Umm I'm pretty sure that a lithium ion cell will short and vent hot gass/fire if punctured. Maybe some time they won't but hundreds maybe thousands? Absolutely. I smell BS.
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Tesla Whistleblower releases VINs with alleged punctured battery cells - Who's got a 3 on the list?
- Thread starter SoCal Jimmy
- Start date
e-FTW
New electron smell
Exactly: the goal is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I don't see how this person would have kept tabs on that many defective modules being “corrected”.
And as @Daniel in SD mentioned, the VINs don't seem match the timeline of events.
I don't see how this person would have kept tabs on that many defective modules being “corrected”.
And as @Daniel in SD mentioned, the VINs don't seem match the timeline of events.
I wonder if anyone who’s VIN he listed would have a legal standing to sue him. This could potentially lead to decreased resale value, doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not.
Such an interesting angle. I like how you think.
Calculating tort would be difficult however.
lunitiks
Cool James & Black Teacher
I feel bad for this guy. Leaving the lawsuit aside, can you imagine this guy ever finding a descent job again after this?
Tesla has denied this. Tripp is crazy, I think.
Tesla whistleblower/saboteur releases VIN of Model 3s with alleged punctured battery cells
Tesla whistleblower/saboteur releases VIN of Model 3s with alleged punctured battery cells
Following logic, if any of these claims were true -
Wouldn’t there be more corroboration, even anonymously?
When you hashtag teslaq and call Musk a subsidy fraud boy, it cast credibility doubts on ones motives.
Disappointing so many weak hands here. If you are that skittish about Tesla, go buy a recalled Subaru.
Wouldn’t there be more corroboration, even anonymously?
When you hashtag teslaq and call Musk a subsidy fraud boy, it cast credibility doubts on ones motives.
Disappointing so many weak hands here. If you are that skittish about Tesla, go buy a recalled Subaru.
Man, I saw this list and promptly took a crow bar to my battery pack. It looked good at first, but after drilling through a few hundred cells, I can confirm that my battery pack is indeed defective.... several drill bit sized holes throughout..... this type of build quality is unacceptable.... if Tesla can't put a battery in a car without a bunch of drill holes in the pack, who can I trust? I blame Elon.Tesla whistleblower/saboteur releases VIN of Model 3s with alleged punctured battery cells
Tripp claims that he was able to track the vehicles that received those cells and now he released on Twitter the VINs of the Model 3 vehicles with the alleged punctured battery cells
So who's got a VIN on this list?
Adm
Active Member
Tesla knows who own these cars. I would have the NHTSA pick a sample of the vin's and have those battery packs inspected by an independent party. It the battery cells are OK, the lawsuit against Tesla would come to a swift and painful halt.
Thomas Edison
Active Member
When I first heard this whole thing, I was doing my best to give Tripp the benefit of the doubt. This tweet storm though has made me certain he's full of it. Here's what I noticed by looking through his tweets (warning: long, but researched, post incoming):
- The "remade battery pack" is not the same pack in the two pictures, evidenced by the pattern on top of the packs.
- He states that a bunch of trailers on site at GF1 is proof that they are full of scrap and has a few tweets of trailer license plates. I worked at some companies that had a similar number of trailers on site. We used them for things like inventory, construction parts, and just for storing them when they aren't making runs from location to location. If they were full of scrap, why would they be sitting outside doing nothing instead of, you know, scrapping the scrap?
- His picture of the "scrap bandoliers" is hard for me to tell what is scrap for certain. It looks like one or two packs are damaged. If there were that many in one hour though, how do they get there? There appears to be no people actively moving them nor robots in the area. I would expect this is an inspection area for things that may have gone wrong early on to be fixed, but it sure as heck doesn't seem like one hour of work or they would have to be moving these in at the rate of one every minute in a half or so. Besides that, after they pile up the supposed 500 of them every hour, how to they easily get rid of them? Front end loaders? It just makes no sense.
- The cooling tubes that should be straight if I'm not mistaken is a part that is sandwiched between cells in the module, meaning that it doesn't matter if it is bent as it will automatically be fit properly in the cell. If it wasn't bendable, it may instead break under the pressure, meaning this is better material than that would be.
- He showed an Excel spreadsheet that he made that was apparently the days left until he retired and said this is why he wasn't pushing for a promotion. He says he didn't care about the promotion because of that. This makes no sense to me because if he was so concerned about retiring, why did he try to get all this data from Tesla and share it? Wouldn't you just keep your head down and finish up instead?
- The bandolier numbers don't make any sense to me. First, the cost is about $365 per bandolier. Now, maybe I don't fully understand what one of these is or how many you need to use on a car, but they supposedly scrapped 314,504 of these. If we assume these numbers are for the ENTIRE first half of the year, Tesla delivered 38,344 cars. This would mean that for each car delivered, they scrapped 8 bandoliers? Even crazier, he claims "accounting fraud" eliminated any scrap from 1/1 to 3/21, which would be more than 10 per car were scrapped. Maybe I don't understand what these are (and if so, I don't think Tripp does either, his other picture of the "bandoliers" seem to be modules to me?), but how many of these are used in a battery pack? I'm guessing four, in which case this seems completely crazy.
- Module scrap is actually somewhat believable at 11,405. The most interesting thing to me here is that module cost is an average in his numbers of $2759.95, or assuming an 80.5 kwh battery pack (using four modules) as the EPA has stated, meaning that at the time this data was pulled a module would have cost $137.14 per kwh. Beyond that, it's interesting that all of the "G" parts are supposedly showing these failures while the others (after the first set) show almost none. I don't know what the part numbers refer to, but that seems really fishy to me.
Note on both of the above, this is when they were bringing up these systems to speed, so having a decent amount of scrap at the time shouldn't be completely surprising. For instance, if we say that this was for the entire first two quarters of module production, we would have 38,344 cars x 4 modules x $2760 / module = $423,317,760 in working modules. Using the $31,477,001 number he shows as scrapped, that means less than 7.5% of the battery modules were scrapped. *At a time that Tesla had readily admitted that battery production was their bottleneck.* If this is the worst of "production Hell", not including the "bandolier" stuff above which seems impossible, they probably did a pretty good overall job.
- Finally, his module puncturing thing shows they found a potential defect in certain cells, so those battery packs were manually repaired to ensure the batteries would not charge and were capped. Tesla uses 4416 of these in a Model 3. If one of those were disconnected, it would result in a 0.07 mile range loss for the car. If it was not properly repaired and capped, when the cell was charged, it would start on fire. Basically, Tripp has confirmed here that Tesla found a manufacturing defect at the time and then repaired them properly.
Cute stuff, worth an hour of my time to go through because now I have ZERO worries about any of his stuff.
- The "remade battery pack" is not the same pack in the two pictures, evidenced by the pattern on top of the packs.
- He states that a bunch of trailers on site at GF1 is proof that they are full of scrap and has a few tweets of trailer license plates. I worked at some companies that had a similar number of trailers on site. We used them for things like inventory, construction parts, and just for storing them when they aren't making runs from location to location. If they were full of scrap, why would they be sitting outside doing nothing instead of, you know, scrapping the scrap?
- His picture of the "scrap bandoliers" is hard for me to tell what is scrap for certain. It looks like one or two packs are damaged. If there were that many in one hour though, how do they get there? There appears to be no people actively moving them nor robots in the area. I would expect this is an inspection area for things that may have gone wrong early on to be fixed, but it sure as heck doesn't seem like one hour of work or they would have to be moving these in at the rate of one every minute in a half or so. Besides that, after they pile up the supposed 500 of them every hour, how to they easily get rid of them? Front end loaders? It just makes no sense.
- The cooling tubes that should be straight if I'm not mistaken is a part that is sandwiched between cells in the module, meaning that it doesn't matter if it is bent as it will automatically be fit properly in the cell. If it wasn't bendable, it may instead break under the pressure, meaning this is better material than that would be.
- He showed an Excel spreadsheet that he made that was apparently the days left until he retired and said this is why he wasn't pushing for a promotion. He says he didn't care about the promotion because of that. This makes no sense to me because if he was so concerned about retiring, why did he try to get all this data from Tesla and share it? Wouldn't you just keep your head down and finish up instead?
- The bandolier numbers don't make any sense to me. First, the cost is about $365 per bandolier. Now, maybe I don't fully understand what one of these is or how many you need to use on a car, but they supposedly scrapped 314,504 of these. If we assume these numbers are for the ENTIRE first half of the year, Tesla delivered 38,344 cars. This would mean that for each car delivered, they scrapped 8 bandoliers? Even crazier, he claims "accounting fraud" eliminated any scrap from 1/1 to 3/21, which would be more than 10 per car were scrapped. Maybe I don't understand what these are (and if so, I don't think Tripp does either, his other picture of the "bandoliers" seem to be modules to me?), but how many of these are used in a battery pack? I'm guessing four, in which case this seems completely crazy.
- Module scrap is actually somewhat believable at 11,405. The most interesting thing to me here is that module cost is an average in his numbers of $2759.95, or assuming an 80.5 kwh battery pack (using four modules) as the EPA has stated, meaning that at the time this data was pulled a module would have cost $137.14 per kwh. Beyond that, it's interesting that all of the "G" parts are supposedly showing these failures while the others (after the first set) show almost none. I don't know what the part numbers refer to, but that seems really fishy to me.
Note on both of the above, this is when they were bringing up these systems to speed, so having a decent amount of scrap at the time shouldn't be completely surprising. For instance, if we say that this was for the entire first two quarters of module production, we would have 38,344 cars x 4 modules x $2760 / module = $423,317,760 in working modules. Using the $31,477,001 number he shows as scrapped, that means less than 7.5% of the battery modules were scrapped. *At a time that Tesla had readily admitted that battery production was their bottleneck.* If this is the worst of "production Hell", not including the "bandolier" stuff above which seems impossible, they probably did a pretty good overall job.
- Finally, his module puncturing thing shows they found a potential defect in certain cells, so those battery packs were manually repaired to ensure the batteries would not charge and were capped. Tesla uses 4416 of these in a Model 3. If one of those were disconnected, it would result in a 0.07 mile range loss for the car. If it was not properly repaired and capped, when the cell was charged, it would start on fire. Basically, Tripp has confirmed here that Tesla found a manufacturing defect at the time and then repaired them properly.
Cute stuff, worth an hour of my time to go through because now I have ZERO worries about any of his stuff.
SomeJoe7777
Marginally-Known Member
select vin from cardata where battery_cell=hosed;
[0 rows returned]
select fud from tbl_SeekingAlpha where subject=Tesla;
[ERR909: Too many rows]
lunitiks
Cool James & Black Teacher
I don't know about that... Isn't the white, semi-transparent plastic overlay what they call "Clamshell"? If so, isn't that what they removed (with Dremel), so any "patterns" you might see in the first picture could be different with a new Clamshell?
Quoting Tripp:
Anyway, what I'm more curious about is that the thick, black, plastic tube/tubes on the RH edge, has different numbering: On the "before" pic, it reads "17/278", on the "after" pic, it reads "18/074".
It also - unlike his assertion - looks perfectly clean and looks like a well-done job.
It doesn't really matter. We're talking a company with billions in revenue making millions in scrap. I mean, news flash, details at 11! Scrap has already been accounted for - it's part of COGS. It lowers gross margins. All new lines start with high scrap rates / low margins, and decrease scrap rates / improve margins over time. Model 3 margins are now positive, and should be 15% this quarter.
It's more amusing than that: the cooling ribbons have to be bent. They snake through the pack. Look at how long that is, you think it'd fit in the pack straight? This is like complaining that one of the twisties in a box arrived bent. So? The whole purpose is to bend them.
(note that we're just taking it as a given that that was actually used)
If it's legit, it also shows how much he hated his job and Tesla. What sort of person counts down the days, two years in advance?
*ding* *ding* *ding*!
Tripp copied off Tesla's servers and then dug through trying to find anything "damning". He has no personal experience with the vast majority of the production process. He kept mixing up the terms "modules" and "cells" when talking about punctures, for crying out loud. And his one example of a "puncture" actually says "dent".
Exactly the point I've been bringing up elsewhere. Tesla packs are designed to have cell losses. That's the whole point of having so many cells. A cell that's been disconnected will never charge or discharge. Even if it had some residual charge at manufacturing time, it wouldn't for long, due to self discharge. It's just dead mass. Having never gone through charge/discharge cycles, there's zero chance that there's plated-out lithium, either. You're just talking about an alumium can with lithium-intercalated metal oxides on one side, graphite on the other, all equalized to the state that entropy wants it to be in. Never mind that Tesla packs are specifically designed to contain runaway thermal events from individual cells without failure propagation, and that you generally have to really crush the packs up badly to manage to burn them.
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