Peculiar that they included one non Model 3 pic in their gallery of new Model 3 pictures.
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Change from alcantara to cloth on PUP???
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Peculiar that they included one non Model 3 pic in their gallery of new Model 3 pictures.
stayfocus18
Member
can you show us more internal pics?Door panels are black Alcantara on ours delivered today.
insaneoctane
Well-Known Member
Wonder how much longer before we lose the Alcantara on the doors?Door panels are black Alcantara on ours delivered today.
Xminus6
Member
I suspect it would get changed to match the seat upholstery material like on my UW interior X or my previous S. So it wouldn't be catastrophic.
Xminus6
Member
Sure. I'll take some more tomorrow when I get a chance. I had taken some but realized it had my home address on the nav screen. Anything in particular you'd like to see?
What a mess, yet so typically Tesla. Competition can't come soon enough, I'm afraid.
Shipping alcantara doors and/or visors with a cloth headliner is further evidence that Tesla takes its customers for fools. Tesla is simply getting rid of extra alcantara stock by mixing materials like this, not because it's beautiful or actually adds any value. Who wants cloth mixed with alcantara? Nice patchwork of an interior.
Shipping alcantara doors and/or visors with a cloth headliner is further evidence that Tesla takes its customers for fools. Tesla is simply getting rid of extra alcantara stock by mixing materials like this, not because it's beautiful or actually adds any value. Who wants cloth mixed with alcantara? Nice patchwork of an interior.
insaneoctane
Well-Known Member
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Actually in supply chain management, it is quite common to purposefully not being overly exact in specifying product details in order to maintain supply flexibility.
For example, many devices (laptops, phones, portable game consoles) have multiple screen suppliers, even for the exact same sub-model and specification. These parts can have significantly different performance, making people seek out specific screens (thus the phrase "screen lottery"). There are similar things happening for HDD/SSD suppliers, even processor/modem suppliers for phones. If the manufacturer was too specific about it, they loose flexibility in choosing different suppliers.
Actually it isn't bad. The suede-like material appears to be on all the heavy handling areas while the fabric is mainly areas that people don't normally touch. The black doors have the suede stuff and the headliner is a light grey material. In person it isn't jarring or anything.
Agreed that it isn't really 'upgrade' though. Makes me wonder what the standard interior is going to be.
Xminus6
Member
MotoEvCA
Member
Elon Expressing His Artistic Side In The Model 3 Interior While Channeling Dolly Parton?
MotoEvCA
Member
Hmmm,,, From where did you get this insight??
When I actually worked in manufacturing for a Fortune 500 company we provided multiple suppliers the same set of specifications to meet because we want the customer experience to be the same regardless of supplier product used. While the supplier had some choice on sub-components used, they could not diminish the standards that had to meet. When initial samples of the supplier product were delivered, they were tested against a defined COMMON set of criteria.
Otherwise, overall quality control would be very difficult to measure and maintain AND it would be difficult to give the customer a consistent experience.
@MotoEvCA
I think the most telling example of what @stopcrazypp is saying are smartphones, built in their millions and thus really a parts sourcing problem. Both Apple and the Android high-ends have dabbled in having two different processors inside the phones depending on market etc. Apple has apparently done so quite clandestinely, Samsung for example usually shows the difference at least through the model number (so that a knowing person can know the difference).
So it isn't that @stopcrazypp hasn't got a point in general.
I am not sure it is valid in this case, though. First of all Alcantara vs. base cloth is both a significant visual difference (not something just an expert would notice)...
BUT even more so it is a significant relative difference: the new cloth is Tesla's base cloth. So a Model S/X buyer especially who by all accounts could believe they get the premium headliner when they paid more for premium interior, now get the base headliner instead (with no pre-announcement until now). Model 3 buyers also probably had this reasonable expectation, though there the base car is yet to ship.
So it would be like ordering iPhone Plus and getting a regular iPhone instead at the same Plus price. That's exaggerating a lot of course, but the point is to illustrate how this case is not just about was the spec something they can adjust bit at will, but was the adjustment itself providing the relative value the customer can reasonably expect in this case.
Tesla did not swap Alcantara into another premium option. Tesla removed the premium option and reverted to their base option for all cars, hence removing the higher value option entirely, without compensation or pre-announcement for those who ordered with premium option. And then they spinned a lot.
The terrible obfuscation in how this "Premium Textile" was subsequently announced, once they got caught, is another sordid story on top of this relative loss of value...
I think the most telling example of what @stopcrazypp is saying are smartphones, built in their millions and thus really a parts sourcing problem. Both Apple and the Android high-ends have dabbled in having two different processors inside the phones depending on market etc. Apple has apparently done so quite clandestinely, Samsung for example usually shows the difference at least through the model number (so that a knowing person can know the difference).
So it isn't that @stopcrazypp hasn't got a point in general.
I am not sure it is valid in this case, though. First of all Alcantara vs. base cloth is both a significant visual difference (not something just an expert would notice)...
BUT even more so it is a significant relative difference: the new cloth is Tesla's base cloth. So a Model S/X buyer especially who by all accounts could believe they get the premium headliner when they paid more for premium interior, now get the base headliner instead (with no pre-announcement until now). Model 3 buyers also probably had this reasonable expectation, though there the base car is yet to ship.
So it would be like ordering iPhone Plus and getting a regular iPhone instead at the same Plus price. That's exaggerating a lot of course, but the point is to illustrate how this case is not just about was the spec something they can adjust bit at will, but was the adjustment itself providing the relative value the customer can reasonably expect in this case.
Tesla did not swap Alcantara into another premium option. Tesla removed the premium option and reverted to their base option for all cars, hence removing the higher value option entirely, without compensation or pre-announcement for those who ordered with premium option. And then they spinned a lot.
The terrible obfuscation in how this "Premium Textile" was subsequently announced, once they got caught, is another sordid story on top of this relative loss of value...
whitex
Well-Known Member
I'm not sure what you point is. The debate is not which headliner is better, it's the fact that Tesla sold people alcantara and delivered something else.
anticitizen13.7
Not posting at TMC after 9/17/2018
Apple has had problems with this, especially with regards to LCD displays on iPhones. Multiple sourcing has occasionally resulted in iPhones having different color display characteristics, which causes all kinds of angst and even fury on Macrumors forum every year. People complain that their screen is too yellow or too blue or unevenly lit compared to other people’s iPhones or store display units.
Im not sure how Tesla can avoid this. It’s an issue that won’t go away.
Not at the time I made that post. I was referring to the thread title and initial posts. The thread title is a non-sequitur. The debate has since evolved, but the premise of separating Alcantara from the class of cloth products remains inaccurate.
bonnie
I play a nice person on twitter.
Actually you're both right.
It's not immediately obvious if an engineer has overspecified a product attribute. If a tolerance can be +- .1 and the engineer, in order to complete a stackup analysis quickly, specifies +-.01, that tolerance is too tight and drives up manufacturing costs. Suppliers charge more to begin with, it's a tougher relationship, more parts are rejected at Incoming that now have to be dealt with thru an MRB process, etc.
If I saw a lot of 'print to part' change orders in the first several months of production (accompanied, of course, by validation data), then I knew that engineering had been overly conservative w/specs in their quest to quickly move design from their desks to production. For those who haven't worked in manufacturing a print-to-part change means changing a drawing to match what the supplier is delivering - usually opening up a tolerance to match what is sitting in Incoming Inspection. All change orders require validation data, so they had to include data to show that it really could be opened further with zero impact on product quality.
Measuring the number of print-to-part change orders during the first year of production is, in fact, a measure I put in place at a Fortune 100 company where I worked to motivate engineers to release specs for a manufacturable product. That number, along with other measures, was part of a compensation package associated with the product release. But they had to show they delivered a manufacturable product.
When the specs are established, the expectation is that the supplier will meet. I've seen far too many companies try to keep production moving by someone looking at the part and saying, 'good enough, Use As Is' ... and then no one understands why things don't fit together well at the end.
If you are single source dependent (meaning only one supplier can give you that part), you have a single point of failure - meaning if that supplier fails to deliver the part you have specified, your line can stop. Disaster if that's a long lead item. It is good practice to strive for a second source for the same part - but that's not always possible. In those cases, you absolutely need to work closely w the supplier and establish a partnership-type relationship.
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dhanson865
Well-Known Member
Kind of... I think aside from charging people for FSD and not delivering on the S and X for a while, this is the worst of the complaints. I've never been too persuaded by complaints about battery size, or the complaint about theoretical horsepower vs. horsepower delivered, or many of the prior complaints. The adaptive headlights kerfuffle was a big-ish deal, but Tesla fixed that at the service centers as far as I know.
I'd love to see a top 10 Tesla failures more salient than #alcantaragate, if you've got things in mind.
No one is going to complain or call something deception if a manufacturer over-delivers on battery size, or speed, or software updates, or any of that.
And, if people thought the woven "premium" material was a "like" material to the alcantara stuff they thought they were getting, no one would complain. If I'm having a home built and the specification calls for a Hansgrohe sink fixture, and they install a Matki instead, no one would lose their minds. But this is more like showing Hansgrohe in a model home and then installing this:
Maybe this thread has taught me that 'there's no accounting for taste,' but I suspect if it went in the opposite direction, and the early 3s had the woven material, and then the switch was made to Alcantara, instead of having @498,000 people mad at Tesla, the number would be somewhere less than @2,000 -- maybe far less, since some people seem to not have a taste to know the difference.
I'm no expert on Hansgrohe but apparently they do fuzzy liners differently
Off topic, but it is funny to see MRB referenced on this forum. I was an MRB engineer at my company for about 18 years - it is a fun job if you can handle the fact that you literally never see a conforming part ever, LOL. Learned more about our airplane in my first 4 months doing MRB than I did in over a year on the design team. And I got to get my hands dirty and crawl down inlets and stuff vs sitting at a computer - good times.
bonnie
I play a nice person on twitter.
Every design engineer should work in the MRB at least once in their career. It would make them better design engineers. And on the line. Lots of knowledge to be had there. You would have been one of the people I wanted to see in design transfer meetings - you knew where the dirt was.
(And letting this thread go off topic for a little bit might be for the best. Pretty sure the topic has been beat to death. We all need a breather.)
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