[HN Gopher] Tesla Recalls All Cybertrucks for Faulty Accelerator...
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Tesla Recalls All Cybertrucks for Faulty Accelerator Pedals
Author : sarimkx
Score : 384 points
Date : 2024-04-19 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| tommoor wrote:
| This is a good explainer video:
| https://twitter.com/garageklub/status/1779571445930324456
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| interesting. fortunately seems like a simple fix.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| At least they've only sold 3800 so far. But what are the odds
| this is the only thing that will need to be recalled?
| tehlike wrote:
| First year of New models from any manufacturer will have issues
| to iron out
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Sure but what calibre of issues should you expect? Surely not
| faulty pedals causing the vehicle to accelerate.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Toyota's wheels have been literally falling off their cars.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/cars/toyota-bz4x-tundra-
| recal...
|
| What is their reputation on reliability on here? How many
| decades have they been making cars compared and how mature
| is their manufacturing process?
|
| You just don't hear about other carmakers' recalls on here,
| so everyone makes those assumptions you just did, that
| Tesla is disproportionately bad with quality issues..
| mcculley wrote:
| Disproportionately? Does Tesla ship as many vehicles as
| Toyota? You have made me curious about the numbers you
| are using.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Tesla doesn't even register in the top 10 most recalls
| per car company in 2023.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/bygtzk2.png
|
| What data are _you_ using?
|
| How many of Ford Motor's 58 recalls in 2023 made HN's
| front page?
|
| Meanwhile Tesla updates the car UIs icon sizes via a
| software update, and there are headlines all over the
| media including HN stating that Tesla recalled millions
| of cars, omitting that it was a software update.
|
| That makes people like the GP think Teslas have
| disproportionately worse issues, which appears to be the
| objective.
| mcculley wrote:
| > What data are you using?
|
| I'm not the one claiming anything about proportions. I
| didn't claim to have any data. How did you arrive at your
| proportions?
| ripjaygn wrote:
| I had linked it in the very comment you replied
| to...please reread.
| mcculley wrote:
| I see only a link to an infographic about recalls in
| 2023.
| cycomanic wrote:
| How is recalls per company a valid metric? Should it be
| at least normalised by number of models (e.g. if we
| assume design flaws)?
|
| By that metric Fords 58 are normalised by 40 odd models
| (only counting current) while Teslas 20 are normalised by
| 6 models (counting any car/truck build).
| Thorrez wrote:
| Why would number of recalls be proportional to number of
| vehicles shipped? I think number of recalls would be more
| proportional to number of car models available. And
| number of vehicles recalled would be proportional to
| number of vehicles shipped. In this case 3,878 vehicles
| were recalled.
| mcculley wrote:
| To me, "disproportionately bad with quality issues" would
| be about total units shipped.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Total units shipped since the inception of the company?
|
| I think the NHTSA was only formed in 1970.
| mcculley wrote:
| Which metric are you using when you use the word
| disproportionately?
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Linked it in the other comment that you had replied to.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40086651
| mcculley wrote:
| That says 2023. I don't see Toyota mentioned in there at
| all. Maybe I'm missing something.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Toyota had a recall just a couple of days ago. That story
| wasn't even submitted to HN, while the Cybertruck already
| made the front page a couple of times and will probably
| continue to do so. That's a perfect example of
| disproportionate coverage leading to several commenters
| on this story automatically assuming Tesla is worse than
| other manufacturers. And somehow you didn't ask them for
| data saying you were curious but immediately jumped on my
| comment. That's typically not the behavior of someone
| that's starting with no data and neutral.
| mcculley wrote:
| I asked about the data you are using when you say it is
| disproportionate. It sounds like you don't have any.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| As the saying goes, you can take a horse to the water,
| but you cannot make it drink it. Cannot help those who
| cannot help themselves.
| frumper wrote:
| Ford recalled 6 million vehicles last year. For some
| context, they sold around 2 million last year.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2024/01/12/vehi
| cle....
|
| edit: To add, this isn't some one off event. In 2022 Ford
| recalled 8.6 million vehicles.
| phatfish wrote:
| At least the wheels falling off slow the car down.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| At least you can steer the car with unintentional
| acceleration, unlike with wheels falling off.
| toast0 wrote:
| You can steer as long as you've got three wheels. Not as
| well as with four of course. With a modern brake system,
| you should have some braking power too. I know someone
| who lost a wheel on an 1965 truck with a single chamber
| brake cylinder, so there was no pressure in the system as
| brake parts fell off with the wheel.
| bingbingbing777 wrote:
| You're really working overtime defending Tesla in the
| comments here. Go take a (fast) break in your unsteerable
| truck :^)
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Does the oil lobby pay for overtime astroturfing or just
| regular hours?
|
| I have actual sources and proof unlike you.
|
| https://www.desmog.com/2009/08/13/oil-lobbys-energy-
| citizens...
|
| https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-fossil-fuel-
| lobbyists-u...
|
| https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/02/oil-and-gas-
| industr...
| chrisbolt wrote:
| If you press both the accelerator and brake in a Tesla,
| it slows the car down and shows a message in the
| instrument cluster that both pedals are pressed:
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/while-breaking-
| if-yo...
| andreygrehov wrote:
| There is no calibre of expected issues. Nobody's a prophet.
| Faulty pedals happened in the past with other car
| manufacturers.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Toyota had the floor mat thing as well, that was big news
| for awhile.
| tehlike wrote:
| Literally anything can happen. I never liked the idea of
| buying a Tesla, but let's be fair.
| AirMax98 wrote:
| Some of the 2022 Broncos were literally dropping valves
| right off the lot, so this feels quite minor.
| MBCook wrote:
| First year Ford Mustang Mach E: can confirm.
| xyst wrote:
| Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point. The
| recall is just another multimillion dollar deficit on the books
| now.
|
| Whether this product line will be sustainable (or exist) 1 year
| from now is unlikely.
|
| Lackluster sales. Poor public perception. Truck would likely
| need another overhaul (more money burned) and another 1-2 year
| loss leader phase to test the market, and get their build
| processes updated to scale.
| ZuLuuuuuu wrote:
| Tesla could have owned the entire EV truck market currently,
| if they didn't choose to make a truck that required a big
| amount of R&D and is hard to build. Why Tesla chose such a
| path completely baffles me.
|
| Tesla's mission was "to accelerate the world's transition to
| sustainable energy" which they were doing by making solid and
| affordable EVs and electric storage solutions.
|
| One of the biggest reasons of the success of Model S was
| because it had a modern but conventional design unlike the
| other toy-like EV cars on the market at the time. Model S
| proved that it is possible to build a modern conventional EV
| car that people can buy.
|
| It feels like Cybertruck is coming from a completely
| different mission statement. Actually most of the decisions
| they have been taking for the last 2-3 years feel like it.
| financetechbro wrote:
| I don't see Elon as a business genius and thus the idiotic
| decision to go thru with production for this truck is not
| at all a surprise to me
| matt_s wrote:
| I don't think your first sentence can hold true as soon as
| the designs were released. The way to capture EV truck
| market is to make something that looks like a truck.
| Cybertruck is ugly as all get out.
|
| I saw a Ford F-150 Lightning the other day, looks
| practically the same as an ICE F-150.
| mft_ wrote:
| I've seen rumours here and there (albeit nothing
| particularly reliable) that the Cybertruck might be a
| platform used to learn about this design/manufacturing
| approach. It's hard because it's hard, but the Cybertruck
| is how they learn how to make it easier.
|
| The thinking being, of course, that if/when they get it
| nailed, they've potentially got an advantage to leverage
| over other manufacturers for future cars such as the Model
| 2.
|
| Only time will tell whether this is the case, and whether
| it worked.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is nonsensical, the Cybertruck is a terrible
| platform that had serious Chassis design issues that any
| other automaker would have killed the design over, but
| because Musk's ego is too big, there was never an option
| to say "we need to go back to the drawing board".
| acejam wrote:
| Tesla building the Cybertruck is their attempt to get
| people to buy something specifically because it is "cool",
| and not because it is "an EV".
|
| If the customer buys it, they switch to an EV platform,
| thereby accelerating Tesla's mission of "transition[ing] to
| sustainable energy".
|
| Leading with "it's an EV" is the primary reason why "legacy
| auto" has been scaling back their EV manufacturing, because
| people generally don't care about "EV". They do care about
| something "cool" though.
| faefox wrote:
| They should've gotten some second opinions on what makes
| something "cool" because the Cybertruck is not it.
| snek_case wrote:
| Reports from YouTubers who own the Cybertruck is that (at
| this stage) owning one makes you feel like a celebrity.
| People come to you constantly to take ask questions and
| take pictures with the CT. So, people seem to disagree
| with you.
|
| If that's not enough, there's a long list of celebrities
| that now own cybertrucks, including Kim Kardashian, Lady
| Gaga, Justin Bieber, Jay Z, Steve Aoki, Pharrell, and
| more. Might not fit your definition of "cool", but
| clearly, it does for a lot of people.
| faefox wrote:
| Affirming that I have even less in common with the likes
| of Kim Kardashian and Steve Aoki than previously
| understood is perhaps the nicest compliment you could
| have given me. Thank you!
| acejam wrote:
| I would encourage you to watch any recent YouTube video
| produced by any Cybertruck owner. Middle America, who is
| generally anti-EV, disagrees with you. That is why Tesla
| is doing this.
| ZuLuuuuuu wrote:
| Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y are also cool cars,
| and they have the advantages of being EV. And this
| formula was working with these models, increasing EV
| adoption massively. Why change a winning formula?
|
| Cybertruck tried to be over the top cool, and sacrificed
| some basics like time-to-market, easy production, range,
| safety... And it was a totally unnecessary change of
| strategy. Cybertruck really didn't need to be stainless
| steel or low-poly in order to sell. Model Y being one of
| the best selling cars in the world proves this.
| acejam wrote:
| It was working for people who were willing to buy an EV.
| Those people generally fall into two groups: 1) They
| specifically want an EV due to $reasons or 2) They are
| looking for a new car, and are willing to consider an EV.
| Both of these groups are fine with the current S3XY
| lineup because they resemble "normal" cars. That's why
| the Model S originally had so much success - it was a
| normal car, but electric. Even then, it was still a hard
| sell in 2013 to early adopters.
|
| I'm going to stereotype a bit here, but Tesla
| YouTubers/Tweeters/Fanatics and the two groups above
| aside, everyone else is generally "against" EVs. If you
| own one, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The
| Cybertruck is Tesla's attempt to change that. Don't
| convince them on the green-ness or potential cost-savings
| of home charging, convince them because it's cool. It's
| something that no other manufacturer can compete against.
| (for now)
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| There was never a snowball's chance in hell that once Ford
| and GMC got involved in the EV truck market that Tesla
| would be anything but an afterthought.
| danans wrote:
| > Tesla's mission was "to accelerate the world's transition
| to sustainable energy" which they were doing by making
| solid and affordable EVs and electric storage solutions.
|
| Since far before Tesla, selling cars at high profit margins
| has ultimately been about selling power/attention/sex-
| appeal, not to advance an objective like "accelerate the
| world's transition to sustainable energy. That's a nice
| side effect, but it's not ultimately what sells them.
| Otherwise, all of the original fan base of Tesla would have
| bought Nissan Leafs (which preceded Tesla).
|
| Trendsetting companies need hero products that capture (or
| even set) the zeitgeist.
|
| Teslas older models once played that role, but no longer,
| since they are so common at this point in their primary
| target markets.
|
| To recapture customer imagination, the Cybertruck is
| promoting the "faux survivalism" hero narrative. It's the
| same narrative that is selling Rivians and F150, but taken
| to the aesthetic extreme.
| jsight wrote:
| > Tesla could have owned the entire EV truck market
| currently, if they didn't choose to make a truck that
| required a big amount of R&D and is hard to build. Why
| Tesla chose such a path completely baffles me.
|
| I often think this, but then I think about how it would
| have actually happened. Right now, Tesla doesn't have
| enough domestically produced 2170s to supply both 3 and Y
| production. The 4680 ramp has been so slow that it is
| barely ahead of CT production anyway.
|
| I think some of their failures on the battery supply chain
| side are bleeding over into product failures at this point.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| How do you arrive at lackluster sales conclusion? They are
| obviously just production limited as they scale up a new
| line. Can you place an order today and buy a cybertruck? No
| there is still a year+ long wait list of people wanting to
| buy.
| hnbad wrote:
| It's literally the meme truck. That meme has sailed and died.
| People will still hoot and holler when they spot you driving
| one in the wild but that's different from people wanting to
| pay the steep sticker price for what the car actually is.
|
| I don't see moms picking up their kids with these trucks. I
| don't see people using them for camping. The unnamed
| companion ATV seems to have been recalled for not being
| roadsafe and doesn't seem to be coming back any time soon.
|
| It's possible there will be a revised Cybertruck eventually
| but this thing has so many design flaws and underdelivers on
| so many promises (e.g. "you could use it as a boat" when
| taking it to the carwash voids your warranty) that it's not
| mass market compatible. Heck, it's not even possible to make
| it street legal in Europe without massive changes.
|
| As far as Musk's ventures go, the Cybertruck is up there with
| the Hyperloop in terms of what it is and what was promised.
| Remember the unprovoked throwaway claim that it'll let you
| use it as a source for compressed air to drive pneumatic
| tools? Or the talk about selling a version of it to the
| military as an APC?
| qwerpy wrote:
| I'm definitely going to be picking up my kids in this truck
| and camping, but maybe I'm just a weird tech bro. In the
| arms race that is American roads, it's objectively safer
| for my family to be driven around in a massive steel tank.
| I also love the look.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| > Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this point
|
| Is it just me or many people don't seem to understand fixed
| costs vs. variable costs that I learnt about in high school
| while growing up in the third world?
|
| Don't people have to take Econ 101 in the USA or whatever the
| equivalent is in their countries? Or is it optional.
|
| Not even going to bring up "advanced" concepts like COGS that
| I know about while being a CS major and never taking an
| economics course.
|
| What you said doesn't many sense, because, say they sell 100
| million trucks, according to your logic they would end up
| with a huge loss. But in reality they would make a big
| profit.
| michaelt wrote:
| Some companies will _literally_ sell products for less than
| the cost of the components that go into them.
|
| Sometimes that's a supermarket selling 'loss leaders' to
| get people into the store where they'll hopefully buy other
| things - or a games console manufacturer planning to make
| up the loss because they get paid for every game sold.
|
| Other times a manufacturer wants to hit a promised launch
| date, and hopes to get manufacturing costs down later.
| Maybe they haven't had time to set up certain cost-saving
| automation, or a planned lower-cost component wasn't ready
| in time for launch. Maybe their widget supplier has
| promised a lower cost when they're ordering 10,000 a month
| but right now they're only ordering 500 a month.
|
| Of course, without access to insider information we can
| only guess if this is really occurring...
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Some companies will literally sell products for less
| than the cost of the components that go into them.
|
| But that is not what Tesla is doing, is it?
| ripjaygn wrote:
| > Of course, without access to insider information we can
| only guess if this is really occurring...
|
| No need to guess, the GP poster confidently stated this:
|
| > Tesla is losing money on every truck sold at this
| point.
|
| They must be an insider or have reliable insider
| information.
| vengefulduck wrote:
| Of course, this is the only explanation. No one can just
| make stuff up on the internet. That's impossible.
| yreg wrote:
| Worrisome, but good that it got caught before anyone got into an
| accident. The issue shouldn't be present in all trucks, but
| better to recall all of them to be safe.
|
| BTW: What happens if you fully press both the acceleration and
| brake pedals? I would hope for the brakes to be more powerful and
| stop the car, is that the case?
| zaroth wrote:
| Since the accelerator is drive by wire, pushing both pedals
| disables the accelerator, and produces a warning chime and
| alert message on the screen.
|
| The brakes do not have to be stronger, it's handled in
| software.
|
| If the accelerator is pinned down, letting up on the brake will
| cause the car to start accelerating again. So you have to keep
| on the brake and then put the car in park. Pressing the
| accelerator while in park does nothing.
| techdmn wrote:
| > pushing both pedals disables the accelerator
|
| Much to the frustration of those of us who occasionally
| engage in some left-foot braking. (Though TBH in my
| experience it's usually more effective in FWD cars.)
| jandrese wrote:
| What is the point of heel-toe or left foot braking if there
| is no gearbox to rev match?
| techdmn wrote:
| I like the left-foot jab jab jab to induce a slide while
| still on the power. I've read about other mixed input
| strategies, but that was the only one I was ever able to
| pull off to my satisfaction.
| randlet wrote:
| I don't know about the Cybertruck specifically, but yes, brakes
| are virtually always capable of providing more stopping force
| than the engine can oppose.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > The issue shouldn't be present in all trucks, but better to
| recall all of them to be safe.
|
| There is a video floating around of this issue, and based on
| that I'd call it an issue in all shipped trucks. While only a
| couple had it loose from the factory, the fact the two plates
| are only press fitted and when it slides up there is a perfect
| nook for it to get stuck in is a huge problem.
|
| If I was a Cybertruck owner I'd inspect it at least every week
| and schedule the recall work ASAP.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| They aren't only press fitted, they are glued together, but a
| change on assembly line lead to chance that some soap got on
| pedal and prevented the glue from bonding the two parts
| yreg wrote:
| Sounds like a screw would be better.
| masklinn wrote:
| > What happens if you fully press both the acceleration and
| brake pedals? I would hope for the brakes to be more powerful
| and stop the car, is that the case?
|
| You get a "both pedals pressed" alert and the accelerator is
| ignored, so the brakes don't even need to overcome the engines.
| The behaviour is logical at least since tesla added blended
| braking (though I'd assume it also did that before then).
|
| However as soon as you release the brakes the car starts
| accelerating as whatever the throttle is at again.
| sp332 wrote:
| NHTSA targets a 5th percentile person being able to stop the
| car with the engine at full throttle.
| https://www.autosafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/The-Br...
| echoangle wrote:
| Not related to your comment itself, but that's a really bad
| paper/document. When analyzing the case "sudden full throttle
| when the car is stopped", it is assumed that breaking only
| begins after 1.5s. Does a normal driver not keep the brake
| held while stopped at a traffic light. Also, he later assumes
| that data from a drag race can be compared to the case of
| sudden acceleration when at a stop because drag race drivers
| should floor the throttle, too. As far as I know, flooring is
| often not the fastest way to accelerate (just like fully
| braking compared to ABS), so the drag race data does not
| necessarily represent full throttle from a stop.
| fergie wrote:
| Apparently the brake overrides the accelerator, so if you keep
| your calm, you can come to a stop.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Tesla Cybertruck: "if you keep your calm, you can stop"
| jsight wrote:
| Yes, this is the case on every production vehicle. People don't
| always realize it, though, and fail to push the brake all the
| way and hold it.
| jandrese wrote:
| That's not quite the same. In Tesla hitting the brakes kills
| power to the motor. In an ICE car this is not the case, and
| if the engine is running away it can bleed off vacuum and you
| lose your brake assist. So if someone panics and starts
| pumping the brake pedal they end up in a runaway acceleration
| scenario until they remember that neutral exists.
|
| In the real world runaway acceleration cases are extremely
| rare and always involve a degree of operator error, but they
| make for exciting headlines so people get the wrong idea
| about how common they are.
| giarc wrote:
| "until they remember that neutral exists." Or they can just
| turn the ignition off. When I was 16 and took driving
| school, we did this as an exercise. The instructor just
| simply reached over and turned the key and I had to walk
| through starting it again (I can't remember if we pulled
| over or not). I wonder what would happen to a push button
| start car if you just pushed it while in motion?
| jsight wrote:
| I think you may have to hold it down to force it to stop,
| but this isn't something that I've tried.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > In an ICE car this is not the case
|
| That hasn't been true for a number of years. Almost all ICE
| cars on sale today will cut the throttle if you hit the
| brake.
| kube-system wrote:
| > In an ICE car this is not the case, and if the engine is
| running away it can bleed off vacuum and you lose your
| brake assist
|
| In an older car, yes. Current cars in the US are all fly-
| by-wire throttle, and programmed to close the throttle if
| you apply the brake. And when the throttle is closed,
| vacuum is restored, and you will have full brake power. All
| major automakers started doing this did this after the 2009
| Toyota "sudden acceleration" debacle.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Very few people can keep their calm in an unexpected situation.
| Even people who are trained and supposedly prepared for
| stressful situations often panic.
| zelias wrote:
| I guess the budget for QA went straight into Elon's pay package
| ripjaygn wrote:
| His salary from Tesla's bank accounts is zero. Companies don't
| have their market cap in their bank accounts as cash which they
| use to pay executives.
|
| Also, not like other automakers don't have recalls like this.
| You just don't hear about it here because... reasons. The
| legendary name for quality, Toyota had its wheels literally
| falling off.
| malfist wrote:
| Aye, Tesla pays him nothing, that's why his compensation
| package was struck down in court?
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Yes.
|
| > Tesla noted that since 2018, Musk hasn't drawn any
| compensation, including salary or cash bonuses
|
| His stock compensation was performance based/
|
| > Shareholders approved Musk's pay package back in 2018.
| However, according to an Axios report, very few investors
| at the time believed that they would have to pay out on it.
| That's because the compensation plan was tied to extreme
| performance goals that seemed improbable Therefore, at the
| time, the expected value of the Tesla pay package was
| "closer to zero than it was to $56 billion"
|
| You cannot pay for auto parts quality with stock options
| that pay out only when 'extreme peformance goals' are hit.
| So Musk's salary had pretty much zero impact on this
| recall, unlike, say, other company car recalls which they
| could have presumably used the company CEO's salary to
| prevent the recalls, going by the assumption that the OP
| was making.
| WrongAssumption wrote:
| His compensation was in stock options.
| jrmg wrote:
| Those are still something of value that the company is
| giving to him. They're just not cash.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| The point is that you cannot pay for car quality with
| stock options that are worth zero if the stock doesn't
| double and car sale increases don't meet really high
| metrics. So the OP in this thread is wrong.
|
| What they said would be true of all the other car
| companies that directly pay the CEO, and they all have
| safety recalls. Lets take Toyota. Toyota could've used
| some of the CEOs pay to stop wheels from falling off
| their cars recently.
| jrmg wrote:
| Okay, that's a good point. It's not liquid. In theory,
| though, surely the company could sell stock (or options,
| even) instead of granting it to Elon?
|
| [Edit: this is all a bit academic though. I don't think
| Tesla's process problems, of whatever magnitude you think
| they are, are as simply solved as "if they just spent a
| bit more this would be fine!", or that the 'solution' to
| the Elon problem, of whatever magnitude you think that
| is, is "if they just paid him less!"]
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| As of now he is actually paid 0 for last 4 years when Tesla
| stock has gone up by 900% (even after the recent stock
| slide).
|
| People forget that if the stock price didn't at least
| double and Tesla meet some manufacturing and sales quotas,
| Elon's pay package would be 0. The only reason he's getting
| paid 44B or whatever number is because the stock price has
| gone through the roof and the Model Y has become the best
| selling car in the US. On top of that, he is required to
| hold the stock for at least 5 years, so even if the judge
| didn't invalidate his pay, he wouldn't see any liquidity
| for at least 5 years.
|
| You don't need to like Elon to see that his pay package was
| completely fine. I doubt many CEO's would accept a pay
| package where they don't get paid a dime unless the stock
| price at least doubles, a very large number of CEO's would
| also be paid 0 under such a pay package.
| norir wrote:
| How does this not create perverse incentives? I have
| noticed that Musk has repeatedly made fraudulent claims
| about Tesla. I can't help but wonder how many of his
| fantastical claims are precisely in service of boosting
| the stock price. Also what exactly are the material
| consequences for him if he didn't get paid by Tesla?
| Essentially zero.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| > I can't help but wonder how many of his fantastical
| claims are precisely in service of boosting the stock
| price
|
| Like these ones where he said the stock price was too
| high and it then crashed a a full 10%?
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-says-
| sto...
|
| Or when he said Tesla is worth approximately zero without
| FSD fully functional?
|
| Stock price based compensation is extremely common for
| top exectives.
| funac wrote:
| tesla booked musk's much-discussed options package as a $2.5
| billion expense. opportunity cost aside, it's silly to imply
| that a public company isn't going to act differently after
| it's stuck a significant fraction of its revenue on the wrong
| side of its balance sheet: analysts definitely will be.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| > tesla booked musk's much-discussed options package as a
| $2.5 billion expense
|
| As stated elsewhere the point is that you cannot pay for
| car quality with stock options that are worth zero if the
| stock doesn't double and car sale increases don't meet
| really high metrics
|
| Unlike the other car companies that pay CEOs directly, like
| Toyota could've used their CEO's pay to instead maybe stop
| their wheels from falling off recently.
|
| > it's silly to imply that a public company isn't going to
| act differently after it's stuck a significant fraction of
| its revenue on the wrong side of its balance sheet
|
| What? The $2.5B isn't coming from revenue.
| financetechbro wrote:
| If Elons pay package from 2018 gets revoked and they issue a
| new one (supposedly after moving from Delaware to Texas law),
| then it's estimated Tesla will have $20bn+ accounting charge
| newsclues wrote:
| But did he provide value to shareholders ?
| a5huynh wrote:
| Just to add context since I was curious about "Toyota had it
| wheels literally falling off".
|
| That was a recall from 2022
| (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/business/toyota-bz4x-wheel-
| fi...) for 260 vehicles (their model BZ4X electric SUV).
|
| The Cybertruck recall affects 3,878 vehicles
| (https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60538687/2024-tesla-
| cyber...).
| ripjaygn wrote:
| That's some misleading context since the article you linked
| says:
|
| > Only 260 BZ4Xs had been delivered to customers before the
| recall was announced
|
| If they had sold 4000 like the truck, they would have
| recalled 4000. Both recalls affected all the cars sold for
| the model.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > . After performing a series of tests, it decided on April 12 to
| issue a recall after determining that an "[a]n unapproved change
| introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of
| the pad onto the accelerator pedal," and that "[r]esidual
| lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal."
|
| How do you have so little quality control and insight into your
| manufacturing process that someone on your own production line
| can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing process that
| no one noticed?
|
| I guess when analysts said the incumbent auto manufacturers would
| have a large advantage over Tesla in manufacturing, this is what
| they meant?
|
| Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have made
| for a company that has done well up until now.
| htrp wrote:
| >How do you have so little quality control and insight into
| your manufacturing process that someone on your own production
| line can introduce a new step to your truck manufacturing
| process that no one noticed?
|
| That's legal covering the company.
|
| I'd bet this was just a general design flaw.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| To me both sound plausible (that the process was added, and
| that it's a fabricated story). Either way we will never know,
| and ultimately it's Tesla's responsibility to make sure the
| accelerator pedal doesn't get suck in the on position due to
| manufacturing defects.
| smith7018 wrote:
| We'll find out in discovery if a lawsuit around this ever
| happens, I suppose
| johnmaguire wrote:
| What does unapproved mean in this context? That it didn't pass
| by Musk's desk?
| bitexploder wrote:
| I am generally mildly negative on many Tesla decisions, but
| this has happened to the big manufacturers as well. Stock floor
| mats that caused stuck accelerator. Toyotas infamous stuck
| accelerator code that actually hurt people. Their code was
| reputedly a giant mess.
| chollida1 wrote:
| If Telsa and the article are telling the truth then these
| aren't anywhere near the same.
|
| The mat was a design flaw from the beginning that missed QA,
| that happens in any large scale manufacturing as you can't
| just get everything right from the start.
|
| If the article is telling the truth, this was a change made
| on the build line that wasnt' approved, that's a huge f$ck up
| if true and an incredible show of incompetence if someone can
| just start making design changes without approval on the
| build line.
| bitexploder wrote:
| It's better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way vs a
| production line mistake? That is similar to saying a simple
| bug is worse than an architectural flaw that no one caught
| at design time. Far more eyes are on the design flaw vs a
| production bug.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _vs a production line mistake?_
|
| I think the point they are getting at, if I understand
| the commenter correctly (and assuming the wording of the
| article is accurate), is that someone on the line had the
| ability to make a change to the production process
| without authorization.
|
| That would not just be a "production line mistake",
| instead it is indicative of a serious policy and
| procedure failure. No single person on the production
| line should have the ability to make unauthorized changes
| to the procedures being used in production.
|
| I hate analogies, but to use yours, it is a rogue
| employee that was able to change critical code with no
| approval process -- and no one else noticed that code was
| being changed and went ahead with shipping it out.
| taeric wrote:
| This is basically how all construction and manufacturing
| jobs work out, though? It isn't an isolated "single
| person" that can make arbitrary changes. They can propose
| something and it should be reviewed.
|
| So, I don't think it is quite as simple as an isolated
| bug, per se. But it is very common for changes to get
| introduced at build time of physical things. Depending on
| where and what the change is, the level of review for it
| will be very different.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _This is basically how all construction and
| manufacturing jobs work out, though?_
|
| Not really. Any place with a decent QA department would
| sample a part, compare it to the specification, and raise
| an alarm because the part differs from the specification.
| There also should be occasional audits on the build
| process itself, which should have identified this, as it
| would differ from the specified process.
|
| This type of issue (again, assuming the articles wording
| is true -- I have no idea) can only occur if there is
| either bad/missing QA, or bad/missing specifications.
|
| > _But it is very common for changes to get introduced at
| build time of physical things_
|
| Even in construction you need to have changes approved
| (i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect,
| engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which
| this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built"
| drawings.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > Even in construction you need to have changes approved
| (i.e. a "change order" approved by the architect,
| engineer, and owner). Even extremely minor changes (which
| this would not be) must be documented on the "as-built"
| drawings.
|
| Do you really think this is what happens on job sites?
| Does this match your personal experience? Because my
| initial reaction was to laugh to myself at how rarely
| contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers would
| actually engage a process like the one you are describing
| here. Non-spec stuff happens all the time without record,
| even in firms with solid QA.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Do you really think this is what happens on job sites?
| Does this match your personal experience?_
|
| I worked in ICI (Industrial, Commercial, Institutional)
| construction for ~10 years. Yes, this matches my
| experience. Perhaps it is different where you are from.
|
| I also experienced this while doing utility locating for
| oil & gas pipelines (~2 years). As-built drawings were
| very accurate, and detailed any deviation from the
| initial drawings.
| kylecordes wrote:
| In the 2000s I had a SaaS firm making software for
| underground utility locating companies so I learned a lot
| about the industry. In most parts of the country as built
| drawings are unusual for residential property anyway.
| Locating staff mostly shows up, looks at whatever
| drawings are available, and then has to figure out what
| was actually done from the clues and by using locating
| equipment. Many of these folks end up with a very subtle
| understanding of what common practice was by different
| utility companies in various specific areas in specific
| eras.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _In most parts of the country as built drawings are
| unusual for residential property anyway._
|
| I was doing large transmission pipelines (i.e. NPS 24 to
| NPS 56), so I can't speak to residential, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if there was less attention paid to as-built
| drawings when the cost of damage/replacement wasn't in
| the millions of dollars.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I am involved with software that moves data between
| construction ERP systems and financial systems. Typically
| used in mid market commercial companies.
|
| The single most commonly synced entity is Commitment
| Change Order items.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Do you really think this is what happens on job sites?
| Does this match your personal experience?
|
| Yes, it does. I'm a construction project manager, I'm not
| having my crew do _any_ work that isn't represented in
| the current revision of the plans and specs without
| approval because that's the only way you get paid for the
| extras. Also if it's an unapproved and unwanted change,
| you have to pay to remove it. Anyone managing a project
| who cares about managing their risk is going to submit
| RFIs and RFCs for every change.
|
| It's possible that the (tiny and insignificant)
| residential market is different, but that's how
| commercial and industrial construction works.
|
| It's possible some tiny and insignificant changes like
| moving a receptacle or data opening a couple inches
| aren't properly documented on the as-builts, but major
| changes almost always are.
|
| > Because my initial reaction was to laugh to myself at
| how rarely contractors, subcontractors, and crewmembers
| would actually engage a process like the one you are
| describing here.
|
| The firms you hire to work on your house aren't
| representative of the firms who manage or work on
| commercial and industrial projects.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > It's possible some tiny and insignificant changes like
| moving a receptacle or data opening a couple inches
| aren't properly documented on the as-builts, but major
| changes almost always are.
|
| Based on these responses I should have been more clear.
| These small and inconsequential things are what I'm
| referring to. Yes, the projects I'm familiar with track
| the medium and big stuff, and most of the small stuff.
| taylodl wrote:
| Absolutely! Why? Because it's _your_ ass that 's on the
| line should any of your "self-motivated" deviations cause
| financial harm, injury, or death, and _you_ are going to
| be held responsible for those damages.
|
| No one with any brains wants to be "that" guy.
|
| That's why we have "cookie cutter" houses and even office
| buildings. All the kinks have been _legitimately_ worked
| out and they can just crank them out. Bespoke
| construction? Cost overrun city. Now you know why.
| taeric wrote:
| This is going on the idea that there wasn't a
| documentation event with this change? I'm positing that
| knowing it is a recall on all of the trucks indicates
| that it was, in fact, a signed off change on the assembly
| line.
|
| That is to say, just because it was on the assembly line
| doesn't mean it wasn't reviewed. And just because it was
| reviewed doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. Part of the
| sign off was almost certainly "does not need retesting"
| for implementation. Which, was clearly a mistake. But
| isn't a sign of a broken QA system.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Relevant part of the quote which started this discussion:
|
| > _"[a]n unapproved change [...]_
|
| Unapproved, to me, implies that it was not reviewed or
| signed-off.
|
| > _Part of the sign off was almost certainly "does not
| need retesting" for implementation_
|
| If you are not assuring your quality, you have a QA
| failure. Regardless, I initially said "serious policy and
| procedure failure". Which, if you change a safety-
| critical component in your product and don't do testing
| on it, that is a serious policy failure.
| jon-wood wrote:
| This sounds like standard corporate ass covering to me.
| "Oh, that was just an unauthorised rogue employee,
| they've been fired" sounds a lot better than "someone
| suggested lubing up the accelerator to speed up
| production, and no one thought to check it won't cause
| problems".
| ziddoap wrote:
| For sure, I have no idea if the wording is truthful or
| just standard corporate blame dilution. But if the
| wording is truthful, this would be a significant process
| & policy failure.
| explaininjs wrote:
| If you ask me the lube just accelerated the problem. The
| root cause remains that you have a part secured with only
| a friction fit, in a setting where if that friction fit
| fails you have a a critical failure of the system.
| Friction fits _can_ be very strong when properly
| established between appropriate materials, but this was
| not that. This was a cheap plastic cover made to be a bit
| too small over the metal lever. Over time with heat, sand
| /dirt, cold, pressure, vibration, etc. cycles, this was
| going to fall off regardless.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > It's better that a mat was designed in a dangerous way
| vs a production line mistake? That is similar to saying a
| simple bug is worse than an architectural flaw that no
| one caught at design time. Far more eyes are on the
| design flaw vs a production bug.
|
| :) I think you're missing my point, or I 've failed to
| explain it clearly.
|
| A design flaw is bad, but we can't eliminate those.
| According to this article an assembly line employee went
| rouge and introduced a change without telling anyone.
|
| If the article is correct then clearly these two things
| aren't even near comparable. We expect design flaws and
| adapt, we don't expect employees to go rouge and change
| the design without telling anyone.
|
| Now the article or Tesla could be lying here but this is
| the facts as we know them.
|
| Does that help clear things up for you?
|
| I also dont' think you deserved the downvotes I saw you
| got for just misunderstanding. Sorry that happend to you!
| bitexploder wrote:
| I don't believe I misunderstand anything. This would be
| an interesting case study. It is very convenient to blame
| an employee "going rogue" for a dangerous issue like
| this. The design wasn't even changed. They just used a
| lubricant (soap?) to slide it on.
|
| This overall points out the immaturity in Tesla's
| manufacturing process if changes like this can happen and
| then occur or affect every vehicle of a particular type
| produced, does it not? Overall, it still seems like a
| "below the line" change. These can still be quite
| impactful (see: memory corruption bugs leading to
| compromise and functional exploits). But it is still more
| akin to a bug or production flaw than a design flaw.
| toast0 wrote:
| A design error leaves a papertrail for future study and
| redress.
|
| An unapproved/undocumented production change may leave
| only the misproduced items. Mistakes happen, but this
| sounds more like changing the process without review.
| diydsp wrote:
| wrt to the code: Although NASA found many aesthetic issues
| with the Toyota code, it did not find a smoking gun. [1]
| Presumably many other of their other products are running
| successfully with similar code. To put the comparison bt
| Toyota and Tesla in perspective: Toyota is an 85 year old
| company which ships about 10 million vehicles per year. Tesla
| has shipped almost 5 million vehicles total as of July
| 2023.[2]
|
| [1] "In conducting their report, NASA engineers evaluated the
| electronic circuitry in Toyota vehicles and analyzed more
| than 280,000 lines of software code for any potential flaws
| that could initiate an unintended acceleration incident. "
|
| "NASA engineers found no electronic flaws in Toyota vehicles
| capable of producing the large throttle openings required to
| create dangerous high-speed unintended acceleration
| incidents."
|
| "The two mechanical safety defects identified by NHTSA more
| than a year ago - "sticking" accelerator pedals and a design
| flaw that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by
| floor mats - remain the only known causes for these kinds of
| unsafe unintended acceleration incidents."
|
| https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-
| department-t...
|
| [2] https://www.licarco.com/news/how-many-tesla-cars-have-
| been-s...
| donkers wrote:
| That Toyota code was a total mess and NASA missed a few
| things. Take a look at this report from a CMU prof.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236303
| SilasX wrote:
| Correct, but, to bring it back to the original point,
| there's a difference between "sloppy code" and "sloppy
| code that cascades into unintended acceleration". The
| fact that it didn't _actually_ cascade isn 't a reason to
| keep writing sloppy code, of course. But such sloppiness
| also remains a red herring until they can actually find a
| concrete way that code could have contributed.
| warcher wrote:
| Last I heard there was speculation that the CPU was
| vulnerable to an alpha particle flipped bit error and
| fixing that was the eventual patch. A one in a million
| shot happens ten times a year (sic) when you ship ten
| million cars a year covering many billions of miles.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Or the Takata airbag scandal [1]. A decade worth of airbags
| that were compromised, over 100 million vehicles that had to
| have all airbags replaced, likely 100+ injured and dozens of
| deaths. The sheer scale of that is absolutely mind-blowing,
| there is virtually no car manufacturer (except Tesla,
| ironically - I think they manufacture in-house?) that did not
| get hit.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takata_Corporation#Defectiv
| e_a...
| delfinom wrote:
| It just means Tesla bought air bags from the other
| manufacturers for airbags. Takata just happened to be the
| biggest supplier. My old v6 Honda was unaffected by airbag
| recalls because they used airbags from Autoliv. There is
| also Daicel and Nippon Kayaku and ZF.
| danielfoster wrote:
| That's what I thought until I saw the video. The top metal
| panel that covers the accelerator literally falls off,
| wedging itself between the accelerator and the car. It's not
| a fabric cover.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| My Corolla was also recalled - code was a mess as with most
| embedded projects but no obvious bugs related to unintended
| acceleration - think the cases reported were less than a 300.
|
| Never encountered the issue.
|
| They replaced my floor mats and installed a new pedal
| assembly and updated to the ECU with "brake override" ability
| - meaning if I pressed the brake pedal it would ignore input
| from the throttle.
| delfinom wrote:
| Yea many things point to it having been mass hysteria and
| people too stupid to shift their cars in neutral if the
| throttle really did fail.
| skellington wrote:
| Except this has nothing to do with those things.
|
| This is just the f'n rubber pad on the accelerator can come
| off which isn't great, but harms nothing.
|
| What is wrong with the people here?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those
| vehicles.
|
| You can void your warranty by driving them through car
| washes. What exactly is the point of a bulletproof truck
| that can't get wet?
| jsight wrote:
| No, you can't void your warranty that way. That was
| hyperbole.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| "Damage caused by car washes is not covered by the
| warranty." in the owners manual seems to contradict that
| statement.
| jsight wrote:
| The preceding sentence explained why. Car wash damage is
| surprisingly common. I've known people who have had side
| mirrors damaged (not Teslas) and seeing damage to rear
| wipers is common enough that I've seen the results of it.
|
| This whole story was essentially made up by
| mischaracterizing some guy's tiktok. :facepalm
| Qwertious wrote:
| The pad can get wedged under a sill in front of the pedal,
| making the car accelerate even when you release the pedal.
| This could kill people.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| I imagine some of the schadenfreude comes from the Tesla
| bulls proudly proclaiming "and unlike the other OEMs, Tesla
| has _never_ had a recall " for years, when it was just a
| matter of time.
| m463 wrote:
| tesla also has floor mat issues (that it has tried to cover
| up)
| jrmg wrote:
| An 'unapproved change' getting in to the process seems way
| worse to me than just the ['approved'] production process
| having an unforeseen flaw that's being corrected now it's been
| found.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> someone on your own production line can introduce a new step
| to your truck manufacturing process that no one noticed?_
|
| That's actually not unusual at all.
|
| It's perfectly common for an engineer to order that a hole be
| made in a given location on a given part without specifying
| that coolant should be used, or the spindle speed of the drill,
| or how the part should be held in the machine, or that the hole
| should be deburred.
|
| Manufacturing is skilled work.
| trust_bt_verify wrote:
| Bespoke manufacturing and machining is where this kind of
| change would be introduced. Not in a flushed out design being
| produced on a line. It becomes an expensive mistake when
| these types of decisions are made this late in the process.
| Seems like they rushed the design in a number of places.
| mimikatz wrote:
| This exact same thing was seen a Boeing, which isn't a model of
| good manufacturing, but it is semi-commmonplace for the line to
| have unapproved fixes.
|
| https://uk.news.yahoo.com/faa-found-staff-boeings-supplier-0...
| xethos wrote:
| If I may clarify: Unapproved here would typically mean
| engineering hasn't signed off. It does not mean engineering
| was asked and said "Hell no".
| bombcar wrote:
| And additionally, using dish soap to lubricate parts for
| assembly _is standard procedure_ elsewhere in many
| industries. It 's sometimes even recommended in the
| standard manuals as part of a repair procedure (I've had
| refrigerator gaskets that call out using a bit of soap on
| them before installation).
| dns_snek wrote:
| A crucial difference being that there's no risk of your
| refrigerator gasket sending a 3 tonne metal box into a
| crowd of people if it comes loose, unlike the gas pedal
| on a truck.
|
| Playing fast and loose with the processes surrounding
| something as important (and dangerous) as the gas pedal
| is recklessness of the highest order.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Work instructions are kind of like programming - at 'runtime'
| you'll find out all the different ways the technicians can
| misinterpret them, or 'fill in the blanks' for things you
| overlooked.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| And yet every other major auto manufacturer on the planet
| seems to avoid this problem, so clearly Tesla's missing
| something.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This is so far off the mark that it must be sarcasm.
| skellington wrote:
| The hate is so deep that people lose their minds when it
| comes to a minor Tesla issue and conveniently forget the
| HUGE list of problems and recalls from all manufacturers
| over the years.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| In many cases they just don't know about them because
| they're not pushed so hard in the media and people don't
| upvote negative stories about other car manufacturers
| like they do with negative Tesla stories on HN and
| Reddit.
|
| It's very affective, that's why the oil lobby pushes
| negative EV news so hard in the media, especially right
| wing media.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I'm prepared to change my stance on the matter the moment
| someone produces evidence that suggests other
| manufacturers have had instances of on-the-fly changes
| made on their production lines.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I work in manufacturing and sometimes stuff like this happens
| despite controls in place. You can get technicians/assemblers
| who just take it upon themselves to fix a problem rather than
| notifying anyone. To them it is no big deal (i.e. doesn't
| warrant mentioning to engineering), so it must be "no big
| deal".
| danielfoster wrote:
| Pressure to perform?
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I would suspect more "get'r'dun".
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| At least in the instances I have encountered, it came from
| a place of well meaning combined with overconfidence.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Is "Irresponsibility" I feel -- without any true blame /
| shame though.
|
| Complex work is hard.
|
| Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that.
|
| So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's
| shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the
| risky challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex
| job.
|
| ?
|
| EDIT: here is the flaw
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/735775817650
| 408...
|
| yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame, seems like an obvious
| design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on 'soap' to keep
| a flat pedal cover attached to another flat pedal.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I actually blame the engineering/design department for
| this one.
|
| The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a
| single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them?
|
| Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin
| gets too hot or the factory has too much dust in it?
|
| If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including
| mine, a Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a
| single piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker
| glued for style.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Right, it's always dependant on circumstances. I try to
| stress as much as possible that you always need to design
| things in such a way that even the dumbest, newest
| assembler will still be able to build it correctly. And
| often times we review drawings/instructions and find lots
| of poorly outlined procedures.
|
| But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran
| out, but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just
| used that instead". It can be a killer.
| brabel wrote:
| No... I've been a maintenance worker. If you needed
| "Engineering" to help you fix every problem you faced
| everyday in a production line, the Engineer would need to
| come to work with you every day. If you stopped the
| production line until "someone higher up" came down to
| approve your changes, you'd better make sure you have a
| strong reason to do so as the company will be losing
| millions while you wait :).
|
| You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's
| really up to the technician to know when something requires
| notifying Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll
| get rid of you for being annoying... notify too little and
| shit like this can happen, but in the very large majority
| of cases, it doesn't.
| er4hn wrote:
| I haven't been a maintenance worker, but I've worked as
| an SWE in a company with a large IT dept. Sometimes it's
| faster to work around them to find solutions to doing
| your job. Both sides have good intentions but the IT
| dept. cannot move nimbly.
|
| Same story everywhere.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I don't have a problem with technicians solving problems.
| But as an engineer I would like to codify the solution so
| that A) we're implementing a controlled process and B) if
| there's a better solution out there I can make that
| recommendation or fix the system. When you take it upon
| yourself then problems only happen if you don't
| communicate.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| > If you stopped the production line until "someone
| higher up" came down to approve your changes, you'd
| better make sure you have a strong reason to do so as the
| company will be losing millions while you wait
|
| Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson
| that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Human nature. I run into this all the time. I've lost count
| of the number of times I've asked a user "Why did you not
| just mention this was not working right and you are working
| around it? We could have fixed this, but if you do not say
| anything it might be a while before someone on the dev team
| notices."
| agumonkey wrote:
| There's something difficult about notifying problems. You
| might make people angry, you might feel like a moron
| because you misunderstood, or guilty because you worry how
| they feel.
| bgirard wrote:
| Agreed. For me it's often the time it takes to find the
| contact to notify, start a conversation, update the
| conversation, wait for the issue to be picked up, wait
| for the software to be updated. Now repeat for everything
| you notice.
|
| If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be
| doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority
| of the time to work around the issue and immediately get
| back to work.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Wait, don't car assembly lines have a big red button you
| can push if you find a defect? Haven't they for many
| years? Does pushing that button really make everyone
| angry?
|
| That's not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
| agumonkey wrote:
| You're right, in some settings there's everything in
| place to ease communicating issues. But what if it's not
| something clear enough to trigger it ?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah our support people at my company do the same thing.
| Then you'll get a report 6 months later that "[big
| critically important feature] is not working" and you'll
| look into it and support has adopted a process that
| essentially disables that feature or they have a workaround
| for a bug that was fixed 4 years ago and because they never
| entered the conversation at that time they still do the
| workaround.
|
| We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one
| point because they did a big round of updates and "none of
| them worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each
| of those components and 95% of what they claimed didn't
| work actually did. But meanwhile you've got product
| managers and other people wading into the conversation to
| try to tell you to fix something that isn't actually the
| problem.
|
| We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop
| excluding people from the conversation about product
| problems. I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality
| management system of some sort before the company's product
| implodes.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| There was a poorly implemented customer support system
| that I worked with once that due to the way the app
| worked, support could run a query that would essentially
| scan the entire database, predictably it'd hit a proxy
| timeout. So what happened instead was they would open 10+
| tabs doing the _exact same query_ hoping one would get
| lucky and succeed, and we had to figure out why our
| database was getting ddos 'd. Trying to explain that they
| were actually making the issue _worse_ with the
| workaround was very painful, saying stuff like "well
| what did you change, it was working fine for months."
| IshKebab wrote:
| Have you tried thinking of the reasons? I can think of
| several:
|
| * There's probably a small chance it actually _would_ get
| fixed, and therefore a decent probability that reporting it
| would be a waste of their time.
|
| * They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and
| waiting for fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the
| workaround was in place there was no need for a fix.
|
| * Sometimes the people running projects you use can be
| hostile, which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and
| even stressful. Much better to avoid interacting with them
| if at all possible.
|
| * They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report
| it.
|
| * They simply didn't have time to report it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that devs often underestimate just how difficult it
| is for users to report problems. The most common problems
| are that the users feel ignored, like they're being a
| burden on the devs, or scolded (for not reporting it
| correctly, for "not holding it right", etc.). It's even
| common for there not to be an easy way to report such
| problems ("use Discord", "sign up for an account on this
| website and report there", etc.)
|
| Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant
| it can be. If I can come up with a workaround without
| having to report the issue, that's what I'll tend to do.
| And if I have to talk to tech support rather than the devs?
| That's simply not going to happen unless I'm trapped into
| using the product.
|
| We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.
| rurp wrote:
| To make things worse the largest consumer tech companies,
| like Google and Apple, have a well deserved reputation
| for caring very little about customer feedback. It's a
| normal thing to lookup how to fix an annoyance or
| regression, finding hundreds of people posting about the
| same complaint, without ever getting any sort of response
| or reaction from the company.
|
| Heck the only support Google offers for many products is
| a community forum that their own employees never post on,
| and I assume few even look at. People have largely been
| conditioned to think that tech companies don't care about
| their feedback.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Very true, but funny enough, AWS has some of the best
| support of any product I have ever used.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev?
|
| This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be
| working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with
| the code, so the Devs can address. You've been dealing
| with bad support teams, because your experience is not
| how support is supposed to work.
|
| Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work
| arounds by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over
| a given system, trying 107 different versions of some
| framework, causing lots of downtime, and working
| nights/weekends, just to learn that some UNDOCUMENTED
| cludge fucking bullshit is what's actually causing the
| issue.
|
| Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the
| users.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Why are users reporting issues directly to Dev?
|
| With open source, you're usually reporting to devs. With
| commercial software, usually to tech support or to
| nobody.
|
| > You've been dealing with bad support teams, because
| your experience is not how support is supposed to work.
|
| Yes, I know -- but it is how the majority of support
| actually is, if there is even support available at all.
| In a whole lot of cases, there is none.
|
| I'm talking about software meant for consumer use.
| Software for business use is much better on these issues,
| although you still do find them. At my workplace, we
| recently took a large financial hit (and almost lost an
| important customer) because of bad and unresponsive tech
| support from a supplier. It happens.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > Why did you not just mention this was not working right
| and you are working around it?
|
| Because in the real world messengers get shot.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical
| article is "no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like
| safety culture.
| jmspring wrote:
| It seems typical Elon Musk to me.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| Tesla desperately wishes it could have the safety culture
| of Boeing.
| ncr100 wrote:
| I speculate in a Musk company, this "I will fix it" attitude
| would be promoted.
|
| "I sleep on the floor" .. "You're fired for not proactively
| fixing a problem I just thought of a solution to". Is my
| speculation off-base?
| jsight wrote:
| There's an old story about toothpaste boxes and solving the
| empty box problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/com
| ments/2o9dho/the_emp...
|
| I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But just think, if
| the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we might be
| reading a story about how important workers are at solving
| little production problems.
|
| Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix
| problems is great, until they use soap to put glued parts
| on.
| nabilhat wrote:
| It's a design error from the start. The workaround shouldn't
| have happened, but is only one of countless ways this would
| have inevitably happened anyway. Glue has a lot of failure
| modes. Correct application can't be reliably tested non-
| destructively. Product variances are often very hard to
| detect. Degradation with age and physical use can't be
| reliably forecast.
|
| Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push
| into starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than
| the appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more
| reliable, trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and
| that's why it's a common solution that auto manufacturers use
| in this exact application. This was a confoundingly stupid
| place to rely on glue.
| Draiken wrote:
| This is an underrated point. A lot of focus has been put on
| manufacturing procedures when this could've been avoided
| entirely in design.
|
| IDK anything about manufacturing so I wonder if this was
| due to incompetence, to save costs, ignorance or something
| else?
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Why not all of the above?
| FredPret wrote:
| Correct - a great design is also easy / automatic to build
| correctly. This is vastly easier said than done when you
| have a complex product with many components.
|
| I remember reading about the original iPhone's
| manufacturing operations in China - how the Apple engineers
| spent a ton of time making sure that the right way is also
| the easy way for the factory workers.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Same, I work in manufacturing(not automotive but heavy
| construction equipment) and see things like this all the
| time. Workers think they understand/ don't think engineers
| understand or want to do it faster/easier than what they were
| shown.
|
| I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess:
|
| Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-
| assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the
| pad to slip it on.
|
| Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and
| runs but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not
| releasing. further troubleshoot and find it is due to
| pressure not getting to brakes(configuration is such that
| brakes come on if there is loss of hydraulic pressure).
| Replace hydraulic line, machine is working. Remove
| contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly
| pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the
| assembly area, I find that paint decided to use packing
| peanuts to mask holes that the hydraulic fitting go in
| instead of masking tape as directed. The packing peanut tore
| while being removed and the assembly working inserting the
| fittings did not notice.
| jsight wrote:
| > Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-
| assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on
| the pad to slip it on.
|
| TBH, something like this might even get approved by a
| foreman. "Thanks for coming up with a clever way to save a
| few seconds on assembly!"
| downrightmike wrote:
| Definitely not the Total Quality Management model. If
| management and engineers can't be bothered, this shit
| happens.
| germinator wrote:
| It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing,
| you run into small problems and ambiguities all the time.
|
| By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients
| give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need
| to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you
| in the first place.
|
| We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the
| worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that
| if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before,
| nothing would ever get done.
|
| In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide
| off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like
| an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right?
| Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays
| WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Exactly - especially in a TRUCK of all things. The pedal
| area should be expected to get getting all kinds of crud
| and crap in it and be cleaned regularly and be extra
| durable.
| ivix wrote:
| You have written this as if this doesn't routinely happen to
| every auto manufacturer. Why?
| chollida1 wrote:
| > You have written this as if this doesn't routinely happen
| to every auto manufacturer. Why?
|
| Does it?
|
| Which auto manufacturer's have had recalls due to unapproved
| changes made on the assembly line?
|
| I've seen design flaws force a recall but i'm not certain
| that unapproved change s on the assembly line is something
| that routinely happens.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Do we have public post mortems for all the thousands of
| recalls over the years?
|
| For example, what happened with Toyota's wheels falling off
| a couple a years ago.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think Tesla has tons of problems, and I think the Cybertruck
| is a ghastly creation, and I think there have been many worse
| examples of QA problems at Tesla in the past (e.g. steering
| wheels falling off).
|
| But at this point, this just feels like piling on. "OMG, how
| can their processes be so immature that something like this
| happened?!?!" Nearly all new models have significant recalls,
| and I'm not surprised for a vehicle as soup-to-nuts different
| as the Cybertruck. These are _incredibly_ complicated
| engineering processes, so it 's always easy to point out one
| thing (out of potentially millions) and yell "How could this
| happen?!"
|
| I'm certainly not excusing Tesla for their overall QA issues,
| but at the same time this pearl clutching and what seems like
| undue attention every time there is a Tesla recall just seems
| over the top at this point.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have
| made for a company that has done well up until now.
|
| I can't tell if this is a serious comment, because in the past
| there have been many weird problems, like wood trim in Model
| Ys:
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/tech/36274/tesla-model-y-owners-fin...
|
| (and yes, I know it's not exactly the same, but it's certainly
| still very bad to be using home renovation materials in the
| face of part shortages)
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| What's the problem with using trim? It doesn't seem like it'd
| have any impact at all, aside from being funny.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Would you be okay with your child driving a car where
| critical systems were assembled with whatever ad-hoc
| materials were available in local home renovation stores?
| jsight wrote:
| Given that I've never heard of an issue with that
| particular part after years of extended use...
|
| Yes.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Are you willing to bet the safety of your family on the
| efficacy of some wood trim that someone bought at Home
| Depot to meet their manufacturing quota just because none
| of them have spectacularly failed yet? Really?
| jsight wrote:
| Given my knowledge of the part involved and the materials
| used, absolutely. I'd be doing it in the same way that
| I'm betting "the safety of [my] family on the efficacy"
| of the cheap little shim that I bought to make water
| bottles fit in the cup holders better.
|
| Despite the high language involved here, there is no
| risk.
|
| Although if you want to take up a career as a service
| advisor at a dealer, you might make good commissions from
| that style of rhetoric.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| "Given the benefit of hindsight, I sure would!"
|
| Gee good point.
|
| How confident are you that you not hearing about such a
| failure means they haven't happened? How confident are
| you that this is the only component that's been hacked
| together like this?
| jsight wrote:
| Oh, there's plenty of cobbled together stuff. But we were
| talking about strain relief. That's boring compared to
| some of the dumb stuff that I've seen come out of that
| factory. :-)
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| My question was literally asking if/why this was unsafe.
|
| > The trim appears to be providing some strain relief for
| the strap holding the LCC in place, perhaps to keep the
| tension from providing unnecessary stress on the
| condenser during vibration or flexing, or to prevent any
| sharp corners from severing the strap itself.
|
| Can you explain to me why wood trim would be less safe
| than plastic for this?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Are the performance characteristics of that (presumably)
| random piece of wood well-established for a usecase like
| this?
|
| If so: Sure, no problem!
|
| If no: Then that's why.
|
| A key part of engineering pretty much anything is
| understanding the characteristics of the materials.
| Plastics are extremely highly-engineered and well-
| understood (which is why they're everywhere now). Wood
| _can be_ the same, but by default _is not_ , especially
| in mass-production contexts where performance can vary
| dramatically between individual pieces of wood, which is
| one of many reasons you don't see it used in these
| contexts.
|
| This _could_ be totally fine, but there 's absolutely no
| reason that should be the default assumption, especially
| when we know for a fact that was not the typical assembly
| plan and this is a company and culture known for cutting
| corners.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Trim has different heat tolerances than automotive-grade
| plastics, especially those physically attached to heat
| sources.
|
| Also, the glue used in wood trim has a fairly low
| combustion temperature...
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Whether or not you're comfortable with it, it shows that
| they bent their own manufacturing standards by using
| nonstandard parts that weren't purpose-built. When I buy a
| new Dell computer I don't expect to open it up to find
| parts taped together with electrical tape and wire nuts on
| connections. I similarly don't expect parts in my new Model
| Y to be made from materials that someone bought at Home
| Depot.
| throitallaway wrote:
| Or the Cybertruck's wheel covers coming off, or the lack of
| ridge next to the windshield that causes any moisture on the
| windshield to hit the side windows (and intrude if they're
| open), or the extremely failure prone Model S door handles,
| the cost optimizations that have lead to stalk-less steering
| columns, etc. You could write a book about all of the quirky
| little problems that Teslas have.
|
| Incumbent manufacturers have most of this stuff figured out;
| Tesla seems to want to "be different" on the most minute and
| boring of things. They keep stubbing their toe along the way.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Don't forget saving a few dollars on a rain sensor... Tesla
| tried to use the cameras to detect rain in the early model
| S. The result was no automatic wipers for a long time.
|
| The rest of the industry all use a standard sensor that
| works well.
| m463 wrote:
| Older model S cars have horrible intermittent wipers.
|
| Turn them on, and invariably slow intermittent, becomes
| slow continuous, becomes annoying fast continuous. Really
| really just needed manual intermittent.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| When you consider who's running it, it makes perfect sense.
|
| Only a moron of the scope of Musk would own an EV company,
| and then become a literal Nazi online alienating the left
| leaning people, you know, the kind of people interested in
| climate change, technology and EVs, and cater non-stop to
| right wingers, the kind of people who think climate change is
| a hoax, "EVs are for pussies", and love coal rolling.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I don't think it is an unprofessional error, there are many
| reasons that changes get introduced on the manufacturing line
| which benefit production speed and/or reduce errors.
|
| What they missed was the after action surveillance and
| analysis. In a different organization such a change would go
| in, and at the same time kick off an engineering investigation
| to verify that it doesn't make anything worse. If that analysis
| comes up clean, there is no change. If it finds a problem
| though, then the change is reverted/changed to something else.
| In regular car companies you see things like "We're recalling
| all cars between VINxxxx and VINyyyy" which basically delineate
| that time between when the change was made and the time the
| analysis suggesting it wasn't a good thing. If its a minor
| thing there won't be a recall, just a bit of extra "warranty
| work" at the next service opportunity which the dealer does.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Moreover, from what I've seen, this is an isolated
| manufacturing escape. Given the perspective of the rapid
| growth in capacity, with 3 factories coming online in 5 years
| and 2 million+ total capacity, wouldn't we expect to see more
| escapes, even from a top performing auto company?
| JohnFen wrote:
| If rapid expansion is resulting in an increase in defects,
| whatever the cause, then the expansion itself is far too
| rapid and needs to be considered a fault.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I'd agree with this. I was at Intel early on and as they
| expanded they were very careful about exactly replicating
| fabs because they didn't want an increase in defects.
|
| For most (all?) manufacturers bringing a new factory
| online that didn't produce _exactly_ the same level of
| quality would be red flag to re-evaluate how they brought
| on new capacity.
| valianteffort wrote:
| Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor.
| You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have
| consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to
| do with expansion and more to do with people just getting
| lazy or negligent throughout the day.
| FiberBundle wrote:
| Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the
| 19th century.
| jajko wrote:
| But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he
| views workers and at this point we know how he treats
| them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of
| unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff
| coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it
| trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for
| better or worse.
|
| Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all
| those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks
| I take also with them but they are always calculated and
| control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting
| some startup mentality scales well into giga factories
| level.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and
| your commuting expense per hour of work goes down.
|
| The alternative is that someone who wants to make more
| money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're
| working _16_ hours a day and have two commutes. What does
| 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
| pixiemaster wrote:
| how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family
| with that?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an
| hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of
| labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive
| market. You can get more money by working more hours.
| jjav wrote:
| > employers are operating in a competitive market
|
| Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a
| 56B pay package.
|
| Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could
| afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still
| gets a fortune from the left over money.
|
| So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just
| that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think
| Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have
| to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the
| shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But
| maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man
| marketing machine and owns a major social media company
| that can influence the public perception of the company.
| That could very well be worth that amount of money to the
| company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single
| year's compensation.
|
| So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If
| the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon
| Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can
| either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B
| relative to the alternative. And then have even less
| money to pay employees.
|
| Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders
| give it to him then it's costing the company money. But
| then that's maladaptive and the company will lose
| business to some other company that pays its executives
| less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars
| and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the
| market rate for other types of labor.
|
| Either way it doesn't change the market price for those
| other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate
| than the value of certain unusual executives.
| jjav wrote:
| > If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that
| amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him
|
| Well, if you're following that drama, that is how it is
| supposed to work and how the Delaware judge said it needs
| to work.
|
| So, now Musk just want to move the incorporation to TX,
| where he can order the board to pay him whatever he wants
| without oversight.
| FiberBundle wrote:
| The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by
| having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to
| provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable
| to giving employees a raise.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Money is money. In theory they could dilute the
| shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and
| use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to
| identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want
| to do that.
|
| Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good
| idea what the market price is for a particular job. If
| they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour
| causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept
| the position, they _could_ offer $35 /hour, but this is
| like saying that the employees _could_ accept $15 /hour
| when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation
| is required for why they _would_.
| jjav wrote:
| > so it's not really comparable to giving employees a
| raise
|
| Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company
| shares as well, so no difference.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s?
|
| You know how you're mentally checked out of a job after 4
| to 6 hours? That doesn't get better after 8.
|
| A 12 hour shift means you're in a bit of a mental fog
| half the day.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of
| shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than
| others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can
| do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who
| is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
| askonomm wrote:
| So because someone can take more of a beating than I can,
| it makes it somehow okay?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because
| they'd make more money, what right do you have to
| prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
| gopher_space wrote:
| What kind of work are you imagining where there's no
| brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other
| employees if a tired worker makes mistakes?
|
| I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and
| not quite enough personal experience.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g.
| textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce
| something that gets tossed out by quality control, this
| is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost
| trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating
| the factory for longer hours.
|
| Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You
| just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.
| The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be
| less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding
| to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.
|
| Generically anything where the cost of occasional
| mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have
| a major impact.
|
| But also, the point is that different people have
| different levels of endurance. Some people will be making
| more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be
| making after 12.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g.
| textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce
| something that gets tossed out by quality control, this
| is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost
| trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating
| the factory for longer hours.
|
| Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how
| easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove
| the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead
| crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you
| have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
|
| > Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You
| just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.
|
| That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving
| into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario
| is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's
| lives due to an emergency.
|
| > But also, the point is that different people have
| different levels of endurance. Some people will be making
| more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be
| making after 12.
|
| I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance
| because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the
| self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It
| doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output
| isn't making us money.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| I wouldn't have believed this when I was a teenager but
| as an adult I know it to be true. I've worked with guys
| who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute
| to and from work. I could only keep it up for three
| months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the
| military are machines.
| asa400 wrote:
| A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour
| shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute
| mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck
| drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working
| more than a certain amount of hours in a given period
| because if their performance suffers, people die.
| Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens
| to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car.
|
| Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they
| possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone
| other than those workers and the companies that employ
| them is going to pay the externalities for all of their
| quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because
| people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck
| driver.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that
| bears this out.
|
| Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a
| physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than
| a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work
| more hours than the latter in actual fact.
|
| > Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from
| working more than a certain amount of hours in a given
| period because if their performance suffers, people die.
|
| Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from
| working more than a certain number of hours because some
| of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were
| to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that
| provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to
| demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
| asa400 wrote:
| It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than
| unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't
| that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people,
| it's that all people - even healthy people, even young
| people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for
| stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their
| performance at the limit degrades quickly.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The issue is that the limit is in a different place for
| different people. One person's performance is degraded by
| hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no
| sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first
| presumably shouldn't even be working 6.
|
| There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that
| the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after
| 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're
| not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good
| enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good
| enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75%
| after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a
| different kind of work and then the same person is still
| at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours
| but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee.
|
| There is no one size fits all.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the
| work force.
| Libcat99 wrote:
| Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts...
|
| If long shifts impact production quality (and they do)
| run shorter shifts.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all
| the time...
| stonogo wrote:
| YC startup founders do not work shifts.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and
| it can be hard to do, but I don't think I'd label the
| effort "work" for the same reasons I don't think of home
| improvements as a duty or chore.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they
| actually do it
|
| 2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited
| bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink
| breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head
| breaks]"
|
| 3. To the extent that anyone _actually_ does this with
| _any_ consistency, it 's a laughable example of poor
| self-management and company leadership
|
| 4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership
| for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it
| produces _bad work_
|
| 5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're
| putting out onto public roads
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they
| were still in the same league, and except on the week
| before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the
| place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams
| who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).
| ragestorm wrote:
| Apples to oranges. Tesla manufactures cars with much more
| liability.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of
| defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number
| of defects than is normal, then something about that
| expansion is likely the root cause.
|
| In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.
| Draiken wrote:
| > You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have
| consistent high quality of throughput.
|
| Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize
| safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes.
|
| Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift
| practice, at the very least have good procedures and
| quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy"
| workers don't leave the factory.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As a followup to this, in this Techcrunch article[1] it says
| that all 3,878 Cybertrucks shipped to date have been
| recalled. That isn't a lot of cars. Apart from what it says
| about sales of the Cybertruck, that suggests they haven't had
| enough customer miles on these things yet to flesh out the
| more subtle issues.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-
| throttle-...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Apart from what it says about sales of the Cybertruck,
|
| What? It says nothing about Cybertruck sales and everything
| about how slow they've been to ramp up production.
|
| Tesla has a well-known history of being slow to put a new
| model into production. I find it odd that you would assume
| less than 4,000 Cybertrucks have been sold because of lack
| of interest.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Also isn't a recall is a good thing for consumers? It means
| Tesla is fixing an error, not ignoring it.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Absolutely, its good they are proactively fixing things,
| this particular issue with uncontrolled acceleration was
| particularly dangerous.
|
| In the US, consumer liability laws make these fixes
| mandatory but it is always better when a manufacturer
| voluntarily recalls a product than when it is ordered to
| by some oversight agency.
| ilovetux wrote:
| Would this not classify as reactive since it is happening
| 3 weeks after hearing about it from a customer?
| filoleg wrote:
| Proactive, in this case, means "before they are legally
| required to."
|
| If they waited until NHTSA performed their investigation
| and made a recall request (which is how the heavy
| majority of the recalls in the US are performed), that
| would be reactive.
| bennyhill wrote:
| Seems pretty scary to me that the supposed error causing
| uncontrolled acceleration is a little soap near interior
| matts. I guess I've been called a pig for not being
| extremely reckless with the cars I've owned.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Soap in the glue joint between the accelerator pedal and
| its cover. You won't cause this by cleaning your car with
| soap
| rcpt wrote:
| Yes I would love it if Honda would admit that the
| transmission on the Odyssey is bonkers but seems like
| they'll claim it's WAI until a lawsuit happens
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Yes, because recalls are a good thing, because the manuf.
| has acknowledged the issue and is trying to address it.
|
| No, because what glue sniffing idiot thought glue would
| be the best option, instead of just riveting the damn
| thing down, and never worrying about the pretty little
| piece of garbage coming loose and sticking the accel
| pedal down.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| For a halo vehicle that's typical volume.
|
| There are numerous car companies with those sorts of sales
| numbers on a particular model and they don't have these
| issues, mostly because they aren't stupid enough to make
| their own stuff. Rolls Royce doesn't make their own gas
| pedal; they go to a company that makes them.
|
| Nearly every problem Tesla has can be attributed to Musk's
| insistence that he knows better than an industry that is
| extremely cutthroat and has learned lessons from a century
| of being in business. He has been propped up by customers
| and VCs who think that means the auto industry is "stodgy",
| when really they didn't understand all the reasons things
| are done the way they are.
|
| It's like the fresh college grad who comes onto the SW eng
| team having made some clever app while he was a
| sophomore...and says "oh you're doing it all wrong" to
| senior engineers.
|
| One major mistake Musk made is confusing "big five" (GM,
| Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, VAG) _ambivalence_ toward
| electric cars with _incompetence_. In Ford 's case that is
| fairly accurate - the Mach E is an engineering
| embarrassment, the Lightning less so, probably because
| there is enormous organizational pressure to not fuck up in
| the product line that is their bread and butter.
|
| VAG has demonstrated great competency at EVs (Porsche and
| Audi mostly) at the high end of the market...and once GM
| really gets its Ultium platform going, Tesla is well and
| truly _fucked_ if they intend to keep making cars instead
| of just shifting to being an 'electric gas station'
| company...but they're on their heels there too, having
| slept while CCS surpassed their charging standard years
| ago.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I don't think anyone thinks traditional auto is
| incompetent at _manufacturing_.
|
| I think lots of people have their doubts about the
| _strategic product vision_ of big auto executives, who
| traditionally have tactically chased short-term profit
| margins with tunnel vision that would make GE cringe.
| ajross wrote:
| > There are numerous car companies with those sorts of
| sales numbers on a particular model and they don't have
| these issues
|
| Recalls are absolutely routine in this industry, though.
| This sounds like a semantic argument hiding behind "
| _these_ issues " as being somehow different from "those"
| issues?
| Moto7451 wrote:
| I'm not a Tesla-stan but I can give this one a "it could have
| happened to any manufacturer" explanation.
|
| Soap is a common method for getting rubber pads onto metal
| pedals in the aftermarket world. Dish soap dries out and
| becomes less slippery, unlike lithium grease or other options.
| It is possible it was carried over from an appropriate and
| approved installation method for top hinged pedals, where
| pressing down will push the rubber pad's grove deeper into the
| metal shoe and not cause removal. For bottom hinged pedals,
| preferred for performance cars, I wouldn't recommend that at
| all.
|
| One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making its
| way to Tesla ownership.
|
| I don't disagree with the takeaway though. If they were trying
| to Toyota Method/Six Sigma this assembly line properly, they'd
| have reviewed and approved the change as part of a periodic
| process and it wouldn't have been "unapproved" and probably
| would not be the process they used.
|
| Adding to my "it could have happened to any manufacturer" my EV
| Porsche comes with a NEMA 14-50 plug/pigtale that was
| previously only approved for use in 16 Amp EVSEs. The wire says
| 16A only (10 or 12ga wire is in use). However, they kept using
| these on 40 amp capable EVSEs. Over the years many 14-50
| outlets and these plugs have melted. Through that time Porsche
| blamed low quality outlets and recommended an industrial model,
| but the plugs then melted instead of the outlet. Only this year
| did they issue a recall. This is extremely similar to an issue
| that happened with Tesla's EVSE plug adapters. Porsche managed
| to make the same exact mistake years later despite that being
| an easy situation to reference.
|
| https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2023/RCMN-23V841-8821.pdf
|
| https://www.tesla.com/support/adapter-recall
| jsight wrote:
| > One off possibility is that this is NUMI knowledge making
| its way to Tesla ownership.
|
| Good point. While this was in Texas instead of there, it
| likely still applies. Given that this is early production,
| they were likely using some of their most experienced
| workers, possibly even as transfers from the other plant.
|
| It is easy to imagine them transferring an approach like this
| ("it was approved before") without realizing that the
| consequences might be different.
| jacktribe wrote:
| The pedals are manufactured (and likely assembled with the pad)
| by a supplier in Canada, according to
| https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/nhtsa-off...
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| This reminds me of the supposed factory floor modification to
| include a battery heat sink on the Model Y.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424567
| asddubs wrote:
| I'm kind of uneasy about this being possible at all. Obviously
| this is just because of the power of hindsight, but should
| things that can wedge the accelerator in full throttle position
| be using adhesive for fixation at all?
| Phanyxx wrote:
| I just took my car in and there were 4 active recalls to
| address (Hyundai). This is hardly unique to Tesla.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _Because this looks like a very unprofessional error to have
| made for a company that has done well up until now._
|
| bro their QA has been garbage since day 1. they've gotten
| better but this isn't really a surprise.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| You're aware the other legacy manufactures have recalls all the
| time, right?
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| In the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, design
| engineers have their offices next to the manufacturing line. So
| they see and hear everything going on. It probably wasn't just
| "someone on the production line".
| FredPret wrote:
| Manufacturing is super complex - employees and robots
| performing thousands of interconnected tasks, sometimes
| requiring a little bit of judgement, and never 100% supervised.
|
| Even a mature operation like Toyota and Ford can blunder.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| For me it was a situation where I've never heard of another
| case, so I guess highly anecdotal, but can see how it might
| have applied to millions of regular old Ford ICE cars that
| were on the road.
|
| At one end of the accelerator linkage is the "user interface"
| (gas pedal) and at the other end it's the entire V8 engine.
| Where the linkage connects directly to the throttle using
| optimized leverage and failure-mitigating springs that can
| overcome a number of foreseeable failure scenarios. Which had
| gradually been improved since the Model T and through the
| entire Space Age.
|
| Runaway acceleration wasn't a problem with the pedal.
|
| Engine was running properly too. And the linkage was perfect.
|
| Well the engine is heavy and is not bolted directly to the
| frame of the car, instead it uses motor mounts, which consist
| of a metal plate which bolts to the motor, and an opposite
| plate that bolts to the frame, separated by a thick hard
| rubber shock absorbing pad.
|
| Motor mounts are doing some of their isolation duty when you
| see an idling engine under the hood shimmying a little while
| the fenders and hood are nicely stationary.
|
| Anyway it took years to figure out because it happened so
| seldom, and the cause & effect were so widely separated in
| time, but one day while navigating a jeep trail the engine
| had bottomed out, and that must have been the time one of the
| motor mounts separated, while the engine was momentarily
| forced an inch or more away from its normal position.
|
| Nothing ever seemed any different, but every once in while
| when I would accelerate from a stop, the pedal would drop
| almost to the floor and it would really take off until I got
| my foot under the pedal and pulled it back.
|
| Turns out the torque was occasionally capable of twisting the
| engine in the direction away from the broken mount, enough to
| be pulling on the linkage, opening the throttle further, and
| resulting in more torque. Might have had something to do with
| the octane of the gasoline in use.
|
| I guess at either end of the linkage you want the rubber to
| be bonded to the metal a lot better than you might think at
| first.
| jameslevy wrote:
| "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome". I do not
| know anything of the culture of Tesla and am not commenting on
| it specifically, and that quote could apply just as much to a
| company like Boeing. But at companies working on safety-
| critical products, the problems usually arise from employees
| acting in their own self interest to do what will get them
| rewarded for shipping on time, or to avoid punishment for
| causing delays.
| traviswingo wrote:
| I picked up a car from a mechanic the other day and we got to
| riffing about my own Tesla. He admitted to having friends that
| worked at Tesla on the manufacturing line. In his own words,
| these guys are "complete idiots," and "do shrooms before
| assembling cars."
|
| I want to take his words with a grain of salt, but...I kinda
| believe it. Obviously hearsay means nothing, though.
| roflchoppa wrote:
| I mean I don't doubt that the some people working the
| assembly lines are getting a little messed-up before their
| shifts.
|
| Our classic mini from Australia has other production
| anomalies, you kinda just chock it up to the workers being a
| little drunk during its construction.
| dhosek wrote:
| "for a company that has done well up until now."
|
| Haven't there been widespread complaints about manufacturing
| defects (poorly-fit panels, unexpected braking, wheels falling
| off, suspensions collapsing, axles breaking). They tend to rank
| at or near the bottom in quality surveys. _Alfa Romeo_ comes
| out ahead of them. Even before Elon Musk's antics turned me off
| the idea of buying a Tesla, I held off the possibility of
| buying one because the price /quality proposition was not
| great.
| blindstitch wrote:
| Good thing this shit isn't street legal in the EU. They at least
| have some amount of will to enforce basic car design safety.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Don't worry, Tesla's next car will be a lot safer:
|
| https://www.imcdb.org/i733450.jpg
| superultra wrote:
| It feels like web community's reponse to Elon Inc businesses,
| including Tesla and SpaceX, is frequently a double standard. By
| that I mean that Tesla gets a hall pass on crucial QC detail work
| because they're iterating or ironing out the detail as if it's a
| web app.
|
| Meanwhile I'm not so sure the same leniency applies to Chevy or
| Toyota or whatever.
|
| I don't deny that iteration is a crucial process. Also I'm not
| advocating for a hall pass for big auto. I just think this is a
| really big oversight and mistake. When you're dealing with
| software that doesn't directly impact lives, go ahead: break
| stuff. But when we're talking about big ass trucks on roads,
| there should be a harsh response to a recall like this.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| What hall pass? It's the opposite, the media blows a minor
| issue at Tesla out of proportion, while there are no national
| headlines about Fords or Jeeps getting recalled for bursting
| into flames
|
| https://www.powernationtv.com/post/auto-brands-with-the-most...
| superultra wrote:
| Not sure that's true. I have a Chevy Bolt and when those were
| exploding (lol), it was all over the news. So much so that
| there are still parking garages that won't let you park a
| Bolt in the garage.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We heard a lot about Toyota bz4x lug nuts and that recall was
| smaller than this cybertruck recall.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| How long did it take Toyota to troubleshoot the issue, fix
| it and restart the problem? How does that compare?
| gnfargbl wrote:
| It's just the halo/horns effect. If you think (Tesla|SpaceX) is
| an innovative company doing some great envelope-pushing stuff
| then you probably empathise with their engineers more than
| usual and you're willing to give them a pass. If you think Elon
| is a (bigoted man-child|burgeoning danger to western democracy)
| then you probably think negatively about his companies and
| you're more likely to do the opposite.
|
| At the risk of sounding trite, it's incredibly difficult to
| form a balanced opinion on any situation because the little
| lizard brain inside always wants to steer you one way or
| another.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The best bit is that both is true, as Tesla / SpaceX aren't
| the same thing as Elon.
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's not any universal treatment.
|
| There does seem to be a borderline cult of personality around
| the guy, composed of people that more or less seem motivated to
| come up with a reason to excuse anything. But that isn't that
| big a group of people, they are just loud.
|
| There's also plenty of people that are loud because they don't
| like his politics/attitude.
| jsight wrote:
| That's been a problem in the auto industry in general, not just
| with Musk.
|
| Honda's shipped a whole generation of Accord with a bad
| transmission. Civic clear coat failures were horrible for a
| while. Nissan has had huge issues with CVTs.
|
| Chevy or Ford would be treated much worse for similar
| situations. There are patterns, and real disconnects between
| the reputational damage that is done and underlying vehicle
| reliability.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| One of the most frightening moments of my early life was when the
| accelerator peddle got stuck (actually one of the connecting
| rods) going into a roundabout, fairly recently after passing my
| driving test.
|
| I couldn't figure out why I was speeding up even when breaking
| hard. But somehow I managed to maintain control and put the gear
| into neutral - and then sat at the edge of the roundabout with
| the engine screaming at full throttle before I figured out what
| was wrong and turned off the ignition. Wouldn't want to be in a
| Cybertruck with that happening.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| You would want to be in a Cybertruck, when you press the brake
| pedal it auto overrides the accelerator pedal. Being in a
| Cybertruck with a stuck accel pedal is way safer than in a
| traditional truck
| danparsonson wrote:
| Except it's all fly by wire so you're relying on the software
| to be bug free and I'd honestly rather trust physics.
| lucianbr wrote:
| There is no "physics", unless you're relying on falling
| fast without a parachute or something like that.
|
| In this case you're relying on mechanics to be bug free as
| opposed to software. To imply that any car is designed and
| built in such a way that it can only fail if physics itself
| fails is rather arrogant. There are comments here in the
| thread pointing to the long lists of bugs with non-drive-
| by-wire cars.
|
| Mechanics may well be easier to design correctly and test,
| sure. But get out with "physics".
| kube-system wrote:
| Fly by wire throttles have been commonplace in cars since
| the early-to-mid 00s.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I was more referring to its power and size, you need to
| figure out that your still accelerating when you've released
| pressure on the accelerator and you need to switch pedals to
| break.
|
| Where are you going to be after half a second of maximum
| acceleration in a 6600lb cybertruck?
| tnmom wrote:
| 0-60 time is 2.6 seconds, or 10.32m/s^2 if it's evenly
| distributed. So from zero you'd be doing 11.5mph in 0.5s
| (and travelled a little over four feet).
|
| But importantly, it looks like this is more of a ratchet
| effect... so if your pedal is stuck at 100%, it's because
| you pressed it that far (even if intending it to be
| momentary). That's not something you'd normally do in a
| parking lot full of nuns, you're probably on a highway with
| some time to react and press the brake. My guess is that's
| why we haven't seen a tragic accident out of this.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah except it has a 0-60mph time of 2.6 seconds. You're
| probably already travelling at at least 20 so you have 1-2
| seconds to figure out what's going on before you crash. Good
| luck.
| matja wrote:
| Until the brake pedal falls off as well
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Being in a Cybertruck with a stuck accel pedal is way safer
| than in a traditional truck
|
| I'd bet there isn't a current truck on the market that
| doesn't cut the throttle when you hit the brake. Basically
| all cars now.
| kube-system wrote:
| Traditional automakers have been programming their vehicles
| to work exactly the same way for a decade+, ever since the
| Toyota stuck accelerator debacle. My last two cars both
| ignored throttle input when the brake was depressed.
| echoangle wrote:
| What car was this in? I was always told that the brake of a
| modern car is much stronger than the engine so you can always
| come to a stop, even with a stuck accelerator
| mrguyorama wrote:
| While the breaks physically will be ABLE to overcome the
| engine in anything that isn't a dodge hellcat, if the peddle
| is stuck to the floor and the engine is at full throttle, you
| won't have much or any vacuum boosting effects! You will have
| to quite literally STAND on the brake peddle like the bad old
| days, and a lot of people driving today have never
| experienced unassisted braking.
| blake1 wrote:
| In most modern cars, there is a pressure booster in the power
| brake system, enabling braking force that can overcome the
| engine's horsepower and quickly stop the car. But they are
| designed to continually maintain the braking force for a
| limited amount of time--30 seconds or so--after which this
| boosting ability is depleted. Once that happens, braking must
| be fully supplied by muscle power via the mechanical backup.
|
| This is challenging if the engine is stuck in a wide open
| throttle (WOT) state, because the driver must overcome the
| cars weight in addition to the engine.
|
| For a small car like a Toyota Corolla, this requires a few
| hundred pounds of downforce on the pedal. For a large 300hp
| SUV, this could require a thousand pounds of downforce.
|
| As you said, the brakes can bring the car to a stop, but the
| car will start reaccelerating if the engine isn't shut off.
|
| (Sorry for mixing physical units.)
| topspin wrote:
| While it is the case, by design and typically by regulation,
| that brakes have more braking force on paper than the engine
| and drivetrain can produce, in the real world it is not so
| straightforward.
|
| ICE engines have active heat rejection and conventional
| brakes don't. So ultimately in any prolonged fight between an
| engine and brakes the engine will win.
|
| Hot brakes have a lower coefficient of friction. This is the
| brake "fade" experienced on long downhill runs or heavy use,
| such as while towing heavy loads. In extreme cases brake pad
| outgassing, brake pad glazing and boiling brake fluid, all a
| consequence of heat, will degrade brake power.
|
| Traditionally vacuum assist is used to amplify brake force in
| passenger cars. The vacuum reserve is, however, finite and
| little vacuum is available from an engine with a stuck open
| throttle. When the throttle is even partially open and the
| engine RPM is kept low (such as when fighting it with the
| brakes) the vacuum drops severely. When boost runs out brake
| force is greatly reduced. This all changes in heavier
| vehicles where more robust systems are employed, such as
| compressed air brakes with large pressure reserves.
|
| Some vehicles have enough power to overcome the brakes on
| driven wheels. Some vehicles have "low range" gearing that
| can also easily overcome the brakes.
|
| The situation described by helsinkiandrew was probably a
| combination of brake fade that emerged while fighting the
| engine and lack of brake boost due to low vacuum because the
| throttle was somehow stuck. But there isn't enough
| information to say for certain.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| FWIW, even if the accelerator pedal is stuck or misread in the
| Cybertruck, the brake pedal immediately overrides any input
| from it and stops accelerating.
| MBCook wrote:
| So I'm going to wildly speculate here:
|
| I'm guessing most CTs have sold to big Tesla fans who already
| had Teslas. I'm going to assume those kind of fans also like
| one-pedal driving (many people do).
|
| So if you've been using one-pedal for years you're used to
| releasing the accelerator stopping you.
|
| Could the driver who hit a pole have stopped themselves with
| the brake? Yes. If they were used to one-pedal for years,
| _would they have thought of that_? In a split-second panic
| scenario perhaps not.
|
| I know millions of people love one-pedal and many (most?)
| electric cars have done version of it. But I wonder if stuff
| like this has been studied. How well to people used to it
| handle using the brake in a panic if they don't often drive
| two pedal mode/cars?
|
| I'd love to know the results of such a study.
| hacker_88 wrote:
| If one was aware what was happening, they would be able to
| stop/Slow but lifting the brake would immediately cause the
| car to accelerate . This would be instantaneous
| acceleration enough to cause damage before you could hit
| the brakes at which it would stop.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Single pedal driving still requires me to use the brake
| pedal often.
|
| In reality, there might be a 3-5x reduction to brake pedal
| usage. That still means on any given trip, every 5th stop
| sign/red light will require break pedal usage.
|
| If anything the single pedal driving causes me to let off
| of the accelerator earlier than I normally would in an ICE
| car, and therefore I have more time to react with the break
| pedal if needed.
|
| I doubt I'm unique in these things.
| zormino wrote:
| I rarely hit the brake pedal in my car at all with one
| pedal driving. In fact I'd say 80% of drives I don't hit
| it at all, and the rest i might use it once or twice. I'm
| sure I'd still hit the brake in an emergency since it's
| so ingrained in me from driving normal cars for so long,
| but I'm not sure how long that will be true for,
| especially for new younger drivers that have really only
| driven EVs.
| kcb wrote:
| That's surprising. I've definitely driven 100s of miles
| without ever hitting the brake peddle.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Stuck throttles used to be quite a common problem in the pre-
| ECU days.
|
| I've had two cars that had a stuck throttle in the past, both
| where the accelerator cable connects to the throttle body on
| the top of the engine. In both cases, lubing it up solved the
| problem and it never reoccurred. It is a bit of a shocking
| thing to happen, but with a manual it's instinctive to just jam
| the clutch down.
|
| What worries me about modern cars, in particular electrics, is
| the lack of any kind of kill-switch. Motorbikes have them, cars
| used to just have an ignition switch, but now everything from
| the ignition to the accelerator pedals is electric. Wouldn't it
| be a good idea to have a switch that kills the car if all else
| fails?
| HaZeust wrote:
| Shifting the car into neutral is your best bet, as well as a
| pumped parking/emergency brakes. However, I will always
| believe that turning secondary brakes into a button/lever was
| a bad idea.
| e44858 wrote:
| In some cars the transmission is also controlled
| electrically.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Don't buy a car that can't manually go into neutral.
| Ever.
| callalex wrote:
| In cyber trucks shifting to neutral requires a tap and a
| gesture on the touch screen. It's a really great and safe
| idea.
| GhostVII wrote:
| Putting shifting controls on the screen was dumb for many
| reasons, but doesn't really cause a problem in this case
| - the cybertruck will disable the accelerator when you
| hit the brakes, accomplishing the same thing as putting
| it into neutral.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I was curious how frequently automakers have recalls, because it
| seems to me that Elon linked companies tend to get treated
| 'differently' by the media. The answer was extremely surprising.
| Here is a list. [1] Just in 2022:
|
| Ford - 67
|
| Volkswagen - 46
|
| Daimler Trucks North America - 42
|
| Chrysler - 38
|
| Mercedes Benz - 34
|
| GM - 32
|
| Kia - 24
|
| Hyundai - 22
|
| Tesla - 20
|
| BMW - 20
|
| Pretty wild, because these rarely if ever make the news.
|
| [1] - https://www.carpro.com/blog/automakers-with-the-most-
| recalls...
| jandrese wrote:
| It should also be noted that most of those Tesla "recalls" are
| over the air software updates that happen automatically. This
| one is noteworthy because the owners have to physically bring
| their vehicle to the service center.
| athorax wrote:
| That is objectively not true
| https://www.tesla.com/support/annual-and-recall-service
| jandrese wrote:
| You are right. This makes it 9 of the 20 that were just
| software updates.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Well that puts a damper on the oft-stated claim that
| Tesla makes superior software. Sounds like they are
| relying on their frequent OTA updates to allow them to
| half-ass the initial design and just fix it later.
| jandrese wrote:
| True, but that ends up comparing not so bad to
| traditional car makers that half-ass their software and
| then _never update it_.
| ronnier wrote:
| Most of the Tesla recalls are just software updates that are
| done from home over the air
| albertopv wrote:
| Source?
| dymk wrote:
| Anyone who owns a Tesla knows this
| bingbingbing777 wrote:
| A minority of people own Tesla's.
| croes wrote:
| But is the difference that it's just a software update or
| that it's OTA?
| vitaliyf wrote:
| https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-recalls-262ec9a7
|
| The article has a chart that sources NHTSA data.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| "Most" is pulling a lot of undeserved weight there.
|
| _Some_ recalls have been software updates. There have been
| plenty (like rear camera harnesses failing, the media CPU
| overheating, rear seatbelts being incorrectly attached,
| faulty MMC modules, and the incident being talked about here)
| that have required hardware fixes.
| yreg wrote:
| >"Most" is pulling a lot of undeserved weight there.
|
| So were most OTA updates or not? That is either objectively
| true or objectively false, not "pulling a lot of undeserved
| weight".
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is a good point. As long as Tesla continuously
| churns out software that breaks the car the percentage of
| "woops the accelerator stuck because they mixed soap with
| the pedal glue" issues gets smaller and thus less
| relevant
| yreg wrote:
| Then there wouldn't be 20 recalls in total. But there
| were 20 in total in that year.
| jsight wrote:
| I've had several recalls done on my Model Y. 100% of them
| were OTA software updates.
|
| It seems like that most of them are software, regardless of
| the metric chosen (number of units recalled or number of
| recalls).
| croes wrote:
| How many of the others are software updates but without the
| possibility of OTA?
| danparsonson wrote:
| I don't think that single number by itself says very much
| though as it's not normalised, for example by the number of
| different product lines a manufacturer produces or the total
| number of vehicles manufactured.
| schiffern wrote:
| Why would you normalize by number of vehicles sold?
|
| If a large-volume vehicle gets recalled, it _should_ be a
| bigger news story than a niche car.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| It sounds like they're talking about normalizing by number
| of models (SKUs) not number of units.
|
| But in the case of Tesla, I would still want to know
| normalized since those niche cars are being trumpeted as
| mroe revolutionary and better than everyone else.
| abadpoli wrote:
| Of course Elon gets treated differently. No other car company
| CEO is on Twitter drawing attention to himself like Elon. Tesla
| itself is also the darling car company of the decade, with the
| highest market cap. And the Cybertruck, by design, is basically
| a celebrity on wheels on every road/parking lot it traverses.
|
| I'd be blown away if a full recall of the cybertruck wasn't top
| headline news.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| This is one of those things that makes no sense about the
| Elon/Trump fanbase(s): they engage in absolutely incessant,
| flamboyant exuberance at every word out of their mouth to the
| degree it is nearly impossible to escape it, short of
| unplugging the internet and TV. Then they act shocked when
| negative news is also amplified.
|
| Like yeah, there are both rewards and hazards to placing
| yourself in the spotlight 24/7/365. As there should be.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| They rarely make the _tech_ news. There 's plenty reporting on
| recalls in traditional media[1][2][3][4][etc]. I think a lot of
| Tesla fans have a persecution complex when it comes to
| reporting on Tesla.
|
| [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-toyota-
| cana...
|
| [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-
| busin...
|
| [3] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-toyota-
| cana...
|
| [4] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ford-
| recalls-...
| ripjaygn wrote:
| You're saying tech news and the articles that make HN's front
| page make a lot of tech people wrongly assume that Tesla is
| way worse with recalls than other car companies? Like we are
| seeing all over the comments here.
|
| Looks like "a lot of Tesla fans" are right then. Now add the
| fact that headlines and HN post titles about Tesla software
| recalls omitting that it's a software update and just stating
| that millions of Tesla cars are being recalled. A neutral
| observer would agree but not Tesla haters.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| For clarity, _the specific recall talked about in this
| article_ is not a software update. You can't software
| update a stuck accelerator pedal.
| croes wrote:
| How many recalls of the other manufacturers are software
| updates just without the possibility, of OTA?
|
| How many different models do the other manufacturers have,
| how many has Tesla?
|
| And don't forget that Musk acts like Tesla is special and
| doesn't have the same problems as the old lame boring
| companies.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Tf are you arguing?
|
| The OTA is the crucial point because as a customer you
| just don't care that you wake up one day and your tesla
| starts displaying PARK instead of an icon after a
| ,,recall". With other vehicles you gotta schedule service
| and leave it there.
| croes wrote:
| My point is that other manufacturers' recalls could also
| be simple software updates but without OTA you need to
| visit a garage.
|
| So just because Tesla could fix most of their problem oer
| OTA doesn't mean other manufacturers have more severe
| malfunctions, just a more complicated way of fixing it.
|
| And OTA is nice until someone finds an unfixable bug and
| changes your brake setting per malicious OTA.
|
| As a customer, I do care if someone can change important
| systems in my car without me noticing or being able to
| prevent it.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| If it's a software update that only a service center can
| fix then few folks are going to take their time out to do
| that expeditiously, like with hardware recalls. Assuming
| their address is current and they even know about it.
| Whereas an OTA update is either automatically done or in
| their face the next time they drive.
| trust_bt_verify wrote:
| At least the fanboys seem ok with using the word 'recall'
| this time!
| ripjaygn wrote:
| I think the issue was that the headlines omitted the fact
| that it was a software update changing the size of some
| icons in the car's UI. And instead just stated that
| millions of Tesla cars were recalled, the default
| assumption being they were recalled to a service dealership
| instead of an OTA update at home.
|
| The oil lobbyists and Tesla haters absolutely don't want
| the phrase 'software' in any of the media headlines or HN
| titles relating to Tesla software recalls and vehemently
| argued against it. The media grants their wishes.
|
| It's hardly surprising that Tesla fans are not demanding
| that the word recall not be used for this car hardware
| issue, even they're more rational and less delusional about
| car recall phrasing than Tesla haters who seem to be agenda
| driven to create negative perception about Tesla, and the
| media happily accommodates them all the time.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| This spin on things is hilarious. It wasn't the "Tesla
| haters" screaming "don't mention our precious software!
| It's just a recall!", it was the Tesla fans. "How can it
| be a recall if it can be fixed without my car going
| anywhere? The media just wants to make Tesla look bad!
| This isn't a recall because Tesla can update it OTA,
| something the dinosaurs can't!"
|
| (Which ignores that while Tesla can update more than most
| other manufacturers, my car gets regular OTA updates
| too.)
|
| Meanwhile Lincoln sent me a "fix" for a recall that
| involved neither software or my car moving an inch.
|
| "We identified an issue in your vehicles user guide that
| could lead to improper seat operation. Please place this
| piece of paper between pages 168 and 169 of your guide."
|
| That was a recall, too.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| What kind of updates have you received? New maps? Or do
| you have to pay for those
| theatrus2 wrote:
| Lots of continual updates, some release notes aggregated
| at third party sites like this:
| https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Those are Tesla updates. They were asking about non-Tesla
| OTA updates, for the Lincoln cars I think.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| This was the article headline from NYPost(yay oil lobby
| funding anti-EV right wing media posted on HN):
|
| "Latest recall at Elon Musk's Tesla affecting 2.2M
| vehicles over warning lights"
|
| The recall over "warning lights" turned out be a font
| size increase in the UI on the screen. I guess it's a
| light because pixels glow.
|
| This was CNN's headline:
|
| "Tesla recalls nearly all 2 million of its vehicles on US
| roads"
|
| CNN doesn't like Tesla as well.
|
| Do you think NYPost or the CNN shouldn't have added
| 'software' in the headline, perhaps before the word
| recall?
|
| Why or why not?
|
| Not even saying it should be 'over-the-air software
| recall'.
|
| It can't be a space issue, NYPost found the space to add
| "Elon Musk" to the headline to fuel extra negativity and
| the CNN's headline is short.
| klyrs wrote:
| > yay oil lobby funding anti-EV right wing media posted
| on HN
|
| But we must blame the left whenever the right eats
| itself!
|
| Or maybe we live in a multipolar world?
|
| ....nah
| ripjaygn wrote:
| The oil lobby pays the right wing, Musk does not. So they
| demonize Tesla and EVs and the left has joined them since
| a few years, to my disgust.
|
| I used to be a die hard liberal, I only lately realized
| that liberal media and many liberals don't care two hoots
| about climate change. I used to defend them all the time.
| They've been publishing hit pieces and even fake news
| about Tesla just because they don't like Musk. They lost
| the moral high ground about fake news. Those are heavily
| upvoted on liberal social media like HN and Reddit. I
| don't like what Musk has been doing lately but I do care
| about the environment and don't hate Tesla and SpaceX
| like people on here. I was going to buy an EV even at a
| price premium but now I don't care. I'll buy a gas
| guzzler like the rest.
|
| I am too old for climate change to affect me and it turns
| out the young ones don't care enough about it themselves.
| I used to be very liberal but seeing how Tesla is
| maligned on HN and Reddit changed me. I don't think I
| will vote red but I will never vote blue from now on. And
| then more liberals will wonder why the vote is so close
| come November.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| > Meanwhile Lincoln sent me a "fix" for a recall that
| involved neither software or my car moving an inch.
|
| > "We identified an issue in your vehicles user guide
| that could lead to improper seat operation. Please place
| this piece of paper between pages 168 and 169 of your
| guide."
|
| Great and perfect example, thanks for bringing that up.
|
| I searched for that issue and every single news article I
| could find [1] had "missing owner's manual information"
| or the equivalent right in the headline.
|
| Only Ford or Lincoln haters would argue that removing
| that information in the headline is a fair and acceptable
| thing to do.
|
| Are you still going to argue that Tesla is treated the
| same as Lincoln by the media and on HN? Is hoping for
| more context in the headlines a bad and unreasonable
| thing?
|
| [1]
|
| https://www.motor1.com/news/672511/ford-recalls-trucks-
| suvs-...
|
| https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/recall-alert-
| nearly-1-mi...
|
| https://www.ksstradio.com/2023/06/ford-recalls-nearly-
| one-mi...
|
| https://www.auto123.com/en/news/ford-recall-million-
| vehicles...
|
| https://www.autoevolution.com/news/ford-
| recalls-1-million-tr...
|
| https://fordauthority.com/2023/06/1-million-ford-
| vehicles-re...
|
| https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/recall-alert-
| nearly-1-mil...
|
| https://dallasexpress.com/business-markets/ford-recall-
| over-...
| root_axis wrote:
| A recall is a recall. It might be convenient for the
| customer that the problem can be fixed via software, but
| it's ultimately irrelevant with respect to the fact that
| a safety related issue needed to be corrected.
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Ultimately irrelevant things are added to headlines all
| the time, like all the stories about the Lincoln recall
| in this comment.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089379
|
| See how they don't just say it's a recall and remove
| context like it's done with Tesla?
|
| Why are the media and some people so against including
| similar context for an OTA software when it comes to
| Tesla?
| jsight wrote:
| To be fair, software recalls are just a scam by big post
| office. /s
|
| (more seriously, software updates trigger a required mailed
| notification, even if the work has already been done.
| physical recalls do not trigger the same requirement)
| phatfish wrote:
| The amount of attention "the media" gives a company is
| correlated to the number of shit posts per day the CEO makes on
| Twitter.
| athorax wrote:
| These numbers are pretty meaningless without more context, Ford
| manufactures ~3x more vehicles per year than Tesla
| neogodless wrote:
| Number of _models_ would also be relevant.
| schiffern wrote:
| "Models" is a marketing distinction, which is subject to
| fudging. For instance Ford lumps their F-150 / F-250 /
| F-350 models together, calling them all "F Series."
|
| Many other manufacturers would have classified them as
| separate models sharing a platform, but that decision
| shouldn't influence the recall performance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
| mkipper wrote:
| Also not all recalls are created equal. I have a VW that was
| recalled a few years ago for this:
|
| https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2019/RIONL-19V615-0655.pdf
|
| > If the build-up happens, it may be possible to remove the
| key from the ignition switch without the shift lever being in
| the "P" park position because the system is unable to
| recognize that the vehicle is not in "P" park
|
| That's obviously not a good thing and I'm glad it was caught,
| but it's not quite as dangerous to the public as a 7000lb
| truck's accelerator getting stuck or a car catching on fire
| when it gets rear-ended.
|
| That's not to say those other automakers haven't had recent
| recalls just as bad as the Cybertruck's -- I have no idea.
| kube-system wrote:
| I had a vehicle recalled because it was missing a single
| sentence in the owners manual. It was resolved my mailing
| me a sticker with the sentence on it, and instructions on
| where it should be applied in the manual.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| I'm intensely curious: what was the sentence and did you
| actually do it?
|
| I would've.
| kube-system wrote:
| I forget what it was, some statement about a safety
| system or something. I put the sticker in there.
| 7e wrote:
| Um, all of these manufacturers make more varieties of models
| and have sold, cumulatively, a lot more cars than Tesla. This
| means more opportunity for recall.
|
| You need to normalize by total sales over the past ten years.
|
| Tesla also has a monopoly on the service of their cars, so they
| can hide recalls. Most Tesla recalls only started to occur
| during the Biden administration, as regulatory bodies became
| less impotent.
| aredox wrote:
| A company with a good QA (that doesn't stop at the vendor's
| gate) and putting safety above all _will_ have more recalls.
|
| This is the wrong metric to compare.
| JangoSteve wrote:
| First, I agree it's important to put Tesla recalls in context
| with the greater automotive industry, so I think what you
| posted is great info. The only thing I'd disagree with is that
| the numbers compared to Tesla, and relative media coverage, is
| surprising. It seems expected to me.
|
| Tesla bills itself not as an automaker, but a tech company. So,
| it makes sense they'd have a larger media footprint, which
| covers not just the automotive industry, but the tech industry
| media as well. This isn't unfair, considering they get the
| benefit of a tech-based market cap to go with it [1].
|
| They also put themselves in headlines more often than other car
| companies with outlandish claims such as Musk saying, "At this
| point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone
| currently alive on earth." [2] When Musk and the company put
| themselves in headlines so often, it makes sense that the media
| would cover them more. This is likely a direct result of their
| advertising strategy, to create buzz [3], so I think media
| coverage of failures is a direct result.
|
| You could argue that's Musk, not the company, but they made the
| strategic decision that Musk is their PR function when they
| became the only car company to dissolve their PR department in
| 2020 [4].
|
| One last thing I noticed was that the source of the recall data
| comes from the NHTSA [5], and they don't seem to distinguish
| recalls between different brands owned by the same company (for
| example, Ford's recalls seem like they would include both Ford
| and Lincoln, GM includes Chevrolet, GMC, etc.) Tesla's 20
| recalls in 2022 cover I believe the four models they made in
| 2022, while Ford's 67 recalls are across the 39 models under
| the Ford brand and five models under Lincoln (I counted these
| by looking at the drop-down selectors on KBB's value estimator
| [6]).
|
| In short, Tesla exploits the hype machine; is it surprising
| that their recalls are hyped as well?
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/tesla-...
|
| [2] https://www.thestreet.com/markets/elon-musk-ted-talk
|
| [3] https://fourweekmba.com/tesla-marketing-strategy/
|
| [4] https://electrek.co/2020/10/06/tesla-dissolves-pr-
| department...
|
| [5] https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-
| Recalls...
|
| [6] https://www.kbb.com/car-prices/
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| The Ford one was the worst - we had cases of people cars
| burning out and one person died.
|
| It was due to the Kuga 1.4 Ecoboost 4 cylinder - there were a
| design defect that caused cracks that caused fuel to leak onto
| a hot cylinder head and then your car broke into flames.
|
| Thanks to social media pressure think Ford bought back all
| models or offered generous trade in values - the resale value
| of the 1.4 Ecoboost tanked in our markets.
|
| Ford discontinued the 1.4 Ecoboost completely.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| In the UK, lots of people are finding their 1.0 Ecoboost
| engines are catastrophically failing at 50,000 miles or less
| (hence the nickname Ecoboom). Ford have been useless. This
| has been going on for years now, and they have finally said
| they'll help, but only if the repair was done at the dealer,
| you have a FSH and the car is less than 7 years old. Outside
| of that you're SOL. They've refused to recall and fix the
| underlying issue. Obviously this tanks their resale value but
| Ford do not care.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Probably because these other manufacturers have more than 4-5
| models.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I am not knowledgeable about cars so please correct me if I'm
| mistaken but surely that number isn't useful unless we also
| have the number of models and vintages are in service? I would
| think Ford have way more models in play than Tesla for example,
| and additionally brands with a long history would have multiple
| years of models. I mean BMW and Ford have been building cars
| since before WWI and have a very wide range so there are
| probably at least 10 or 20 years of models that might
| conceivably have a recall. It's not fair to compare them
| directly I would think.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| A major reason they don't make the news is that many aren't
| that critical.
|
| The most serious recall I had was for an electric harness that
| could catch fire (or cause a fire?), one of the least serious
| was a light (not a headlight or taillight, a light in the door
| that illuminated the ground and lower part of the vehicle when
| you opened it) would just stop working.
|
| The former may have made the news, I don't know, the latter had
| no reason to. I've even had a couple (specifics forgotten) that
| were entirely aesthetic (interior, not exterior like issues
| with paint peeling, that was on a car from the 90s).
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Right, but do you feel tesla changing icon sizes was
| critical?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Information impacting safety features is critical. Either
| the font was complaint with the specs or it was not.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Haha yes and the world is black and white
| PurelyApplied wrote:
| > A major reason they don't make the news is that many aren't
| that critical.
|
| My favorite recall was the letter I got last year for
| 23V048000.
|
| The instructions for how to engage the defroster in my car
| manual were suboptimal. You actually _don't_ want it to be on
| full-blast.
|
| Please report to your nearest Nissan dealer to get a piece of
| paper to put in your car manual.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| My Ford truck currently has a recall with an unknown fix.
| Axle bolts can sheer off, leaving only the rotors and caliper
| mount to keep the wheels on the car.
|
| But, you're right, most of these recalls are not "instant
| death machine you can't stop". While a fire can be dangerous,
| you will have time to react to that one.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| True, but in the case of the one I had (and I forgot to
| mention) it was a fire when the vehicle was _off_.
| Definitely an urgent problem since this meant it could
| happen when no one was around.
| wcunning wrote:
| I work in automotive and have had to handle the procedures
| after a recall was decided against code I owned (though had not
| written). The important distinction here is in how many
| vehicles are affected by the recall and the severity of it.
| Also, potentially in the party at fault (Takata vs _every
| single OEM_ , for example). The thing to note here is that
| Tesla had to recall _every single Tesla with FSD or Autopilot_
| because NHTSA demanded it, over Tesla 's express wishes. That
| is much worse than pretty much any other recall.
|
| The other component to this is that many of those other recalls
| are probably software/calibration recalls, with no parts
| touched, and Tesla has been doing OTA updates for years longer
| than the other OEMs. In some ways that's good, since they can
| fix things without the need to issue a full recall and get the
| fix out to customers much faster. In some ways that's really
| really really bad because they push fixes to a range of
| hardware with limited customer ability to opt out, and I have
| zero reason to believe that they're managing the
| complexity/testing problem on that orders of magnitude better
| than the rest of the OEMs, since I sat through a lot of
| meetings trying to come up with a way to really thoroughly
| handle it to no avail. I distrust that kind of operation
| immensely and it's probably the primary reason I won't own a
| Tesla and have little interest in anything being produced
| today. Maybe a Mazda, maybe.
|
| That said, I spent 5 years at Ford and I can't say I'm at all
| surprised that they lead this list...
| okdood64 wrote:
| Doesn't mean much without a breakdown of volume & model year.
| daveguy wrote:
| And you also need to see percent of production. Of course
| Ford is going to have _more_ trucks recalled than Tesla.
| Tesla has only put a few thousand on the road (trucks ie
| cybertruck, not cars).
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Here we go. The inevitable post in every single thread about a
| Tesla recall. We get it, other manufacturers have recalls too.
| We get it, other manufacturers' recalls don't get as much news
| coverage or HN discussion. Please. No one cares.
| aynyc wrote:
| Can you put cybertruck in neutral? That's the SOP for ICE cars if
| accelerator is stuck.
| martin_ wrote:
| No but the brake pedal overrides the accelerator. Of course,
| EV's accelerate _fast_ so you likely don't have much time to
| react
| hinkley wrote:
| The video in thread says park also overrides the accelerator.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Electric cars don't have a gearbox that you can put into
| neutral
| ksherlock wrote:
| Yes; there's no gearstalk but you can set p/r/n/d via the
| buttons on the overhead console, or on the touchscreen.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Granted, this isn't a usual occurence so maybe not a
| reasonable use case for the design.
|
| But man, when accelerating at max power due to a glitch, you
| need to look at the touchscreen to find the right place to
| slide your finger to switch to neutral... I thougt having
| touch controls for climate was bad.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > That's the SOP for ICE cars if accelerator is stuck.
|
| That is totally wrong. Most/all cars won't even go into neutral
| if the throttle is pinned. Your best option, always, is to mash
| the brake pedal as hard as you possibly can. It will win every
| time, even if the car doesn't have throttle cutoff.
| ectospheno wrote:
| Car and Driver disagrees with you regarding shifting to
| neutral. Can you provide additional info?
| hinkley wrote:
| Shifting into reverse on most modern automatic transmissions
| requires the brake pedal to be depressed at least a tiny bit.
| Neutral has no pin.
|
| In fact this is a somewhat little advertised boon to three
| point turns, in that you can go from reverse to drive without
| depressing the release button on floor mounted shifters or
| pulling the stalk in on steering wheel mounted units. You can
| just slap the car into D from R.
| phkahler wrote:
| This is why having a dealer network is important, if annoying.
| Tesla has been a leader in having a "software defined car" so
| lots of problems can be fixed via over the air updates. They
| should be glad this issue was found early and not after 5 years
| and 2 million vehicles on the road.
| rstupek wrote:
| Tesla has service centers to deal with these do they not? Not
| sure how dealers makes it any easier to manage the recall
| kube-system wrote:
| Traditional automakers have more dealers than Tesla has
| service centers. Tesla service is known for long wait times.
| Ford, for example, has 15x as many locations to get your
| vehicle serviced.
| bink wrote:
| A bit unfair to compare Tesla to a company that's built a
| dealer network over 100+ years.
| Qwertious wrote:
| They're competing in the same market, people expect the
| same quality.
| kube-system wrote:
| Fairness has nothing to do with anything here. First of
| all, it's the reality of having a Tesla worked on,
| regardless of blame. Second, Tesla's lack of a US dealer
| network is _very_ intentional and they 've fought very
| hard against the legal status quo to avoid having one at
| all.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| but it wouldn't be a big issue if it went 5 years unnoticed.
| dazc wrote:
| For context, worse things happen at sea...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/01/royal-navy-o...
| vzaliva wrote:
| The most interesting part of this news is that it gives is the
| exact number of Cybertrucks sold so far. It is under 4000.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Are all 4000 of those even delivered?
|
| Last I checked they were basically bespoke at this point.
| hacker_88 wrote:
| Are these all 100k$ above
| jsight wrote:
| Yes, all foundation series at >$100k.
| offsky wrote:
| This is surprising to me too because I saw 3 different
| Cybertrucks on the road yesterday. I guess I live in a hot
| zone.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| thats the number produced, which is the bottleneck
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Tesla is recalling all 3,878
|
| So one of the smallest recalls in recent history? I understand
| that this company, its CEO, and this vehicle in question are all
| controversial, however the levels of attention coming from media
| are getting to be a bit too much. If you look at NHTSA's data and
| take a data-driven approach (just sort by potentially affected),
| you will find this to be quite normal.
|
| https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...
| fullshark wrote:
| So they shouldn't have published a story on this? Shouldn't
| have used the word "all?" What exactly are you complaining
| about? Just that the "lol Musk" media clickbait factory is
| lame? Cause this seems newsworthy to me and I don't find fault
| with the story published here.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yeah, it's the clickbait. Every step and mis-step Tesla has
| is criticized beyond what I think is reasonable amounts. It's
| just sloppy journalism and clickbait.
| fullshark wrote:
| There's a ton of that crap no doubt, and I'm sure this
| recall will produce more of it, but this news story and
| headline seems totally fine to me.
| kredd wrote:
| I have absolutely no skin in the game, but to my
| understanding Tesla's entire valuation heavily depends on
| being constant news cycles. It has positive impacts (like
| gigantic growth rate with limited marketing in the past 10
| years) and negatives (any mistake gets chewed by the
| media).
| post_break wrote:
| Suzuki recalled a single car:
| https://japanesenostalgiccar.com/news-suzuki-issues-recall-f...
| bombcar wrote:
| Suzuki recalled a single 21 year old car because it was
| missing a single stamp on the engine block _and replaced the
| entire engine_.
| wnevets wrote:
| Will there be a recall for a car wash being able to destroy the
| cybertruck? [1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/StonkKing4/status/1780306557538050532
| bugbuddy wrote:
| If this problem is real and serious, meaning the damage is
| expensive to repair, this could destroy Tesla's reputation and
| valuation.
| wnevets wrote:
| Supposedly it broke the entire truck and they voided his
| warranty. [1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/StonkKing4/status/1780303955811278884
| walthamstow wrote:
| Jesus... "Do not wash in direct sunlight"
| hinkley wrote:
| Didn't listen to the blind old Chinese man that sold it
| to him I guess.
| tpmoney wrote:
| That's pretty standard advice for washing any car. A lot
| of the chemicals in the soaps and polishes and waxes you
| use you don't want drying on the surface of your paint,
| or at least not in the quantities you apply it in. But if
| you're washing in direct sunlight, there's a high chance
| the water will evaporate and leave dried residues before
| you get to rinsing / buffing it away.
| jsight wrote:
| Yep, just standard detailer wisdom. Washing in direct
| sunlight requires extra care, especially when using
| chemicals that aren't ph-neutral.
| klyrs wrote:
| This... actually makes sense. But I think the stakes are
| higher with brushed steel. And when it comes to
| lampooning bad decisions in car design, Cybertruck is in
| good company with DeLorean which had similar issues and
| enjoyed a similar comedic reception.
| jsight wrote:
| There are a few DeLoreans in my area. They look really
| nice. I've owned one before, the finish was a little
| finnicky and very fingerprint prone, but ultimately held
| up better than painted finishes from the era. The
| plastics on them tended to degrade pretty badly, though.
|
| For a truck, stainless might turn out to be a pretty good
| choice. Fingerprints will always be problematic, though.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| I am glad I canceled my Cybertruck reservation. Getting
| margin called and a bricked $100k tin can at the same time
| would probably be too much. Now about that margin call, I
| have to deal with...
| morkalork wrote:
| I love how they prioritized gimmicks like bullet proof
| doors and "bioweapon defense mode" but simply driving
| through a carwash can fuck your car.
| klyrs wrote:
| Bullets: no worries
|
| Squirt gun: oh shit, hide the jewels!
|
| Weirdest goddamn timeline
| nightshadetrie wrote:
| I can imagine someone being in a rush and forgetting to put
| on Car Wash mode. 100k down is a rough way to go.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Seems like detecting "hey, I'm in a car wash..." would be
| substantially easier for AI than full self-driving.
| klyrs wrote:
| It is! It always was! But how does the AI decide when to
| launch the car wash detector app?
| jsight wrote:
| Why link to that guy instead of the original source?
| https://www.tiktok.com/@captian.ad/video/7358236474321505578
|
| There was never a claim made of a denied warranty.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Why link to that guy instead of the original source?
|
| 1. Its what google showed
|
| 2. TikTokphobia on HN
| felixg3 wrote:
| -phobia implies irrational fear, while any hate for TikTok
| is very much warranted. ;)
| wnevets wrote:
| Did you visit tiktok and watch the video?
| jsight wrote:
| I get that, but the twitter post completely
| mischaracterized the issue.
| kernal wrote:
| This would not have been a serious problem had the lower back of
| the pedal footwell section been flush with the upper back
| section. How this design was able to pass QA is baffling.
| mig39 wrote:
| "Recall all Cybertrucks" isn't a huge deal. How many have they
| sold? 3000? 4000?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Huge, no. But "all" is where it becomes halfway newsworthy.
|
| Other manufacturers have made the news for smaller recalls, so
| this is pretty normal. Toyota, for example, when they recalled
| the bz4x.
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| The videos of this issue are telling.
|
| Extremely poor design. With something as simple as a peddle, its
| almost unfathomable.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| interesting that this hasn't caused a significant stock slide.
| Does that mean that the expectation for failures and mishaps is
| already priced in?
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Car manufacturers have quite a few recalls like this. Some of
| Tesla's are even OTA fixes but require a "recall" to be
| announced. I think given the small volume of Cybertrucks in
| circulation AND the low volume being produced this has
| negligible effect on their bottom line of deliveries and
| revenues.
| jsight wrote:
| Even if Tesla's rosiest projections for CT were true, it'd be
| less than 20% of unit volume. Reality might be under 15%.
|
| It doesn't really move the needle either way.
| ck2 wrote:
| btw whatever happened with Toyota's "Spaghetti Code" accelerator?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration...
| hinkley wrote:
| Friction fit handlebar grips for mountain bikes, cruisers and
| kids bikes have a similar installation problem. Bike mechanics
| use hairspray to solve it.
|
| Slick when initially sprayed, tacky when dry. Also the solvent in
| more hairspray can be used to subsequently remove them.
| jtriangle wrote:
| I've always prefered spit and yelling... so this is a good tip
| hinkley wrote:
| Mountain bikes tend to be ridden wet, so soap is a big no no.
|
| But yes, saliva if you can't figure out where the can of
| AquaNet went.
| timemct wrote:
| The air compressor trick works great.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6SsqBcpXZU
| wunderland wrote:
| A guy posted a video of his accelerator pedal getting stuck in
| the fully down position to all of the relevant subreddits
| (r/tesla, etc) and was banned from posting in all of them.
|
| https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1779600432085819708?s=4...
|
| These forums are all moderated by Tesla, or is it Elon fanboys
| who refuse to accept any criticism?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It's a cult, worst than peak Steve Jobs distortion field era
| for those that lived through both. I say this as an Apple user
| and former Tesla driver..
| leesec wrote:
| Nothing bad happened here and they caught an issue without any
| incident or injury. I wonder if there will ever be a day where
| Hackernews isn't actively rooting for the downfall of innovative
| technology companies
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Tesla is no longer a leader in innovation, their vehicles
| couldn't even do V2L/V2G until the CyberTruck.
| jacktribe wrote:
| 48v is a pretty big leap forward that I bet other automakers
| will replicate. So is assembling the interior (seats,
| console, etc.) onto the battery and lifting it into the
| vehicle. Also, the rigid wire harness that can be snapped in
| by robotic arms. The list goes on. I recommend watching some
| of the teardown videos.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Munro is transparently biased at this point.
| leesec wrote:
| Don't even know how to respond to this lol. Their EV's are
| head and shoulders above the competition
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Don't even know how to respond to this because no facts
| were presented.
| jsight wrote:
| In some ways, Tesla gets too much credit for innovation.
| Their cars aren't the cheapest, their charging curves aren't
| the fastest, and their range isn't the highest.
|
| But the balance of all three attributes often makes them the
| best choice within their segment.
|
| CT is an exception at the moment. It'd be really hard to pick
| it over the Silverado EV.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| The charging network being open to everyone will mitigate a
| massive advantage they had in terms of selling cars.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Yes, they are.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It's schadenfreude. I think the Edison Truck guy is also a
| little bit of a jerk but I prefer how they're planning to do
| things - just make a hybrid version of a regular truck. You
| don't have to re invent every little bit of metal and
| computerize everything and make it into a privacy nightmare
| just to stick a battery into a vehicle
|
| In fact the Toyota hybrids are quite similar to regular cars.
| Ground-up rewrites are great resume filler but there are other
| ways to innovate
| ccorcos wrote:
| Ironically, they could've used glue instead of soap with no delay
| in assembly time
| MBCook wrote:
| Or designed it with simple snaps.
| royaltjames wrote:
| My dad lives by using dish soap to lube up hoses and other
| connectors. This has that vibe.
| cs702 wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40040100
|
| To repeat what I wrote on that post, this is all 100% explainable
| by Tesla's sacred five-step algorithm for manufacturing[a]:
|
| 1. Make the requirements less dumb: "All designs are wrong, it's
| just a matter of how wrong." - Musk
|
| 2. Try and delete parts (that seem unnecessary): "If parts are
| not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time,
| not enough parts are being deleted." - Musk
|
| 3. Simplify or optimize: "The most common error of a smart
| engineer is to optimize something that should not exist." - Musk
|
| 4. Accelerate cycle time: "You're moving too slowly, go faster!
| But don't go faster until you've worked on the other three things
| first." - Musk
|
| 5. Finally, as a last step, automate. "I've made the mistake of
| going backwards on all five steps." - Musk
|
| Evidently the accelerator pedal issue was caused by step #2: At
| some point, the Cybertruck team at Tesla questioned the
| requirement to securely tighten the metal plate covering the
| accelerator pedal, and somehow concluded it seemed unnecessary.
| Now they have to add it back!
|
| ---
|
| [a] https://evannex.com/blogs/news/elon-musk-reveals-
| his-5-step-...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| And from somewhere far above or below us, 'Mad Man' Muntz, wire
| cutters still in his hand, smiles at Elon.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thanks for that. I laughed out loud at "far above _or below_
| us ".
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It's truly wild to me that people will pay upwards of $100k to be
| beta-testers for a several thousand pound machine easily capable
| of killing them or others
| hacker_88 wrote:
| Relax , it is just an OTA .
|
| not this time
| cdme wrote:
| Is it surprising that a company that thought a vehicle this
| absurd was a good idea to build would also suffer from quality
| control issues?
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha whew.
|
| Move fast and break things, ketamine-fueled edition!
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| At this point I wonder if Musk is so insecure about anyone being
| him at anything that he decided to pick on Boeing.
| greenish_shores wrote:
| Unapproved lubricant... well. Exactly the same, and also in
| throttle control input, caused (albeit together with software
| having problems handling the issue) a total control loss in
| Airbus A320, during a training flight in 2018 in Estonia. It
| resulted in a crash landing - they barely landed the plane in a
| way in which they could walk away from the landing, and the plane
| got destroyed.
|
| Incident report: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/1...
|
| Also Mentour Pilot did a pretty good video explaining all causes,
| including the software issues:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04M63B1sv_Y
| djcannabiz wrote:
| I second the video recommendation, mentor makes some of the
| better documentary style content on the app. the fact that it's
| completely free makes it even crazier!
| greenish_shores wrote:
| Yeah I like his content too, but I'm far from revering him
| this way (and I see a lot of comments like yours). By the way
| I also respect how good he is at monetizing this, however...
| Internet both as a technology and even more as a community
| was founded by scientists whom were a bit later joined by
| (also often same people were doing both) people doing and
| creating things non-commercially, as a hobby, because they
| simply enjoy them, and so on (I'm speaking mostly of Usenet
| newsgroups in the latter part, as the early form of that). I
| don't see how (consensually) sharing content for free is
| "crazy". That's just _the_ way, the Internet way. Maybe it 's
| just the demographic cohort of enjoyers of his content
| largely overlaps with the cohort of customers of commercial
| video streaming platforms which creates a feeling like that.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Stick a fork in it. It's done.
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