If tesla was a gas car company it would be history by now. I cant wait till porsche/volvo and bmw step up the game with more ev cars that hopefully look cool and are priced well to help ev market grow-then tesla wont be so elite to own and people will realize other companies can do it better.
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Help, A-Pillar Defect Found
- Thread starter Snowstorm
- Start date
Well Tesla just has to rebuild whatever is closest to the original configuration; it can throw new things in but nothing out of course.
I'm curious about unlimited supercharging because (a) Tesla does need to offer you that (and yes, even if you won't be using it, it does affect resale value, because, even if is doesn't make that much difference if you do the math, some years from now unlimited supercharging will be a valuable 'vintage option', and (b) I do not believe the argument that Tesla cannot do that because unlimited supercharging is based on VIN number (firstly, that was not the case for 2012 MS40's where it was an option, if I recall correctly, and secondly, it would be very crappy programming, so there must be some 'flagging' of unlimited supercharging regardless of VIN).
Actually I don't think they will be able to do EVs better without some false starts. Tesla is still learning the fine points of building and maintaining cars, but they are years ahead on the design of EVs. They produced the first 200+ mile production EV in 2012 and the first non-Tesla production EV rolled off the assembly lines last fall. That's 5 years.
Tesla also rethought the car from the ground up with the Model S. They did the skateboard under the floor for the batteries which freed up a lot of space for cargo. The Model S has more cargo space than pretty much any other sedan in the world. Tesla also built the Model S to take full advantage of the upsides of electric power-trains, hence the top version of the Model S is the fastest accelerating production car in the world. Other EVs are rather enemic by comparison.
I read Chevy de-rated the motors on the Bolt when the front wheel drive system was having some power problems in turns. There were a number of better design decisions they could have made that would have made the Bolt a lot peppier car for essentially the same cost, but GM wasn't interested in making anything too appealing.
Some European car makers are seriously looking to make appealing EVs and they will probably be the first real competition to the Model S, but by the time they reach market with their limited production cars (limited in part due to their inability to get enough batteries for mass production), the Model S will have been out there for 8 years and Tesla is constantly improving. The Model S for sale today is mostly the same body as the 2012 Model S, but the guts are very different.
And delivering the occasional car that has major problems is not unique to Tesla. Here are consumer complaints about Mercedes:
Mercedes-Benz Problems
http://www.carcomplaints.com/Mercedes-Benz/
Just about every car maker has had to take back at least a few cars under the lemon laws:
Recent Repurchases & Refunds | Lemon Law.com (the article is from 2008, but I couldn't find anything more current)
Anything that happens regarding Tesla is major news worldwide. The Gigafactory had a spill of cleaning fluid yesterday and it got reported like Love Canal. How many factories in the US have similar spills every year and never get the slightest mention? All news about Tesla is magnified by a factor of 1000 because people pay more attention to Tesla than any other car maker. It is unfortunate the OP got a car with this kind of damage and it is a failure of QC on Tesla's part that it got into the customer's hands before it was caught. That does not mean Tesla's QC is worse than everyone else in the industry, or even they are in the bottom half of the pack. I doubt there is any car maker making as many cars Tesla makes a year or more that hasn't had one or two defects that are this bad or worse get into customer's hands. Cars are made by humans, and are inspected by humans, and humans make mistakes.
Yep, its not like Porsche would build cars that would randomly self-immolate and require full engine replacements.
Porsche recalls all its latest 911 GT3 models to replace engines after two of the £100,000 supercars catch fire | Daily Mail Online
doofenshmirtz
Member
That's what I would expect. Repairing this would be a require complete disassembly. The major sub-components will be used as rebuilt for warranty replacement, and the body will be scrapped except for the piece that failed and that will go through detailed root cause analysis.
This looks like a material failure to me - which Tesla couldn't be aware of unless it started to split before shipment. Incoming coil aluminum would normally only be spot checked if at all. The fault is almost certainly with the aluminum sheet mill, and I'm sure that this will be the point of some difficult discussions.
I did get information that once this vehicle's ownership is transferred from me, it will go back on a carrier and be shipped back to the factory. Apparently, it is cheaper to ship the car back for retrospective than to ship a bunch of equipment and engineers up there to investigate. I would imagine that there are some empty car carriers that can be used which just dropped off the new Tesla (though they would probably go on to do other tasks). The good news is that they are not just going to patch this one up and sell if off as an CPO or something. Maybe it will still end up a loaner vehicle provided the repair is safe.
Totally disagree. It's not a lack of expertise or design ability by the established automakers, it's a lack of will. But once they muster that will, Tesla will have to watch out because companies like GM, BMW, Mercedes, Ford, and others can easily outpace and outclass Tesla in almost every way. That is, if they can muster the corporate willpower to do what is necessary.
boonedocks
MS LR Blk/Blk 19”
+1 Especially when BMW & Mercedes see that they can sell $100k+ cars to a new era of buyers bolstered by their 100+ years of making cars that are many X fold more luxurious than my $120k+ Tesla Had to drive my BMW AH7 a couple of days this week and missing that immediate torque and autopilot aside, there is no more comfortable better driving AND QUIET car in the world than that trusty 142k+mile BMW
What I see happening is a bit like IBM vs the PC start ups in the 1980s. IBM had the financial power to crush the start ups if they got their act together, but the nimble start ups out maneuvered them at every turn.
I've worked inside a few large corporations and there is always "the _____ Way" of doing things. There is a GM Way and a Ford Way and a Toyota Way. It's their formula that has worked up until now and they will stick with it until they are facing extinction. GM redid their way going through bankruptcy and they are a bit more nimble company than before, but they are nowhere near as nimble as Tesla.
There is also a thing called institutional knowledge. Every organization has knowledge built up from experience that is passed down from the old salts to the new hires. When I was at Boeing I worked in a lab that did engineering testing on all the electronics (avionics) that went into commercial aircraft. The lab was originally built in the early 1960s and some of the people who built the lab were still around. There were lots of things that weren't written down anywhere, you had to go talk to so and so. Shortly after I left Boeing gave an incentive for older employees to take early retirement and pretty much all the old salts retired en masse. Seven years later I heard about a contract position that had opened up in the same lab and when the hiring manager found out I had worked there with the old salts, he wanted me badly because they had entire systems with poor documentation that I knew about it. Unfortunately this was a month before 9/11/2001 and Boeing put a hiring freeze on just after.
Tesla has the largest experience pool in making EVs in the car industry. Nobody else has the industrial knowledge base they have. They not only know what works, but more importantly, they know what won't work. Various EV start ups have poached Tesla's expertise, but I don't recall hearing of any of Tesla's expertise being hired by an established car maker. Several have gone to Apple, Nvidia, Google, Faraday Future, and other EV start up projects/companies, but if Ford, Daimler, Toyota, etc. have hired any, I didn't see the story.
Those start up projects are trying to build on Tesla's institutional knowledge base to give them a leg up. The major car companies on the other hand are trying to do it all on their own. Several of the majors have learned some about EVs, but they exist in a corporate culture that doesn't respect them. Major car companies make cars with ICEs. Hybrids are becoming accepted, but the majors still think you need an ICE or the car is an eco toy.
Most major car companies only do a few things these days: overall design of the car, final assembly, and make engines. Everything else is farmed out. GM has farmed out most of the Bolt because they don't consider much of the EV drive train anything important enough to do in house.
I'm pretty sure LG is looking to jump into the EV market with their own car and they are using the Bolt as training wheels to learn how to make cars. I expect they will have their own car in 5 years or so.
Anyone who believes that the major car companies are institutionally capable of making EVs that would beat Tesla doesn't understand how corporate culture works in large corporations. EVs had to become a thing from the outside because the majors would never take them seriously otherwise and most of the majors still aren't taking them seriously. Audi, Porsche, Daimler, and Volvo are taking Tesla more seriously than the American and Japanese car makers because they have seen the fierce competition the Model S has given their flagship sedans. They know if the Model 3 is as big a mass market success as the Model S and X have been in their luxury niches, the entire car industry as we know it is at risk.
The mass market ICE makers who don't compete much in the top tier luxury market are still discounting Tesla as a flash in the pan. Go back and read what Bob Lutz has written over the last few years. He encapsulates the mindset of the mainstream car makers about Tesla. He has been consistently wrong in predicting doom for Tesla. He was sure the Model S would be a failure, he was sure the Model X would be a failure. He's been predicting bankruptcy for Tesla in about six months in the future for years. The one thing he's most consistent about it being wrong.
Almost all the top executives at the ICE makers think along the same lines as Lutz.
If the Model 3 crashes sales for Chevy Malibus, Toyota Camrys, Honda Accords, and Ford Fusions, the big mainstream ICE makers will wake up as the European luxury makes have and will start to take the threat seriously, but by then they will be at least 5 years behind Tesla with no access to the number of batteries they need to mass produce anything. The battery makers will be in the driver's seat able to dictate terms on who gets the limited supply of batteries.
Maybe LG Chem will buy a failing automaker and start making LG cars? They have experience with heavy industry (they do make a range of household appliances and I believe they make industrial machinery too). They could have some teams working on some in house EV designs right now.
The major auto makers are in a similar position as IBM around 1983 or 84. The sales of their thing is a much larger market share than the upstarts like Compaq, but the smaller nimbler rivals were catching up fast. One of my classmates in college was the daughter of one of the top executives at IBM's PC division. He sounded the warning about the rivals catching up and how their tech was no better and their prices much higher, but instead of listening, they forced him into retirement. Everything he predicted came true.
When he was forced out (1986), they were working on the second generation PC, the PS/2 (introduced 1987) which was going to kill off the competition. I remember going to a PS/2 demo at school and thinking while the computers looked slick, they weren't really all that impressive compared to what was available already from the competition. The PS/2 was a flop because corporations went with the competition rather than overspend for a so-so computer from IBM.
If the big car companies took Tesla seriously today and did a crash program to develop a Model 3 killer which had the supply chain to be produced in 500K quantities, it would put Tesla on the ropes. But most are institutionally incapable of taking Tesla seriously until they themselves are hurting.
The US has not seen an automotive start up make it since 1925. The only major car company players that haven't been around since before WW II are Korean and those were started in the 40s doing some kind of industry. The big car company executives "know" it's impossible to survive as a car start up, especially a car start up aimed at the mass market. There has been no start up company with no industrial experience that has survived making mass market cars in the car industry in almost 100 years.
The dinosaurs are blissfully unaware the small mammals under their feet are the wave of the future.
PhillyGal
Member
@Snowstorm - I'm glad they're working it out for you but really just wanted to give you many props for how well you've handled yourself during this situation. We all work hard for our money and it's far too easy to act spoiled and entitled when companies we give money to make mistakes but giving them the chance to fix it before flipping out is the mature thing to do.
I'm not 100% convinced that they don't see it coming. They're in a bit of a catch 22, in that if the ADMIT that Tesla is a threat, that legitimizes Tesla and will help make Tesla into a more serious threat. So... even if they acknowledge that it is an issue internally, they have to put on a different face publicly.
I'm convinced that that's Bob Lutz role. I think he's cooperating with GM to try to delegitimize Tesla, to allow GM more time to catch up... to let them prepare the technology so that they can ramp up quickly when they need to. The Bolt, as far as I can tell, is just a way to test the technology on a smallish scale. And so in the 2020 timeframe, when things start to explode, they'll be there.
It all comes down to the batteries. There is some expansion of battery factories going on, but none of the major car makers except VW are doing anything to get access to enough batteries. That's the key bottleneck that is a logistical necessity and would be difficult to hide a secret build up. It's not cheap to build the factory capacity and I doubt anyone is going to spend a few billion dollars to build the plant capacity on the hopes someone will buy their product when they're done.
Essentially most car companies are just playing around, poking at the edges and experimenting with electric cars, but VW is the only one who is showing they are serious about mass producing them but they don't expect to be up to full production until 2025. By the time public demand flips and ICE cars become as popular as horse and buggies, some of the major car makers may have some decent designs, but they won't have the batteries to build enough to meet demand.
It will boil down to: "You want a Bolt? Do you want batteries with that or do you want a lawn ornament? You can have a lawn ornament next week, but to get a drive-able car has a five year waiting list. The battery factory won't be done until then." So people will go and wait a year to get a Model 3 because it will be available in the shortest time frame.
Without batteries, the auto industry as we know it is screwed and nobody is willing to invest the trillion dollars it's going to take to build all those battery factories and bring all the mining capacity online.
Another thing the car companies are scared of is investing billions in making li-ion batteries only to have the tech change to solid state batteries, or supercapacitors, or something else that's only an idea in the lab right now. Tesla accepts that they will have to constantly retool the Gigafactories, it's a cost of doing business. But the established car companies don't like the idea of the fundamental tech they are investing in today will be obsolete in a few years.
This is where Tesla being a Silicon Valley company making cars has another advantage. In the electronics industry you just accept that everything is going to constantly change on you and you need to surf the changes or die. The car industry is not used to that kind of change and they resist it. GM is still making the small block V-8 they introduced in the 1950s. A lot of the tech in cars today has been around a long time.
The car industry changes evolutionary, not revolutionary and they do not trust software. I think it was JB Straubel who once talked about working with Daimler on an EV. He said the Daimler engineers were paranoid that some part was going to over-rotate and cause damage and the Tesla people's attitude was, "we'll just make sure to test for that condition and make sure the software can't do that". The Daimler people weren't satisfied and insisted on a mechanical stop that was never going to be hit because the software would never allow it.
The automotive industry has had to adopt firmware in large part to meet emissions standards. Computers can manage the fuel consumption in an engine much better than any mechanical system. They have also had to adopt electronics in their infotainment systems, but they don't like it and they have farmed most of that work out.
Tesla has been doing over the air firmware updates for almost 5 years now and there are no reports of the system ever being hacked, yet nobody else has adopted the practice. It's low hanging fruit the major car companies are afraid to do. Converting over to EVs fro ICEs is a much bigger step. I don't see them doing it until it's too late for some companies and almost too late for most of the rest. In 10 years some companies will likely be just a memory.
I agree with all of your points. I agree that none of the big makers are going into EVs in a big way until there is a serious threat. For VW, with their primary market in Europe, that threat is now. The NA builders have a bit more runway since the governments over here aren't as green-focused and because gas is cheaper.
But, from a strictly self-interest perspective, I think GM is probably doing the right things:
1. Build a fairly good car (Bolt) as a testing platform, and ensure that it's scalable, and that the basic tech can be rolled out across multiple platforms.
2. Publicly run down EVs in general - extending your runway. Let the Europeans and Tesla prepare the market and bleed on the edge.
3. In the background work on development of other EV platforms that will eventually take-on the newer tech.
4. Let others stabilize the general battery technology. GM will never make batteries, and so they'll happily let LG continue to develop it. And, battery manufacturing isn't exactly new tech. Yes the chemistry perhaps, but the battery lines themselves don't change a whole lot when the chemistry changes. Even solid lithium batteries aren't going to be massively different. I think you'll see battery availability climb much more quickly than what people expect, once the demand is proven. When Tesla starts popping out 200+K M3s per year, with a major waiting list, that will be a signal.
We could criticize GM for not being more aggressive, taking the lead and so on. GM is not and will never be like Tesla. SO they need to adopt a strategy that works given their limitations. Pretending to be other than what they are would be suicide.
boonedocks
MS LR Blk/Blk 19”
Agree 100% with this. Lutz is such a Dutz. Just listen to him every time he opens his cigar breath stinking mouth. He is preaching to a choir of Dutz' that makes him think he still has a clue of what it actually going on in the automotive world.
Sorry for my soapbox but that guy seriously needs to go to pasture.
I really don't think he's that stupid. I think he's playing a scripted role - which is to open breathing room for GM by disparaging Tesla and others.
And there is probably some truth to his comments about Tesla's accounting. Tesla has a clear motivation to lower reported unit costs by capitalizing every cost that they possibly can, rather than including them into the unit cost. Does Tesla actually have a solid profit margin on each car? I'm not sure that we can divine that from the financial reporting.
ThisIsTrue
Re-member
If it was me, I'd put the VIN -- in quotes -- into Google with a "Google Alert" on it, so that if it ever comes online, you'll get an email about it. For instance, if it comes up on a CPO page.
Nice conclusion to the story, Snowstorm. Thanks for keeping us posted.
Charged EVs | How the Tesla Model 3 could trigger the collapse of the traditional auto industry
I thought this lecture by Julian Cox outlined a scenario I could see happening. He argues that even if the Model 3 isn't getting built in the numbers Tesla promises, the fact that Tesla has a well priced EV people want would be enough to trigger the disruption of the whole industry. He said the key is to watch how many people lease vs how many buy. If people like the Model 3, but want to wait and see if it's reliable, they will either buy an older car or lease a new one to leave their options open for a Model 3 in a couple of years.
This will be fine for ICE's short term, but if people start running for Model 3s as they become available, that will trigger a disruption the ICE industry can't reverse. The ICE industry hopes for a long runway. Some European countries and cities are forcing car maker's hands with regulations banning ICEs in city cores and generally incentivizing EV sales. Norway has taken the boldest step by announcing ICEs will be banned from sales completely by 2025. For European car makers, European sales are their biggest market. Other makers sell a fair number of cars in Europe, but their core market is elsewhere and they could survive selling fewer cars in Europe.
The next generation of batteries might be somewhat different to produce than the current generation. Li-ion batteries are fairly touchy things that require final assembly in a clean room to be reliable and max capacity. Because the lithium is in small ions and not sheets of the stuff, it isn't that dangerous to handle, though many of the liquid electrolytes can be nasty.
Solid electrolytes allow for solid lithium to be used for the anode. This allows significantly higher energy densities, but also poses a handling threat in the factory. Pure lithium is very reactive and extra measures need to be taken in its handling. Factories that make non-rechargeable lithium batteries need fire vaults in the floors to stuff material if the lithium gets water on it or the atmosphere is too wet and it starts to react. Even a little bit of water and lithium will catch fire.
Once in the battery rechargeable lithium solid state batteries are safer than li-ion batteries as long as the container isn't completely ripped open. Li-ion batteries will catch fire if crushed, but solid state won't.
But in any case, the methods to make solid state lithium rechargeable batteries is different from li-ion and will require a complete reworking of the factory. It will allow a lot more cells to be made in the same space taking less time. There are some steps in li-ion battery manufacturing that take 24 hours or more for things to cure which are steps probably not necessary with solid state lithium batteries.
Knowing Tesla, I suspect they looked at every promising tech in the labs when they designed the GigaFactory and probably built in any features they think they may need for future chemistries. It's no guarantee they will need all those things, but I'm sure the building is built to be modified as needed.
I just noticed this thread was about the defect @Snowstorm had. I'm glad Tesla is taking care of you and sorry for hijacking the thread. I should shut up now...
@Snowstorm I'm happy to hear that Tesla has accepted responsibility and that you're getting a new car. It was also nice to meet you today. I'm always happy to meet a fellow owner especially when we live in the same neighbourhood. For now just enjoy that sweet P90D loaner they gave you and before you know it you'll have your car.
P.S: Get the rear seats. My boys love them and my wife and I enjoy not having to hear them on long drives.
Feel free to stop by anytime.
Shawn
P.S: Get the rear seats. My boys love them and my wife and I enjoy not having to hear them on long drives.
Feel free to stop by anytime.
Shawn
Nice to meet you on he forum as well as in person. This was an unfortunate incident but I must say it reaffirmed my trust in their service team in helping me through. I accept that issues happen and can say they are doing what is fair and right to fix things up. I just swapped my original loaner for the p90d on Friday because the original was being sold, and not sure when it would be swapped again. I am trying to not get used to it or I'll have to spend a lot more money than I originally intended...
Thanks for letting me see the rear seats, they are pretty rare and Tesla said the only car they have them on was all the way across town in Lawrence showroom. Seeing yours is good confirmation that is something I want to have.
The Tesla folks are still working out there swap logistics, I'll let you guys know how it turns out.
