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.
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.
A gas station is one of the least glamorous, and lowest margin business out there.
You’re basically making no money from the gas or electricity, and all your profits comes from the chips and other stuff you sell inside.
Tesla is severely problematic as a company, but its salvation does not come from pivoting to selling vapes while people wait for their charge to finish.
> 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?
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.
Subcontracting everything out and being an assembly company contributed to the quality issues Boeing faces now. Perhaps the root cause is lack of focus on safety & quality.
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.
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.
Actually it does :-). I get that being pedantic can be fun but if you actually forcibly misinterpret things base on pedantry you might find it doesn't serve you nearly as well as actually thinking about what was "meant".
There's everyday meaning, then there's the meaning as an industry term, and then there's a legal definition. The everyday meaning is the least relevant one in this context.
A behaviour that focuses on results and actions rather than acting when something happens. This type of behaviours aims to identify and take advantage of opportunities and also to prevent potential threats or problems. On the contrary, reactive behaviour works by retaliating when an event or problem has already occured.
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.
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.
Fasteners are very expensive from a production perspective because they take a long time to install. This is why products these days are designed to be assemble with conformal, friction, or snap fit as much as possible.
Deciding to sub in fasteners in the production line would have involved addition of at least one new position in the line to install the fasteners.
Agreed, to a point, but we're talking about the accel pedal in a vehicle with more torque than god.
Glue is insufficient. It was insufficient with it was decided. It was insufficient when it was implemented and while I'm not a car designer, I can
state that glue, in this case? Predictably insufficient.
> 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.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/tesla-cybertruck-throttle-...