an assembly line employee went rouge and
introduced a change without telling anyone.
If the article is correct then clearly these two things aren't
even near comparable. We expect design flaws and adapt, we
don't expect employees to go rouge and change the design
without telling anyone.
Now the article or Tesla could be lying here but this is the
facts as we know them.
Does that help clear things up for you?
I also dont' think you deserved the downvotes I saw you got for
just misunderstanding. Sorry that happend to you!
bitexploder wrote 1 day ago:
I don't believe I misunderstand anything. This would be an
interesting case study. It is very convenient to blame an
employee "going rogue" for a dangerous issue like this. The
design wasn't even changed. They just used a lubricant
(soap?) to slide it on.
This overall points out the immaturity in Tesla's
manufacturing process if changes like this can happen and
then occur or affect every vehicle of a particular type
produced, does it not? Overall, it still seems like a "below
the line" change. These can still be quite impactful (see:
memory corruption bugs leading to compromise and functional
exploits). But it is still more akin to a bug or production
flaw than a design flaw.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
>vs a production line mistake?
I think the point they are getting at, if I understand the
commenter correctly (and assuming the wording of the article is
accurate), is that someone on the line had the ability to make
a change to the production process without authorization.
That would not just be a "production line mistake", instead it
is indicative of a serious policy and procedure failure. No
single person on the production line should have the ability to
make unauthorized changes to the procedures being used in
production.
I hate analogies, but to use yours, it is a rogue employee that
was able to change critical code with no approval process --
and no one else noticed that code was being changed and went
ahead with shipping it out.
jon-wood wrote 1 day ago:
This sounds like standard corporate ass covering to me. "Oh,
that was just an unauthorised rogue employee, they've been
fired" sounds a lot better than "someone suggested lubing up
the accelerator to speed up production, and no one thought to
check it won't cause problems".
explaininjs wrote 1 day ago:
If you ask me the lube just accelerated the problem. The
root cause remains that you have a part secured with only a
friction fit, in a setting where if that friction fit fails
you have a a critical failure of the system. Friction fits
can be very strong when properly established between
appropriate materials, but this was not that. This was a
cheap plastic cover made to be a bit too small over the
metal lever. Over time with heat, sand/dirt, cold,
pressure, vibration, etc. cycles, this was going to fall
off regardless.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
For sure, I have no idea if the wording is truthful or just
standard corporate blame dilution. But if the wording is
truthful, this would be a significant process & policy
failure.
taeric wrote 1 day ago:
This is basically how all construction and manufacturing jobs
work out, though? It isn't an isolated "single person" that
can make arbitrary changes. They can propose something and
it should be reviewed.
So, I don't think it is quite as simple as an isolated bug,
per se. But it is very common for changes to get introduced
at build time of physical things. Depending on where and
what the change is, the level of review for it will be very
different.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
>This is basically how all construction and manufacturing
jobs work out, though?
Not really. Any place with a decent QA department would
sample a part, compare it to the specification, and raise
an alarm because the part differs from the specification.
There also should be occasional audits on the build process
itself, which should have identified this, as it would
differ from the specified process.
This type of issue (again, assuming the articles wording is
true -- I have no idea) can only occur if there is either
bad/missing QA, or bad/missing specifications.
>But it is very common for changes to get introduced at
build time of physical things
Even in construction you need to have changes approved
(i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect, engineer,
and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which this would
not be) must be documented on the "as-built" drawings.
taeric wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
This is going on the idea that there wasn't a
documentation event with this change? I'm positing that
knowing it is a recall on all of the trucks indicates
that it was, in fact, a signed off change on the assembly
line.
That is to say, just because it was on the assembly line
doesn't mean it wasn't reviewed. And just because it was
reviewed doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. Part of the
sign off was almost certainly "does not need retesting"
for implementation. Which, was clearly a mistake. But
isn't a sign of a broken QA system.
ziddoap wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
Relevant part of the quote which started this
discussion:
>â[a]n unapproved change [...]
Unapproved, to me, implies that it was not reviewed or
signed-off.
>Part of the sign off was almost certainly "does not
need retesting" for implementation
If you are not assuring your quality, you have a QA
failure. Regardless, I initially said "serious policy
and procedure failure". Which, if you change a
safety-critical component in your product and don't do
testing on it, that is a serious policy failure.
taeric wrote 17 hours 0 min ago:
Ah, totally fair. I took that to be "unapproved all
the way back to the designer." Which, yeah, that
doesn't happen. It almost certainly has approval
from a line manager at the bare minimum, if it helps
perform the assembly. If it goes to more teams than
a single line, it gets more approval.
I think I largely biased to the next message, which
did indicate reviews would happen, but that they have
some freedom at the line. And that still sounds
right to me.
DiggyJohnson wrote 1 day ago:
> Even in construction you need to have changes approved
(i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect,
engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which
this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built"
drawings.
Do you really think this is what happens on job sites?
Does this match your personal experience? Because my
initial reaction was to laugh to myself at how rarely
contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers would
actually engage a process like the one you are describing
here. Non-spec stuff happens all the time without record,
even in firms with solid QA.
taylodl wrote 1 day ago:
Absolutely! Why? Because it's your ass that's on the
line should any of your "self-motivated" deviations
cause financial harm, injury, or death, and you are
going to be held responsible for those damages.
No one with any brains wants to be "that" guy.
That's why we have "cookie cutter" houses and even
office buildings. All the kinks have been legitimately
worked out and they can just crank them out. Bespoke
construction? Cost overrun city. Now you know why.
quickthrowman wrote 1 day ago:
> Do you really think this is what happens on job
sites? Does this match your personal experience?
Yes, it does. Iâm a construction project manager,
Iâm not having my crew do any work that isnât
represented in the current revision of the plans and
specs without approval because thatâs the only way
you get paid for the extras. Also if itâs an
unapproved and unwanted change, you have to pay to
remove it. Anyone managing a project who cares about
managing their risk is going to submit RFIs and RFCs
for every change.
Itâs possible that the (tiny and insignificant)
residential market is different, but thatâs how
commercial and industrial construction works.
Itâs possible some tiny and insignificant changes
like moving a receptacle or data opening a couple
inches arenât properly documented on the as-builts,
but major changes almost always are.
> Because my initial reaction was to laugh to myself at
how rarely contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers
would actually engage a process like the one you are
describing here.
The firms you hire to work on your house arenât
representative of the firms who manage or work on
commercial and industrial projects.
DiggyJohnson wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
> Itâs possible some tiny and insignificant changes
like moving a receptacle or data opening a couple
inches arenât properly documented on the as-builts,
but major changes almost always are.
Based on these responses I should have been more
clear. These small and inconsequential things are
what I'm referring to. Yes, the projects I'm familiar
with track the medium and big stuff, and most of the
small stuff.
abduhl wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
I have seen multiple thousands of dollars of
precast concrete get junked because an edge was
less than half an inch out of tolerance. Multiple
times. I have myself rejected multiple thousands of
dollars of rebar because the hook length was short
by less than an inch. Nothing that is shown in the
plans or specs is inconsequential and payment
doesnât occur absent an approved variance.
FireBeyond wrote 1 day ago:
I am involved with software that moves data between
construction ERP systems and financial systems.
Typically used in mid market commercial companies.
The single most commonly synced entity is Commitment
Change Order items.
ziddoap wrote 1 day ago:
>Do you really think this is what happens on job sites?
Does this match your personal experience?
I worked in ICI (Industrial, Commercial, Institutional)
construction for ~10 years. Yes, this matches my
experience. Perhaps it is different where you are from.
I also experienced this while doing utility locating
for oil & gas pipelines (~2 years). As-built drawings
were very accurate, and detailed any deviation from the
initial drawings.
kylecordes wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
In the 2000s I had a SaaS firm making software for
underground utility locating companies so I learned a
lot about the industry. In most parts of the country
as built drawings are unusual for residential
property anyway. Locating staff mostly shows up,
looks at whatever drawings are available, and then
has to figure out what was actually done from the
clues and by using locating equipment. Many of these
folks end up with a very subtle understanding of what
common practice was by different utility companies in
various specific areas in specific eras.
ziddoap wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
>In most parts of the country as built drawings are
unusual for residential property anyway.
I was doing large transmission pipelines (i.e. NPS
24 to NPS 56), so I can't speak to residential, but
I wouldn't be surprised if there was less attention
paid to as-built drawings when the cost of
damage/replacement wasn't in the millions of
dollars.
johnmaguire wrote 1 day ago:
What does unapproved mean in this context? That it didn't pass by
Musk's desk?
htrp wrote 1 day ago:
>How do you have so little quality control and insight into your
manufacturing process that someone on your own production line can
introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that no one
noticed?
That's legal covering the company.
I'd bet this was just a general design flaw.
chrisjj wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
> That's legal covering the company.
Er, how does it cover the company? Company is responsible
regardless.
bitmasher9 wrote 1 day ago:
To me both sound plausible (that the process was added, and that
itâs a fabricated story). Either way we will never know, and
ultimately itâs Teslaâs responsibility to make sure the
accelerator pedal doesnât get suck in the on position due to
manufacturing defects.
smith7018 wrote 1 day ago:
Weâll find out in discovery if a lawsuit around this ever
happens, I suppose
zelias wrote 1 day ago:
I guess the budget for QA went straight into Elon's pay package
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
His salary from Tesla's bank accounts is zero. Companies don't have
their market cap in their bank accounts as cash which they use to pay
executives.
Also, not like other automakers don't have recalls like this. You
just don't hear about it here because... reasons. The legendary name
for quality, Toyota had its wheels literally falling off.
a5huynh wrote 1 day ago:
Just to add context since I was curious about "Toyota had it wheels
literally falling off".
That was a recall from 2022 ( [1] ) for 260 vehicles (their model
BZ4X electric SUV).
The Cybertruck recall affects 3,878 vehicles ( [2] ).
URI [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/business/toyota-bz4x-wheel-...
URI [2]: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60538687/2024-tesla-cyb...
ripjaygn wrote 18 hours 35 min ago:
That's some misleading context since the article you linked says:
> Only 260 BZ4Xs had been delivered to customers before the
recall was announced
If they had sold 4000 like the truck, they would have recalled
4000. Both recalls affected all the cars sold for the model.
a5huynh wrote 14 hours 16 min ago:
I don't think its too misleading because in both cases that's
how many vehicles are affected at very moment by the recall.
Toyota shipped/sold more as mentioned in the article, but those
are unaffected. Likewise with the Tesla, any shipped afterward
the defect was discovered are unaffected.
financetechbro wrote 1 day ago:
If Elons pay package from 2018 gets revoked and they issue a new
one (supposedly after moving from Delaware to Texas law), then
itâs estimated Tesla will have $20bn+ accounting charge
newsclues wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
But did he provide value to shareholders ?
funac wrote 1 day ago:
tesla booked musk's much-discussed options package as a $2.5
billion expense. opportunity cost aside, it's silly to imply that a
public company isn't going to act differently after it's stuck a
significant fraction of its revenue on the wrong side of its
balance sheet: analysts definitely will be.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
> tesla booked musk's much-discussed options package as a $2.5
billion expense
As stated elsewhere the point is that you cannot pay for car
quality with stock options that are worth zero if the stock
doesn't double and car sale increases don't meet really high
metrics
Unlike the other car companies that pay CEOs directly, like
Toyota could've used their CEO's pay to instead maybe stop their
wheels from falling off recently.
> it's silly to imply that a public company isn't going to act
differently after it's stuck a significant fraction of its
revenue on the wrong side of its balance sheet
What? The $2.5B isn't coming from revenue.
malfist wrote 1 day ago:
Aye, Tesla pays him nothing, that's why his compensation package
was struck down in court?
sashank_1509 wrote 1 day ago:
As of now he is actually paid 0 for last 4 years when Tesla stock
has gone up by 900% (even after the recent stock slide).
People forget that if the stock price didnât at least double
and Tesla meet some manufacturing and sales quotas, Elonâs pay
package would be 0. The only reason heâs getting paid 44B or
whatever number is because the stock price has gone through the
roof and the Model Y has become the best selling car in the US.
On top of that, he is required to hold the stock for at least 5
years, so even if the judge didnât invalidate his pay, he
wouldnât see any liquidity for at least 5 years.
You donât need to like Elon to see that his pay package was
completely fine. I doubt many CEOâs would accept a pay package
where they donât get paid a dime unless the stock price at
least doubles, a very large number of CEOâs would also be paid
0 under such a pay package.
norir wrote 1 day ago:
How does this not create perverse incentives? I have noticed
that Musk has repeatedly made fraudulent claims about Tesla. I
can't help but wonder how many of his fantastical claims are
precisely in service of boosting the stock price. Also what
exactly are the material consequences for him if he didn't get
paid by Tesla? Essentially zero.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
> I can't help but wonder how many of his fantastical claims
are precisely in service of boosting the stock price
Like these ones where he said the stock price was too high
and it then crashed a a full 10%? [1] Or when he said Tesla
is worth approximately zero without FSD fully functional?
Stock price based compensation is extremely common for top
exectives.
URI [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-...
WrongAssumption wrote 1 day ago:
His compensation was in stock options.
jrmg wrote 1 day ago:
Those are still something of value that the company is giving
to him. Theyâre just not cash.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
The point is that you cannot pay for car quality with stock
options that are worth zero if the stock doesn't double and
car sale increases don't meet really high metrics. So the OP
in this thread is wrong.
What they said would be true of all the other car companies
that directly pay the CEO, and they all have safety recalls.
Lets take Toyota. Toyota could've used some of the CEOs pay
to stop wheels from falling off their cars recently.
jrmg wrote 1 day ago:
Okay, thatâs a good point. Itâs not liquid. In theory,
though, surely the company could sell stock (or options,
even) instead of granting it to Elon?
[Edit: this is all a bit academic though. I donât think
Teslaâs process problems, of whatever magnitude you think
they are, are as simply solved as âif they just spent a
bit more this would be fine!â, or that the âsolutionâ
to the Elon problem, of whatever magnitude you think that
is, is âif they just paid him less!â]
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Yes.
> Tesla noted that since 2018, Musk hasn't drawn any
compensation, including salary or cash bonuses
His stock compensation was performance based/
> Shareholders approved Muskâs pay package back in 2018.
However, according to an Axios report, very few investors at the
time believed that they would have to pay out on it. Thatâs
because the compensation plan was tied to extreme performance
goals that seemed improbable Therefore, at the time, the expected
value of the Tesla pay package was âcloser to zero than it was
to $56 billionâ
You cannot pay for auto parts quality with stock options that pay
out only when 'extreme peformance goals' are hit. So Musk's
salary had pretty much zero impact on this recall, unlike, say,
other company car recalls which they could have presumably used
the company CEO's salary to prevent the recalls, going by the
assumption that the OP was making.
fergie wrote 1 day ago:
Apparently the brake overrides the accelerator, so if you keep your
calm, you can come to a stop.
bitcharmer wrote 1 day ago:
Very few people can keep their calm in an unexpected situation. Even
people who are trained and supposedly prepared for stressful
situations often panic.
jsight wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, this is the case on every production vehicle. People don't
always realize it, though, and fail to push the brake all the way and
hold it.
jandrese wrote 1 day ago:
That's not quite the same. In Tesla hitting the brakes kills power
to the motor. In an ICE car this is not the case, and if the
engine is running away it can bleed off vacuum and you lose your
brake assist. So if someone panics and starts pumping the brake
pedal they end up in a runaway acceleration scenario until they
remember that neutral exists.
In the real world runaway acceleration cases are extremely rare and
always involve a degree of operator error, but they make for
exciting headlines so people get the wrong idea about how common
they are.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
> In an ICE car this is not the case, and if the engine is
running away it can bleed off vacuum and you lose your brake
assist
In an older car, yes. Current cars in the US are all fly-by-wire
throttle, and programmed to close the throttle if you apply the
brake. And when the throttle is closed, vacuum is restored, and
you will have full brake power. All major automakers started
doing this did this after the 2009 Toyota "sudden acceleration"
debacle.
rootusrootus wrote 1 day ago:
> In an ICE car this is not the case
That hasn't been true for a number of years. Almost all ICE cars
on sale today will cut the throttle if you hit the brake.
giarc wrote 1 day ago:
"until they remember that neutral exists."
Or they can just turn the ignition off. When I was 16 and took
driving school, we did this as an exercise. The instructor just
simply reached over and turned the key and I had to walk through
starting it again (I can't remember if we pulled over or not). I
wonder what would happen to a push button start car if you just
pushed it while in motion?
jsight wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
I think you may have to hold it down to force it to stop, but
this isn't something that I've tried.
darthrupert wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla Cybertruck: "if you keep your calm, you can stop"
yreg wrote 1 day ago:
Worrisome, but good that it got caught before anyone got into an
accident. The issue shouldn't be present in all trucks, but better to
recall all of them to be safe.
BTW: What happens if you fully press both the acceleration and brake
pedals? I would hope for the brakes to be more powerful and stop the
car, is that the case?
sp332 wrote 1 day ago:
NHTSA targets a 5th percentile person being able to stop the car with
the engine at full throttle.
URI [1]: https://www.autosafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/The-Br...
echoangle wrote 1 day ago:
Not related to your comment itself, but thatâs a really bad
paper/document. When analyzing the case âsudden full throttle
when the car is stoppedâ, it is assumed that breaking only begins
after 1.5s. Does a normal driver not keep the brake held while
stopped at a traffic light. Also, he later assumes that data from a
drag race can be compared to the case of sudden acceleration when
at a stop because drag race drivers should floor the throttle, too.
As far as I know, flooring is often not the fastest way to
accelerate (just like fully braking compared to ABS), so the drag
race data does not necessarily represent full throttle from a stop.
masklinn wrote 1 day ago:
> What happens if you fully press both the acceleration and brake
pedals? I would hope for the brakes to be more powerful and stop the
car, is that the case?
You get a âboth pedals pressedâ alert and the accelerator is
ignored, so the brakes donât even need to overcome the engines. The
behaviour is logical at least since tesla added blended braking
(though Iâd assume it also did that before then).
However as soon as you release the brakes the car starts accelerating
as whatever the throttle is at again.
Someone1234 wrote 1 day ago:
> The issue shouldn't be present in all trucks, but better to recall
all of them to be safe.
There is a video floating around of this issue, and based on that I'd
call it an issue in all shipped trucks. While only a couple had it
loose from the factory, the fact the two plates are only press fitted
and when it slides up there is a perfect nook for it to get stuck in
is a huge problem.
If I was a Cybertruck owner I'd inspect it at least every week and
schedule the recall work ASAP.
brandonagr2 wrote 1 day ago:
They aren't only press fitted, they are glued together, but a
change on assembly line lead to chance that some soap got on pedal
and prevented the glue from bonding the two parts
yreg wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a screw would be better.
randlet wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know about the Cybertruck specifically, but yes, brakes are
virtually always capable of providing more stopping force than the
engine can oppose.
zaroth wrote 1 day ago:
Since the accelerator is drive by wire, pushing both pedals disables
the accelerator, and produces a warning chime and alert message on
the screen.
The brakes do not have to be stronger, itâs handled in software.
If the accelerator is pinned down, letting up on the brake will cause
the car to start accelerating again. So you have to keep on the brake
and then put the car in park. Pressing the accelerator while in park
does nothing.
techdmn wrote 1 day ago:
> pushing both pedals disables the accelerator
Much to the frustration of those of us who occasionally engage in
some left-foot braking. (Though TBH in my experience it's usually
more effective in FWD cars.)
jandrese wrote 1 day ago:
What is the point of heel-toe or left foot braking if there is no
gearbox to rev match?
techdmn wrote 1 day ago:
I like the left-foot jab jab jab to induce a slide while still
on the power. I've read about other mixed input strategies,
but that was the only one I was ever able to pull off to my
satisfaction.
ProjectArcturis wrote 1 day ago:
At least they've only sold 3800 so far. But what are the odds this is
the only thing that will need to be recalled?
xyst wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point. The recall
is just another multimillion dollar deficit on the books now.
Whether this product line will be sustainable (or exist) 1 year from
now is unlikely.
Lackluster sales. Poor public perception. Truck would likely need
another overhaul (more money burned) and another 1-2 year loss leader
phase to test the market, and get their build processes updated to
scale.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
> Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point
Is it just me or many people don't seem to understand fixed costs
vs. variable costs that I learnt about in high school while growing
up in the third world?
Don't people have to take Econ 101 in the USA or whatever the
equivalent is in their countries? Or is it optional.
Not even going to bring up "advanced" concepts like COGS that I
know about while being a CS major and never taking an economics
course.
What you said doesn't many sense, because, say they sell 100
million trucks, according to your logic they would end up with a
huge loss. But in reality they would make a big profit.
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
Some companies will literally sell products for less than the
cost of the components that go into them.
Sometimes that's a supermarket selling 'loss leaders' to get
people into the store where they'll hopefully buy other things -
or a games console manufacturer planning to make up the loss
because they get paid for every game sold.
Other times a manufacturer wants to hit a promised launch date,
and hopes to get manufacturing costs down later. Maybe they
haven't had time to set up certain cost-saving automation, or a
planned lower-cost component wasn't ready in time for launch.
Maybe their widget supplier has promised a lower cost when
they're ordering 10,000 a month but right now they're only
ordering 500 a month.
Of course, without access to insider information we can only
guess if this is really occurring...
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
> Of course, without access to insider information we can only
guess if this is really occurring...
No need to guess, the GP poster confidently stated this:
> Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point.
They must be an insider or have reliable insider information.
vengefulduck wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
Of course, this is the only explanation. No one can just make
stuff up on the internet. Thatâs impossible.
andsoitis wrote 1 day ago:
> Some companies will literally sell products for less than the
cost of the components that go into them.
But that is not what Tesla is doing, is it?
hnbad wrote 1 day ago:
It's literally the meme truck. That meme has sailed and died.
People will still hoot and holler when they spot you driving one in
the wild but that's different from people wanting to pay the steep
sticker price for what the car actually is.
I don't see moms picking up their kids with these trucks. I don't
see people using them for camping. The unnamed companion ATV seems
to have been recalled for not being roadsafe and doesn't seem to be
coming back any time soon.
It's possible there will be a revised Cybertruck eventually but
this thing has so many design flaws and underdelivers on so many
promises (e.g. "you could use it as a boat" when taking it to the
carwash voids your warranty) that it's not mass market compatible.
Heck, it's not even possible to make it street legal in Europe
without massive changes.
As far as Musk's ventures go, the Cybertruck is up there with the
Hyperloop in terms of what it is and what was promised. Remember
the unprovoked throwaway claim that it'll let you use it as a
source for compressed air to drive pneumatic tools? Or the talk
about selling a version of it to the military as an APC?
qwerpy wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm definitely going to be picking up my kids in this truck and
camping, but maybe Iâm just a weird tech bro. In the arms race
that is American roads, itâs objectively safer for my family to
be driven around in a massive steel tank. I also love the look.
brandonagr2 wrote 1 day ago:
How do you arrive at lackluster sales conclusion? They are
obviously just production limited as they scale up a new line. Can
you place an order today and buy a cybertruck? No there is still a
year+ long wait list of people wanting to buy.
ZuLuuuuuu wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla could have owned the entire EV truck market currently, if
they didn't choose to make a truck that required a big amount of
R&D and is hard to build. Why Tesla chose such a path completely
baffles me.
Tesla's mission was "to accelerate the world's transition to
sustainable energy" which they were doing by making solid and
affordable EVs and electric storage solutions.
One of the biggest reasons of the success of Model S was because it
had a modern but conventional design unlike the other toy-like EV
cars on the market at the time. Model S proved that it is possible
to build a modern conventional EV car that people can buy.
It feels like Cybertruck is coming from a completely different
mission statement. Actually most of the decisions they have been
taking for the last 2-3 years feel like it.
jsight wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
> Tesla could have owned the entire EV truck market currently, if
they didn't choose to make a truck that required a big amount of
R&D and is hard to build. Why Tesla chose such a path completely
baffles me.
I often think this, but then I think about how it would have
actually happened. Right now, Tesla doesn't have enough
domestically produced 2170s to supply both 3 and Y production.
The 4680 ramp has been so slow that it is barely ahead of CT
production anyway.
I think some of their failures on the battery supply chain side
are bleeding over into product failures at this point.
danans wrote 23 hours 14 min ago:
> Tesla's mission was "to accelerate the world's transition to
sustainable energy" which they were doing by making solid and
affordable EVs and electric storage solutions.
Since far before Tesla, selling cars at high profit margins has
ultimately been about selling power/attention/sex-appeal, not to
advance an objective like "accelerate the world's transition to
sustainable energy. That's a nice side effect, but it's not
ultimately what sells them. Otherwise, all of the original fan
base of Tesla would have bought Nissan Leafs (which preceded
Tesla).
Trendsetting companies need hero products that capture (or even
set) the zeitgeist.
Teslas older models once played that role, but no longer, since
they are so common at this point in their primary target markets.
To recapture customer imagination, the Cybertruck is promoting
the "faux survivalism" hero narrative. It's the same narrative
that is selling Rivians and F150, but taken to the aesthetic
extreme.
MisterBastahrd wrote 1 day ago:
There was never a snowball's chance in hell that once Ford and
GMC got involved in the EV truck market that Tesla would be
anything but an afterthought.
acejam wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla building the Cybertruck is their attempt to get people to
buy something specifically because it is "cool", and not because
it is "an EV".
If the customer buys it, they switch to an EV platform, thereby
accelerating Tesla's mission of "transition[ing] to sustainable
energy".
Leading with "it's an EV" is the primary reason why "legacy auto"
has been scaling back their EV manufacturing, because people
generally don't care about "EV". They do care about something
"cool" though.
ZuLuuuuuu wrote 1 day ago:
Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y are also cool cars, and
they have the advantages of being EV. And this formula was
working with these models, increasing EV adoption massively.
Why change a winning formula?
Cybertruck tried to be over the top cool, and sacrificed some
basics like time-to-market, easy production, range, safety...
And it was a totally unnecessary change of strategy. Cybertruck
really didn't need to be stainless steel or low-poly in order
to sell. Model Y being one of the best selling cars in the
world proves this.
acejam wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
It was working for people who were willing to buy an EV.
Those people generally fall into two groups: 1) They
specifically want an EV due to $reasons or 2) They are
looking for a new car, and are willing to consider an EV.
Both of these groups are fine with the current S3XY lineup
because they resemble "normal" cars. That's why the Model S
originally had so much success - it was a normal car, but
electric. Even then, it was still a hard sell in 2013 to
early adopters.
I'm going to stereotype a bit here, but Tesla
YouTubers/Tweeters/Fanatics and the two groups above aside,
everyone else is generally "against" EVs. If you own one, you
know exactly what I'm talking about. The Cybertruck is
Tesla's attempt to change that. Don't convince them on the
green-ness or potential cost-savings of home charging,
convince them because it's cool. It's something that no other
manufacturer can compete against. (for now)
faefox wrote 1 day ago:
They should've gotten some second opinions on what makes
something "cool" because the Cybertruck is not it.
acejam wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
I would encourage you to watch any recent YouTube video
produced by any Cybertruck owner. Middle America, who is
generally anti-EV, disagrees with you. That is why Tesla is
doing this.
snek_case wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
Reports from YouTubers who own the Cybertruck is that (at
this stage) owning one makes you feel like a celebrity.
People come to you constantly to take ask questions and take
pictures with the CT. So, people seem to disagree with you.
If that's not enough, there's a long list of celebrities that
now own cybertrucks, including Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga,
Justin Bieber, Jay Z, Steve Aoki, Pharrell, and more. Might
not fit your definition of "cool", but clearly, it does for a
lot of people.
faefox wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
Affirming that I have even less in common with the likes of
Kim Kardashian and Steve Aoki than previously understood is
perhaps the nicest compliment you could have given me.
Thank you!
mft_ wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen rumours here and there (albeit nothing particularly
reliable) that the Cybertruck might be a platform used to learn
about this design/manufacturing approach. It's hard because it's
hard, but the Cybertruck is how they learn how to make it easier.
The thinking being, of course, that if/when they get it nailed,
they've potentially got an advantage to leverage over other
manufacturers for future cars such as the Model 2.
Only time will tell whether this is the case, and whether it
worked.
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
This is nonsensical, the Cybertruck is a terrible platform that
had serious Chassis design issues that any other automaker
would have killed the design over, but because Musk's ego is
too big, there was never an option to say "we need to go back
to the drawing board".
matt_s wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think your first sentence can hold true as soon as the
designs were released. The way to capture EV truck market is to
make something that looks like a truck. Cybertruck is ugly as all
get out.
I saw a Ford F-150 Lightning the other day, looks practically the
same as an ICE F-150.
financetechbro wrote 1 day ago:
I donât see Elon as a business genius and thus the idiotic
decision to go thru with production for this truck is not at all
a surprise to me
tehlike wrote 1 day ago:
First year of New models from any manufacturer will have issues to
iron out
MBCook wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
First year Ford Mustang Mach E: can confirm.
bitcharmer wrote 1 day ago:
Sure but what calibre of issues should you expect? Surely not
faulty pedals causing the vehicle to accelerate.
AirMax98 wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
Some of the 2022 Broncos were literally dropping valves right off
the lot, so this feels quite minor.
tehlike wrote 1 day ago:
Literally anything can happen. I never liked the idea of buying a
Tesla, but let's be fair.
andreygrehov wrote 1 day ago:
There is no calibre of expected issues. Nobodyâs a prophet.
Faulty pedals happened in the past with other car manufacturers.
jtriangle wrote 1 day ago:
Toyota had the floor mat thing as well, that was big news for
awhile.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Toyota's wheels have been literally falling off their cars. [1]
What is their reputation on reliability on here? How many decades
have they been making cars compared and how mature is their
manufacturing process?
You just don't hear about other carmakers' recalls on here, so
everyone makes those assumptions you just did, that Tesla is
disproportionately bad with quality issues..
URI [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/cars/toyota-bz4x-tundra-r...
phatfish wrote 1 day ago:
At least the wheels falling off slow the car down.
chrisbolt wrote 1 day ago:
If you press both the accelerator and brake in a Tesla, it
slows the car down and shows a message in the instrument
cluster that both pedals are pressed:
URI [1]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/while-breaki...
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
At least you can steer the car with unintentional
acceleration, unlike with wheels falling off.
bingbingbing777 wrote 1 day ago:
You're really working overtime defending Tesla in the
comments here. Go take a (fast) break in your unsteerable
truck :^)
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Does the oil lobby pay for overtime astroturfing or just
regular hours?
I have actual sources and proof unlike you. [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://www.desmog.com/2009/08/13/oil-lobbys-ene...
URI [2]: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-fossil-fuel...
URI [3]: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/02/oil-and...
bingbingbing777 wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
I don't need sources and proof because I didn't assert
anything. Are you a bot? It's like you are programmed
to reply in a way no matter what. If you're a human you
should at least take a break
toast0 wrote 1 day ago:
You can steer as long as you've got three wheels. Not as
well as with four of course. With a modern brake system,
you should have some braking power too. I know someone who
lost a wheel on an 1965 truck with a single chamber brake
cylinder, so there was no pressure in the system as brake
parts fell off with the wheel.
mcculley wrote 1 day ago:
Disproportionately? Does Tesla ship as many vehicles as Toyota?
You have made me curious about the numbers you are using.
Thorrez wrote 1 day ago:
Why would number of recalls be proportional to number of
vehicles shipped? I think number of recalls would be more
proportional to number of car models available. And number of
vehicles recalled would be proportional to number of vehicles
shipped. In this case 3,878 vehicles were recalled.
mcculley wrote 1 day ago:
To me, âdisproportionately bad with quality issuesâ
would be about total units shipped.
frumper wrote 1 day ago:
Ford recalled 6 million vehicles last year. For some
context, they sold around 2 million last year. [1] .
edit: To add, this isn't some one off event. In 2022
Ford recalled 8.6 million vehicles.
URI [1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2024/0...
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Total units shipped since the inception of the company?
I think the NHTSA was only formed in 1970.
mcculley wrote 1 day ago:
Which metric are you using when you use the word
disproportionately?
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Linked it in the other comment that you had replied
to.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4008665...
mcculley wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
That says 2023. I donât see Toyota mentioned in
there at all. Maybe Iâm missing something.
ripjaygn wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
Toyota had a recall just a couple of days ago.
That story wasn't even submitted to HN, while the
Cybertruck already made the front page a couple
of times and will probably continue to do so.
That's a perfect example of disproportionate
coverage leading to several commenters on this
story automatically assuming Tesla is worse than
other manufacturers. And somehow you didn't ask
them for data saying you were curious but
immediately jumped on my comment. That's
typically not the behavior of someone that's
starting with no data and neutral.
mcculley wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
I asked about the data you are using when you
say it is disproportionate. It sounds like you
donât have any.
ripjaygn wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
As the saying goes, you can take a horse to
the water, but you cannot make it drink it.
Cannot help those who cannot help themselves.
mcculley wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
You did not post any data. You made some
assertions about Toyota and Tesla. I asked
which data you were using. You linked to an
infographic and an article about a recent
recall. You seem to have a bias. You should
think about that.
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
Tesla doesn't even register in the top 10 most recalls per
car company in 2023. [1] What data are you using?
How many of Ford Motor's 58 recalls in 2023 made HN's front
page?
Meanwhile Tesla updates the car UIs icon sizes via a software
update, and there are headlines all over the media including
HN stating that Tesla recalled millions of cars, omitting
that it was a software update.
That makes people like the GP think Teslas have
disproportionately worse issues, which appears to be the
objective.
URI [1]: https://i.imgur.com/bygtzk2.png
cycomanic wrote 1 day ago:
How is recalls per company a valid metric? Should it be at
least normalised by number of models (e.g. if we assume
design flaws)?
By that metric Fords 58 are normalised by 40 odd models
(only counting current) while Teslas 20 are normalised by 6
models (counting any car/truck build).
mcculley wrote 1 day ago:
> What data are you using?
Iâm not the one claiming anything about proportions. I
didnât claim to have any data. How did you arrive at your
proportions?
ripjaygn wrote 1 day ago:
I had linked it in the very comment you replied
to...please reread.
mcculley wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
I see only a link to an infographic about recalls in
2023.
tommoor wrote 1 day ago:
This is a good explainer video:
URI [1]: https://twitter.com/garageklub/status/1779571445930324456
jejeyyy77 wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
interesting. fortunately seems like a simple fix.
DIR <- back to front page