Agree, so I haven't voted
Why would you say this when Elon reported last week the first group of cars "release candidates" built almost entirely built with production tooling on the new assembly line will be out for testing in a week or two?
What would you call the testing those cars will be going thru if not beta testing?
Tesla Model 3 ‘release candidates’ are currently being built – Musk notes ‘almost entirely built with production tooling’
Here's why.
There's an old saying in aviation: regulations are written in blood. You have a very complex machine designed to carry people to a height from which they cannot safely fall. While these machines are exhaustively tested in almost every which way (and their safety record reflects this), with all the "known unknowns" examined with a jeweler's loupe, there are also "unknown unknowns" that crop up only after the flying machine enters service. Take the world's first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet. Built by a hugely experienced company with the very best aeronautical engineers available and exhaustively "Beta tested", the Comet carried passengers higher and faster than any airliner of its day. It was a brand new product meant to change the world.
One year after entering service, they began to fall out of the sky.
It turned out that repeated cabin pressurization allowed stress to become focused on the sharp-edged corners of its big, square passenger ports. The stress begat cracks, the cracks propagated through the skin, the Comet shattered like a popped balloon and fell to the ground in metal confetti. De Havilland had thoroughly test flown the airplane, watched for failures, fixed what broke, tested again, fixed what broke, retested, on and on, until they were satisfied they had a safe and durable product.
They had addressed all the known unknowns. And missed an unknown unknown. A mandate for many thousands of pressurization cycles and providing fuselage tear joints (to stop the propagation of cracks) entered the regs.
Tesla has great faith in its ability to design and build the machines that build the machines. They even invoke superhuman technology when they refer to factories as "alien dreadnoughts." And I am sure they've addressed most, or even all, the known unknowns quite well.
But "faith", by definition, is belief in something unproven, and they've run out of time to prove things the old fashioned way (drive, fix what breaks, drive some more, fix what breaks). There's more than a whiff of hubris about whether such an approach is even needed these days.
That's why I said releasing the Model 3 into the controlled environment of company employees is really an intermediate test period. The car will be driven, thousands of miles racked up. Surely, some unknown unknowns will show up, get addressed, changes made in the design, rinse and repeat, and hope (which is, as they say, not a plan) that by the first non-employee delivery they will have a safe, reliable product that will not come flooding back to service centers in a tidal wave.
I believe (unproven, remember) that
most of the unknown unknowns will get ironed out by the time the car is released into the wild. But not all of them.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Robin
