103 replies
5h18m
. 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.
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".
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."
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
Very true, but funny enough, AWS has some of the best support of any product I have ever used.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Pressure to perform?
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.
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.
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.
Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?
At least in the instances I have encountered, it came from a place of well meaning combined with overconfidence.
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/735775817650408...
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.
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.
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.
I would suspect more "get'r'dun".
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.
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?
Why not all of the above?
An unapproved in-production change of a safety-critical article is "no big deal" to them? That bespeaks a Boeing-like safety culture.
Tesla desperately wishes it could have the safety culture of Boeing.
It seems typical Elon Musk to me.
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.
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?
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?
Definitely not the Total Quality Management model. If management and engineers can't be bothered, this shit happens.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The firms you hire to work on your house aren’t representative of the firms who manage or work on commercial and industrial projects.
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.
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".
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.
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.
:) 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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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#Defective_a...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts...
If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.
YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the time...
YC startup founders do not work shifts.
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
Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
And yet every other major auto manufacturer on the planet seems to avoid this problem, so clearly Tesla's missing something.
This is so far off the mark that it must be sarcasm.
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.
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.
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...
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".
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).
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.
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.
That's legal covering the company.
I'd bet this was just a general design flaw.
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.
We’ll find out in discovery if a lawsuit around this ever happens, I suppose
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)
What's the problem with using trim? It doesn't seem like it'd have any impact at all, aside from being funny.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
What does unapproved mean in this context? That it didn't pass by Musk's desk?
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...
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.
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?
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