“All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
LOL
Yeah ok.
Tell me you know nothing about manufacturing, without telling me you know nothing about manufacturing.
That one quote - assuming it is accurate - explains that Musk is even more of an idiot than everyone already knew he was. You don’t make things at those tight tolerances. A couple of dimensions on a part might be (for instance the bore on a press fit sleeve), but you’d almost never, ever hold an entire part to that tight of a tolerance.
In imperial units, 10 microns is .00039". A human hair is roughly .001 to .005" thick. So he is asking for a tolerance that is 3 to 10x smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To put the absurdity of Musk’s demand into perspective, most parts that go into a car are roughly an order of magnitude looser in tolerance with some dimensions being 2 orders of magnitude looser.
That difference might not sound like a lot, but holding something to +/-.0039 versus +/-.00039" could easily triple the price of an item or more. Easy. You use a tight tolerance only when you need to - that’s engineering 101. Some parts could easily be +/- .039" and not affect their performance on bit. Close tolerance engine parts might be held at what Musk is demanding, but never “ALL PARTS” would be held to that.
When I was young I got a job at a manufacturing place that made all sorts of parts for sensitive equipment. Younger people, or people with steady hands would debur and smooth. We would have these huge magnifiers and friggin microscopes and be working with what looked like a really long tiny exacto knives that needed to be replaced every 5 minutes or a couple dozen uses to get that stuff to spec. You can spend 20 minutes on a piece, think it’s perfect and then QC would send it right back because they somehow found some tiny inconsistency or groove you didn’t or couldn’t notice.
There is no way you can expect that level of accuracy, unless your willing to pay for clean room level stuff. Even we weren’t always quite that accurate depending on the end use and they charged like almost $50 for something that looked quite like something you get a hardware store for 50 cents.
I work in semiconductor industry where machines need to have sub-micron positioning accuracy and even we don’t generally design parts with 10 micron tolerances, unless it really needs to.
Not to mention the fact all the tolerances should have been determined before mass production began. You determine the dimensional requirements and develop the manufacturing process to deliver that.
There is absolutely no way they have the systems and tools in place to properly measure every part with sub 10-micron accuracy and precision either. To control those dimensions you need to go a whole additional order of magnitude out. I pity the fool that has to manage that control plan.
develop the manufacturing process to deliver that.
Exactly. I’m sure his engineers did the right thing and know what they are doing, and now the top executive steps his foot into the mix and will muck everything up.
I know exactly how the people that I have worked with in the past would have dealt with this - surrly engineers and quality managers who knew how to handle tough bosses. They would let the whole situation cool off for a day or two first. Then go tell him how much more expensive the truck would be if they tried to hold every dimension of every part to +/-.0004". Any sane CEO would quickly know he fucked up and issue some retract. If that still didn’t sway him because of his ego, we probably would stop even listening to him altogether. He has shown that he is utterly clues, so would he even know a part held to 10 microns versus one held to 100 or even 1000?? I’m guessing no. If he asked if these new parts were held to the tighter tolerance, we’d say yes and just go on about our day.
The whole Twitter fiasco suggests Tesla and SpaceX know exactly how to do this. Managing their idiot CEO is part of the training. Existing Twitter management didn’t know how to do that, and we haven’t seen the last of the consequences yet.
In many ways, it is their own fault for wanting to work for that clown. It’s not like it isn’t known that he is a terrible person and incompetent boss. We would get lots of fresh grads post up on the engineering subs on Reddit asking about jobs at Tesla. WTF? Why would you WANT to work there? We would try to talk sense into these people but few would ever listen.
Yes. The field is way too broad and has been for decades. I have all this knowledge in my head that I never get to use (integration of 1 over the square root of arctan squared of x cubed), knowledge that would have bern useful in the 1970s (this is how to build a class C amplifier without soldering), and knowledge that would have been useful but wasnt taught (this is what FLA is).
The ideal would be to break it up into a few different degrees. Guys and gals working in Software Defined Radio shouldn’t have the same training as those planning powerlines.
I lost it on an intern a while back who wanted to drop out because “we aren’t learning anything practical”. Yeah I know kid, get your piece of paper and get to work.
I’ve heard almost the exact same thing from MEs as well. Both are sooo broad. I mead I get WHY they try to teach you anything and everything, but it does seem overwhelming and at the same time seems like you haven’t learned anything useful even when you really have. You simply don’t know if you’ll be working at a nuclear power plant dealing with thermodynamics or a car maker mostly dealing with design or as a project manager at some other company dealing with vibrations. There’s just no way to know. The path your work life leads is impossible to predict so they sort of have to teach you a little about everything.
Nope. I might have been to harsh a bit. My sub-field (controls and automation) is notorious for being poorly documented and most of the tech being very vendor specific. So you learn on the job.
I am sure plenty of the semiconductor EEs will disagree with me.
Ah yeh, fair enough. I didn’t do any controls and am. Now having to learn a bit for my job, but I like learning at work. It’s more fun than university.
Really? I’d have thought EEs would learn it in the context of something like circuit breakers using bimetallic strips or the effect of heat-cycling on soldered joints.
As someone who knows almost nothing about the topic, wouldn’t some (most?) of these parts be big enough that a small change in temperature or air pressure alone would cause these parts to expand/shrink enough to go over the tolerance limit?
Thermal expansion of steel is .0000072" per degree F. All you would need is a 100 degree F temp change to blow that tolerance out of the water. And 100 degrees is not that much when it comes to cars. A freezing cold day versus a boiling hot day in the summer is a temperature swing more than 100 degrees. A ICE engine runs at roughly 250 degrees F so that right there would easily expand parts way more than the tolerance he is calling for. On an EV, I don’t think anything gets that hot, but the motors still get warm.
Yes, and different materials will have different rates of thermal expansion. That’s probably why the pixel 7 camera glass was cracking for no apparent reason when winter hit. Imagine coming out in the morning and finding all the glass in your car shattered because it got cold overnight. Or even worse you take it out of a heated garage on a cold day and the glass shatters while you’re driving.
We compensate for thermal expansion. The standard temperature things are measured at is 68F/20C. So if it’s 72 degrees we’ll compensate it back to 68 in software for the material we’re measuring. We use scale bars of known length and similar material type to verify scale. (I run laser trackers and laser radars.)
For measurement equipment that’s stationary, like CMMs, you just control the environment.
I’ve told many (usually new) design engineers that they’re stupid for asking for 0.001" tolerance on parts when they only need 0.005 “or 0.010”. The difference between 0.010" and sub-10 micron is easily a factor of 100 in most parts, ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
Unless you are talking about a press fit location or some kind of high precision alignment issue, almost nothing needs anything tighter than .001" and .005 or .010" is perfectly fine for most things. I work with a lot of weldments so if we’re within .030" we consider that good enough.
ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
not just that, he said “all parts”. The stitching on the seats, the floor carpets, USB ports, cupholders and the A/C vents have to be more accurate than the width of a human hair too
I don’t see anywhere in the article where Musk says “tolerance”. He specifically says “accuracy” and goes on the talk about listing more decimal places instead of rounding. Any mention of tolerance is done by the author of the article. If certain dimensions are not naturally rounded to one, or even two decimals, there is no reason not to list it to three or more on modern drawings. GD&T can specify whatever tolerance is necessary without relying on a decimal-based block tolerance. I’d be interested in seeing the original email but it seems like there is a misunderstanding by the author given the context being discussed.
I default to three decimal places for all my basic dimensions on both in and mm drawings. One of the benefits of GD&T is that you can give provide additional dimensional accuracy, completely independent of the tolerance being specified.
The linguistics of metrology is not exactly a topic I’m particularly passionate about, but if yiu look at the technical definition of accuracy, it essentially is the same as a tolerance.
Accuracy: the degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification conforms to the correct value or a standard.
And when it comes to decimal places, you’d never display more than you really need. If a dimension is +/- .010" there is absolutely no reason to display it to 4 decimal places. That doesn’t win you anything. More importantly, I’m sure a company like Tesla doesn’t even use drawings at all. I’m sure they are paperless and send out their models for machining.
I think there is a very important distinction between accuracy and tolerance in engineering. +/- .010" is not a dimension, but a tolerance that can be applied to a dimension. However if your example was changed to a .010" dimension, I would agree with you as I stated in my last comment. There is no need to give any further accuracy to that dimension if you are just adding zeros to the end (unless you are using block tolerances that rely on a specific number of digits to correspond with a standard tolerance). Unfortunately, not everything is designed using the same units and you will inevitably end up with a part designed in mm that uses a bolt-on component using a hole span in inches (for example, a nice round 1-in span). If you want a +/-1 mm tolerance on that part, you wouldn’t want to round every dimension to the nearest mm because you may end up with a tolerance of 24-26 mm when you really wanted 24.4 to 26.4 mm. I like to provide true dimensional accuracy (to microns or .0001" if I’m not just adding zeros) and then apply a suitable tolerance independently, using GD&T.
Regarding paperless manufacturing, I agree that many components are made straight from the models these days and imported directly into a CNC machine. However, there should always be a drawing or a digital equivalent a drawing. This is the contract that specifies acceptable tolerances to the manufacturer, and it will be used during QA inspection to determine if an acceptable part has been delivered.
I think there is an important distinction between accuracy and precision in engineering. I’m having flashbacks of sitting in class when the professor was going over this stuff. I honestly always found it some of the most boring topics in the curriculum.
One of my physics profs had a story about this. He needed two resistors to be very similar in performance for a circuit he was making, so he asked for a couple of the super-high-quality ones.
His advisor said “fuck that, get the 1% bin, they’ll be bimodal at 1% above and below rating, sort em and find two that match to the degree you need”
That’s kind of analogous; do you need to try to hit a particular value (accuracy) or do you need things in a consistent relation to one another (precision)?
Engine parts? Tesla’s don’t have engines, they have electric motors which shouldn’t need this level of precision. Electric motors they have today work pretty well already.
Machining parts to that precision would exponentially increase the cost of the individual parts. This is something that will never ever ever happen and I’d be willing to bet my entire fortune on it. No Cybertruck will ever be mass produced with all it’s components within 10 microns of tolerance. Elon might roll one off the line like that to prove that it can be done, but nobody other than his billionaire buddies would be able to afford one.
It is not possible to build car parts to that level of precision. They will warp more than that in the heat of the day. It is just a marketing pitch to the idiots who buy his crap.
Every time I see it I can’t get past how hideous it looks. I just don’t get it…who’s the target demo for this thing? They’ve already been beaten to market by non-absurd looking trucks, how big could their market actually be?
Bro, Sega Saturn is was an amazing console. It still holds its own. It was arcade games at home. To this day, if you don’t want to drop the cash on a Capcom CPS2 or Neo Geo MVS. Just get some nice HORI fighting controllers and you have the next best thing.
Why does Space Karen still have all his fanbois? Do they really think he’s some kind of software/technology/business genius, even after all that has come out about him?
I wouldn’t say I was a fanboy, but I liked him before … I don’t know, he was always crazy. These days he’s even more crazy and I’m not touching anything he does.
No clue what this reply is supposed to mean. Yes, crazy and racist are two different words. Yes, Elmo has gone on crazy and racist rants. Sometimes independently, sometimes together.
I think everyone just has a tiny bit of crazy in them, but they meet enough people to realise they need to temper their worst instincts.
The more rich/powerful you get, the more yes men you meet, and the more you think “hey i’m actually right all the time after all”, and the more you start justifying your own craziness.
Mate, it’s the opposite that’s true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
Starlink bandwidth is better than I was expecting.
I can’t find the video that did all the math, but basically by using a low Earth orbit network you can get information long distances faster than you can with cell towers and fiber because you’re significantly reducing the number of repeaters you need without significantly increasing the distance the information has to travel.
“Traditional” satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they’re the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I’m not a physics dude, so I don’t know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there’s a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn’t a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The “genius” of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn’t really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
Eh, not saying starlink isn’t good, but it’s not exactly novel. It didn’t take a genius to come up with the idea, which I very much doubt musk did, but the work that needed to be done and the service provided is impressive.
Musk did very little in that effort beyond paying the bill. I don’t really think that’s something to be commended for. Bill Gates could’ve paid for it and the result would have been identical.
Nah, he caught on late but he got it. He’s been out of the game for a long time, so people don’t remember when he was running MSFT. Guy was the real deal.
I’m definitely not praising Musk, I’m just saying that I’ve been really happy with my Starlink dish. I don’t like that I’m supporting him financially in this small way but it fits my needs too well.
wow that was a really interesting article. the only thing impressive thing elon musk has done is getting the smart people together to form spacex, and i sure hope its out of his hands at this point so he cant drive it into the ground.
yeah not adding a water deluge system like every other launchpad ever was an obvious mistake. the pad (and tower) were mostly fine though, it just destroyed the concrete directly under the engines.
personally i find it interesting to watch them messing around, but i dont really support them. if starship doesnt work out, oh well, it was cool to see them try (and fail) anyway.
Him and his companies have achieved some very impressive things, most notably Tesla being so far ahead of the pack with EV technology, and Space X with their reusable rockets.
Regardless of your opinion of him as a person, he has achieved some impressive things.
Did you know there’s people out there that know how to jailbreak all tesla cars?
They can disconnect those cars from the centralized service to keep them from being controlled by the corporation that made them.
those BMW and ford cars that have certain features locked behind a monthly subscription service can be jailbroken too.
You’re not doing anything wrong if you pay to have something you bought modified. If you paid money for it, you own it…I don’t care what the fine print in any ToS has to say. You buy it, it’s yours.
Sure. But you cant pretend that its some super secret that only non corpos know about and be surprised when the tech who makes the inspection knows what to look for
Well his paranoia was fed (rightly) by sites like Reddit who ate his lunch over panel gaps on the model 3. He wants this to be better and there’s nothing wrong with that!
“Bad news guys… We’re gonna have to delay production for just TWO MORE YEARS because of these woke microns! The good news though, you can get re-premium upgraded waitlist VIP positioning with a renewal deposit of only $500”
To build it with that accuracy would be physically impossible. Guess he forgot about thermal expansion and contraction. Guess he forgot about the weather…
Nah, not impossible people build stellarator type Fusion reactors with large freeform metal parts in that tolerance region that are exposed to liquid helium.
Does not change the fact that all materials expand when temperature rises and contract when temperature cools. Plus different materials have different temperature expansion coefficients.
I mean, it says cybertruck parts, not the whole thing including assembly. Certainly possible for some manufacturing processes under given conditions to produce parts with ±0.005 tolerances like laser cutting or precision CNC machining of small dimensions. But it’s obviously completely unrealistic given that most parts for a car will be of large-ish dimensions and stamped, injection molded, cast, forged, extruded… none of which lends itself to IT grades better than 10, far away from talking about microns.
A rumor I’ve heard somewhere online is that people are noticing the body panels wobbling, or ‘breathing’ in and out in the wind. Not sure how true that is, I can’t find a video showing this happening, but it does make sense. Even the most subtle flexing of a shiny flat surface becomes way more obvious and sticks out like a sore thumb.
Musk is a scammer who has almost no practical understanding of engineering.
He (and unfortunately many after him) forgot about thermal expansion and contraction as well with his dumbass Hyperloop idea. Have a hermetically sealed metal tube with a vacuum run exposed for 200km and let’s just ignore thermal expansion. One station would have to move left and right for several meters throughout the day, every day for that, the 200km pipe somehow would need to be able to move about… His “designs” and “ideas” are engineering nightmares
Indeed, that’s about 10 to 100 times more accuracy than other automakers. Those tolerances just aren’t necessary so no supplier is going to have the tools or infrastructure in place to make parts to such a high degree. Body shop alone sees fluctuations in millimeters because industrial robots can’t do any better than half millimeter accuracy, if they’re brand new.
If you can even get something like +/-3 or 4 mm with say a cpk of 1,33 you are doing pretty well for a whole body.
It’s probably a pr stunt. If this is real then they are doomed because they have not yet understood that you need to compensate tolerances and design a robust assembly that can handle this. If you are trying to get crazy high part precision you have not understood how big scale manufacturing works. This is why the Japanese are often so highly regarded in this and might be the true art of car (or large scale) engineering.
Wait, I thought he was just bullshitting his fans with that. He’s actually serious? XD
Also, I don’t understand what this has to do with bare metal construction of the Cybertruck and why that should present exceptional difficulties. DeLorean figured out how to make bare metal cars more than forty years ago, so it can’t be that hard.
DeLorean also didn’t use flat panels on the body. Though it might look like it at first glance, none of the DeLorean panels were flat, they all had a slight curve.
All metal panels are gonna flex a bit in the changing temperatures.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to be sarcastic or not, but look closely at the DeLorean, none of the panels were completely flat, they all had at least a subtle curve to them.
I would think it was largely for sake of the style he was going for, plus even the most subtle defects in a perfectly flat shiny surface become way more obvious and stick out like a sore thumb.
Also, I don’t think it’s a really good idea to have what’s basically a rolling mirror going down the road, at certain angles the sunlight will blind other drivers and pedestrians all that much more.
Your mistake was actually assuming that there is any discernible difference between a Musk statement he considers serious, and bullshit. They are the same.
The cybertronk looks highly regarded when put together correctly. Imagine if it has the panel gaps of other cars TSLA makes.
My tinfoil hat theory on why Elon is acting all right wing all of the sudden is to get those idiots to buy electric bare metal Pontiac Aztecs with “unbreakable” windows instead of F-150’s
I had exactly the same theory for 2. He seems to genuinely want to save humanity (reusable rockets, electric vehicles etc) and so converting right wingers to electric would fit the goal
This is what I was alluding to, however people seem to have jumped on the “oh he is an Elon fan, quick, tell him he is an idiot!” Rather than accepting nuance
“Had” is past tense. “Theory” is “a supposition or system of ideas indended to explain something”. I didn’t say that I thought that was the most likely theory. I thought lemmy was supposed to be able to hold a nuanced conversation?
Electric vehicles aren’t meant to save humanity. They are meant to save the car. If we removed all gas vehicles off the road right that wouldn’t even stop 30 percent of emissions. The only way to save humanity at this point is to stop capitalism. As long as we continue to expect the market to find a solution to a problem that has no profit motivator we will never save humanity. Elon included.
Ahem, if we removed all gas vehicles from the road right now, including farm vehicles, humanity would starve to death within a few months. Some subsistence farmers in developing countries that don’t need fertilizer would survive.
But it would definitely be the end of industrial society.
Emissions from transportation are a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, so it absolutely does make sense to decarbonize them. This isn’t really debatable. It’s been part of the ICC strategy and negotiations for decades now.
My tinfoil hat theory on why Elon is acting all right wing all of the sudden is to get those idiots to buy electric bare metal Pontiac Aztecs with “unbreakable” windows instead of F-150’s
can he recoup $44 billion tho…? it’s a bold move.meme
wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of logical explanation for his demented thrashings?
I don’t think he actually cares about the money he blew on Twitter. Money is a construct and that is even more true for rich people. If he cared about the money, he wouldn’t have tossed Twitter down the shitter.
I think he cares more about the impression he is making, whether it be good or bad. People are talking about Elon and that’s all that matters.
While I don’t know the cost to develop the cyber truck assuming it was 0 dollars to make the cost of the Twitter deal from cyber truck alone, it would take 88 thousand of them at elon getting 100% of the money from the sales. ( how he expects to sell an electric truck for 50k is beyond me)
100% everyone is making fun of teslas already, so imagine how the people feel who pre-ordered some garbage years ago. Now with their "leaked" email they can tell people how their future car will have toleraces that are on an qtomic level. These are also the prople who believed that teslas can fly in 3 years. Which was in 2016 i believe
My theory is he’s a wealthy dude, so he’s going to have right wing tendencies since the right wing benefits wealthy dudes.
Also, one of his kids came out as trans, he went nuts, blamed social media for making his kid a “degenerate”. Then bought twitter to destroy it out of revenge.
He’s kinda like a James Bond villain, but so much dumber.
And they won’t, because that level of precision is stupid for this application, and not required. They can’t even come close to matching the quality and precision of larger auto makers, how and why would they require levels many times what those manufacturers have deemed necessary?
Classic example of an exec understanding on a high level that they have fit and finish issues with parts, and pulling a completely inane statement out of his ass to make it sound like he has any real understanding or power whatsoever to address the issue.
It’s Musk, so everyone immediately knows he’s full of shit. But it’s a good reminder to not entirely trust CEOs when they make statements related to specific technical details because the fact of the matter is they are not engineers and for large companies they are nowhere near close enough to the design and manufacturing process to be able to make statements like this that are actually informed. It’s just PR bullshit.
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