Elon gonna engineer the shit outta this thing. Nevermind coil steel itself varies by more than that before it goes into a die and stretches. It’s almost like he doesn’t have any background in automotive manufacturing. This statement makes me think Elon may not know what a micron even is. The fit and finish of Tesla’s current offerings seems to evidence it anyway.
Hilarious considering the panel gaps in all his other cars, dude is fucking insane. Unattainable standards don’t breed better work they breed exasperation and apathy.
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.
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.
While holding this tight of a tolerance is standard for small sinple injection molded plastic part like Lego blocks (0.01mm tol. usually need some really good tooling though), it’s not really possible to hold this tight of a tolerance for large sheet metal construction such as the Cybertruck body (Standard tolerance should probably be in the milimeter range at most. )
Also, there is no way to actually measure this tight of a tolerance on large parts such as a car, since the standard methods for this tight of a tolerance measurement is… using a caliper, as using automated optical inspection for every dimension isn’t really feasible.
So, I guess they’ll probably just coddle Musk and make some fake drawings for his eyes only or something, which would only be more useless work for Tesla people.
Also, there is no way to actually measure this tight of a tolerance on large parts such as a car, since the standard methods for this tight of a tolerance measurement is… using a caliper, as using automated optical inspection for every dimension isn’t really feasible.
We definitely have lasers that can measure this tolereance.
And if Musk gets too involved somewhere, they just drop a couple of cool words and get him to go on a wild goose chase about shooting people through a massive vacuum canon or something stupid like that.
Even the heat of the day would make a panel warp more than is being stated. It is just sales BS to make him look good.
No two cars are ever the same. Even with robots panels move in jigs. There is usually a guy at the end of a line who has the job of body adjust. Paint shops warp the crap out of a car body in the baking phase.
Maybe all this is on purpose so he can blame the factory workers on why the product never materialize and he can avoid the shame of having unsold inventory as people realize the car is fugly
“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”
On the whole, most products Lego builds are identical injection molded chunks of plastic, and not complicated cars filled with exotic materials like glass, steel and cobalt.
Only the hardest hitting journalism of the highest quality from Jalopnik. Who else would appreciate the difficulties encountered trying to incorporate exotic materials like glass and steel into a vehicle?
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.
That’s an idea I would have supported when I was taking high school physics. My astronomy calculations I put to the nearest centimetre (something like 20 significant digits sometimes) for no good reason. Just writing down all the numbers from the calculator.
Then I took engineering and grew out of it. Sure some crucial parts need very tight tolerancing, but you also have to have it relative to the size of the part. And if your design is bad, better tolerancing isn’t going to save you from stuff like the steering wheel popping out.
He most certainly didn’t. Other than physical constants, very few measurements were ever taken to more than 15 significant figures. It’s just not practical as no instrument will get 1m precision over a light year. A spacecraft travelling anywhere near that far will just get an order of magnitude closer and then recalculate with one more digit of precision.
You are exactly right, and I wasn’t copy pasting I was writing it all down as part of pen-and-paper submitted answers. I don’t have 1/5 of the energy for such trivial things anymore.
My grandpa once published an article where he turned a tree circumference (obtained using a tape measure) into a “diameter estimate” with 6 significant figures. Turns out, he was wrong on the 4^th^ digit because he used π=3.14…
My high-school chemistry teacher would dock a point for each extra digit past the calculation’s actual precision. We learned quickly not to overstate our sig figs.
An answer written as “3” means that the true value is somewhere between 2½ and 3½. If you write “3.19142” when what you actually know is “3”, you’re incorrectly excluding the vast majority of the possible true values.
Our physics teacher taught measurements and uncertainties as the very first thing in our multi-year syllabus. All answers thereafter needed to be in the precision implied from the number of significant figures in the given figures and error propagation.
Yeah it’s one thing to spit out numbers. But as an engineer I have to understand what’s going to happen with thermal expansion, wear and tear, and what can actually be produced consistently by an apathetic worker on their 60th hour of work that week
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