Recent content by JeffC

Why is raising the striker plate slightly to raise the rear of the door a fraction of a millimeter a bad idea? (Tesla did that on three of my doors to raise the rear, just a fraction of a mm.) In my mind it would be easily within the tolerance of the hinges and just add a tiny amount of the...

See above.

All modern assembly line paint processes have slight orange peel. It's a normal result of putting paint on a very clean surface. Manufacturers actually prefer slight orange peel also because it helps hide very minor sheet metal defects. To get rid of orange peel on a Rolls Royce, custom paint...

I would classify that as very minor. Major changes would be removing or signficantly changing parts of the crash structure (really any part of the central body, door beams, or longitudinal crash beams). It might be interesting to see if they redesign the unit body for the China Model 3. I...

I will bet you the price of a new Model 3 that there will be no major changes to the Model 3 unit body chassis within the next 5 years.

One way to improve the discussion would be clearer language. As the original poster mentioned weight doesn't shift. Load transfers. Weight does not. (Weight isn't really the right term either; technically it's mass subject to gravity.) Use the team load and not weight when referring to...

I would propose that the car is not overbuilt, and in fact is very well designed. It would be nice if a few kilograms could be saved, but all modern car makers do extensive weight reduction, including Tesla. They reduced weight to the point where it met their design goals. One of Tesla's top...

Body panel alignment of recent Model 3s is much better than early ones. I took pictures of many cars showing that, which I have not published. Telsa did adjust my body panels under warranty, as they have done for others. Most people probably would not have noticed or cared about the few...

To be clear, are you saying that you want the car to perform worse in crashes? Because that's what you're implying. I say the proof is in the results, which are measurably excellent. Model 3 has the lowest probability of injury ever measured by NHTSA. That is a measureable, objective fact...

If he were more interested in facts, he would check the gaps and finish on recent cars. His very early car probably was not as good as recent cars. My own inspection of dozens of Model 3s had horrible gaps on the first dozen early employee cars, major improvements in the first few thousand...

Sandy says the car is overbuilt. Crash testing shows Model 3 is probably the safest car ever built. My hypothesis is that Tesla designed the body the way it did for very specific reasons and Sandy may not fully understand those reasons. I do wish we would stop perpetuating and spreading his...

Fair enough, but I expect Tesla may have some novel arrangement of high strength steels in Model 3. Bottom line: it physically outperforms all other cars in crash tests, so it very well may be doing something different from them. I do see that Volvo has been using mixes of high strength...

Yes, it probably comes from a physics equation.

He probably means the motor has a higher top speed, but that's not the same as much more torque than the other motors of similar weight. The square root of 2 is about 1.41, so it's about 41% faster, presumably than if the permanent magnets were not used in a more conventional reluctance motor...

Thanks! Musk fires a lot of people. It's not clear who Munro referred to. The Model 3's unit body design is excellent and performs objectively well both in tests and real world crashes. Munro's criticisms of it seem unfounded both in terms of results and also in terms his understanding of...