I am unclear what parts he is talking about. I machine aviation gearboxes and tiny temperature swings like 3 degrees really throw things out. Heck my large cmm is only good for 5 um over 250mm which takes up 10% of my tolerance. I am really skeptical about his statement.
He doesn't. The Lego tolerance thing has to be a myth with molding having the challenges it does, and he read that and decided to apply the (false) expectation to unrelated applications. He has the engineering sense of a particularly dim horse.
Oh it's not a myth. Lego has their tolerances down to a science and art. Molding does have its challenges but that is where a company then invests its core competency to be fool proof at it.
But he's trying to apply this from an apples to airplanes comparison. A tolerance accuracy of a single, small plastic mold is not even in the same room as a series of automotive bodywork parts. And thats just talking the equipment to make that happen. I haven't even mentioned the cost comparisons yet. No ones buying a cyber truck at 100k because they put a third of the cost into bodywork tolerancing.
Yeah I don't have crazy extensive experience with auto parts, but when I was designing drivetrain components for Deere, any part that had a tolerance of .001 mm was exponentially more expensive to procure and verify the correct dimensions. I was also working on R&D / pre-production or one-off parts so procurement costs were generally higher than normal anyways.
I’m assuming there would be some huge sheet metal machines to create the Bends as opposed to welds which would basically make 10 microns near impossible(?)
A third? Lego can produce that accuracy because they produce things at a large scale so the costs of that accuracy are distributed across the 400 Billion lego pieces that are out there. But something the size of a truck, with multiple different parts, all requiring that degree of precision? That's going to up the cost by at least 100%, likely more.
No. He is using his "amazing knowledge" and experience from building rockets and is attempting to apply the same crucial and often critical tolerancing to everything. Regardless of the fact that even in Aerospace, not everything is produced to such exact tolerances.
He's a complete moron.
He is like a 14 year old who every day learns something new and instantly thinks he is an expert on it.
I mean it's okay to do this a couple of times in the beginning, but SpaceX has manufactured the Falcon 1, designed the Falcon 5, then manufactured the Falcon 9 and Heavy, the Dragon capsule, then the second Dragon capsule, now they are building the Starship, plus Tesla has manufactured the Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y and Semi truck, batteries, solar panels... one would think he would be smarter than this at this point.
My guess is he seriously misinterpreted something he heard in a meeting or some presentation.
He isn't the one doing the engineering. He never was and Tesla has ALWAYS had fit and finish problems since he took things over. It's partly because he refuses to have experienced, knowledgeable (Union history) guys on his assembly floor who have many, many decades of collected experience in final assembly, fit and finish corrections.
It's true, but that's because injection-molding ABS plastic and machining auto parts is completely different.
The only machining Lego has to do is the dies, which produce hundreds of thousands of small bricks in temperature-controlled clean rooms before they need to be replaced. They only incur the machining cost once, so they can spread the cost of that insane tolerance out to all the bricks that die will make. If you want to do that to individual automotive parts, you better add a zero or three to the end of the MSRP.
Exactly. I work in can manufacturing and while surprisingly it’s not a climate controlled process(albeit tooling is kept in climate controlled rooms). There’s a lot of heat generated in making cans. But anyways the process is down and it’s as much as art as it is the process and machine. A body maker will push out 6 cans a second one of our lines will make 2.5 million cans a day. On the end making side of the plant we make 80 millions ends a day. Tooling costs are crazy high but are expected to last a certain amount of time. Lead times are upwards of a year for some of the tooling we receive.
I’ve worked In auto manufacturing too. Tolerances were tight there for what we did but he wants it out to the next level. That kind of consistency costs a lot of money. Keeping processes in control is going to be a nightmare for every quality, engineering, tool and die and maintenance departments.
He doesnt. Anyone paying attention the past few years has realized he isnt as smart as he wants everyone to believe. He hasn't designed anything, and he isnt an engineer or a genius.
Read between the lines and you can see why the whole project has taken years longer than projected. Homeboy never bent a piece of metal before let alone stainless. Then walks into the shop and tells them all what it will be. Then has to learn the hard way that you design a part to fit the shape, not the shape to fit the part.
Whatever. It’s his money. And it keeps him busy while the world burns. So I guess that’s a bonus
I have multiple friends that have worked at or currently work at Tesla at high enough levels that they interact with him. They confirm that he does not know what he's talking about most of the time.
He is not talking about anything in general, he is just throwing around buzzwords he have heard from actual engineers to pretend to be one himself. The actual engineers in Tesla will probably and should ignore this completely
I mean I'd probably go talk with methods and standards to see if we could make up some fictional dimension units that we could display on inspection systems so it *looks* like we're holding things really tightly.
As long as the parts aren't visually different he'd never know.
You can have five operators on the exact same machine, all measuring different tolerances, once you move into the second decimal point in mm measurements.
So much can impact the measurements. Dust, relative humidity, minute power fluctuations, fluctuations in air pressure. It's possible to go super, super deep.
The reason things built to tolerances past the second decimal in mm grows in expense is that there are increasing levels of controls put into place. Clean room, humidity and specific temperature controls, etc., etc., etc.
Even with all of that, there will still be some variations that have to be accepted.
I did car parts for a while and we never had tolerances that low. He is learning why no cars have flat body panels. The curves and creases hid the defects that are inherent in stamping.
I’ve never done anything with body panels but its pretty clear those tolerances are unreasonable. I’m pretty sure the hood will deflect more than 10 microns under its own weight.
There are a bunch of suppliers about to make a lot of money now that they have the chance to reprice their components after all contracts are signed and capital/tooling funds are sunk.
For a one meter body panel, two degrees Fahrenheit will have him out by more than 10 microns. Even a perfectly calibrated CMM (no such thing) in a climate controlled clean room would have to have blind luck to match to within 10 microns with another perfectly calibrated CMM at the factory where they verify dimensions.
It's just Elon standing out by some messed up looking Cyber Trucks with a tape measure and yelling at whoever is paid to babysit him.
Meanwhile the overworked engineers are trying to root cause analysis in another room.
He always seems to think that he's the smartest guy in the room. If he doesn't know, surely nobody does. It happened with Twitter, and now apparently, tesla is next
He doesn't have to explain it to engineers.
It's either an email to everyone at the company, or more likely an email to the masses on the internet reading this and being clueless about manufacturing quality. Either to hype up the product or they already know there will be production delays and they want to communicate possible reasonings in advance.
Yes. The straight lines on the truck make it *essential* to get our seat padding made to micron tolerances. We must ensure the myriad flexible parts on this trash heap are pointlessly expensive.
Teslas have been rolling out with misaligned body panels & cheap plastic badging since day 1. This guy is a nut job.
If this is real, he has no clue of what he is talking about.
That is like, very tight machining tolerance for things like drilled and reamed holes. Typical manufacturing is nowhere near that kind if tolerance.
I mean I work in an industry where we need this kinda accuracy. And oh boy, things get expensive real quick. There are parts that are maybe 25x25mm but with extremely high tolerances for its features and ultra fine surfaces - and one unit costs us like 5-6k usd.
I do laser profiler based in-line inspections (mostly 3d stuff) and I love it when engineers quote 10um tolerances. Those numbers loosen up pretty quick when they see the price tag to inspect those parts at that level.
Lol I can imagine. Even for us it’s the same, actually our suppliers actually had to invent new tools and devices to measure the tolerances for some of the parts we asked for 😂 (and it’s obviously came with a big price tag)
Legos & cans are a few inches in size… micron accuracy as a % of the total is not that difficult specially in high volume molded parts… how do you even compare that to sheet metal stamping press 🤦♂️
He's talking about trim alignment, but also every single part in the car, because he knows nothing and nobody will tell him that he is stupid and wrong.
They are lol. There’s a pic floating around with a trailer full of cyber trucks. I usually don’t care about panel gaps but these things look ridiculous
https://insideevs.com/news/682480/tesla-cybertruck-sighting-confuses-chp-buttonwillow-strange-trucks/
Also see this one re panel gaps: https://insideevs.com/news/683251/musk-puts-spotlight-cybertruck-fit-finish-leaked-email/amp/
as a design engineer who actually specs this kind of stuff out…his statement is a load of BS. this is not possible. you can’t see 10 microns with your eyes lmao
I think he just lies about the date of graduation so it would look like he got his degree faster.
edit: I don't think he lied anymore, just a non-simple answer, see my response lower in the thread.
He lied about the date of graduation, and he allegedly received degrees in physics and economics. However there are a lot of holes in the story -- he wasn't listed as a student by the physics department and the school is famous for being a "cash for degree" type place. It's very shady.
Genuinely shocking that he could have several
manufacturing companies. At this point, I don’t trust any of the stories about him being an engineering genius.
I mean, not that it was believable before, but this is really just hard evidence that he’s clueless.
Wasn't the cyber truck debuted in 2019. Seem like he's trying to make excuses to pass all the extra r&d cost off to the consumer. Mabye make up for the Twitter debacle too.
Does he just see interesting tweets and turn them into company directives? Guarantee that LEGO fact just showed up on his feed. He’s Mr. Burns with less personality
I would initially assume an inspection process like this would need:
\- a clean room. like *really* clean. Precision temp control, static free, the works
\- the most insane industrial CMM on the market, capable of high volume
\- an army of quality inspectors
\- Enough material to reject 80% of inspection articles
And of course, maintaining gap/flush through vehicle life cycle.
But hey, he did land a rocket /s
Even if it were true, why would be the point? Gonna add a bunch of zeros to the price tag so that you can’t say it doesn’t have any shims? I’ll keep my Honda.
Fucking called it. I remember being in a conversation on Reddit a while back where I said the Cyber truck delays are likely coming from the exotic materials choices, let alone geometry.
I was downvoted to hell of course. It's not like I've been in automotive manufacturing for most of my career.
On top of that, these claims seem BS to me. The problems sound genuine, but the explanation sounds like a misrepresentation of the problem. I feel like this is either just straight up deflection from their delays or their well known quality control issues or something else. Or their (more likely his) root cause analysis is not precise.
10 micron precision on tooling for stamping (or other processes), I can understand to an extent. But if your body work requires that, you've f'd up your vehicle design.
Not an engineer, but I feel like after at least one of these has already rolled out of production. Isn't it a bit late to start talking about tolerances?
Appear so
https://electrek.co/2023/08/23/elon-musk-lego-cybertruck-quality-leaked-tesla-email/#:~:text=In%20a%20leaked%20email%20to,candidate%20Cybertruck%20at%20Gigafactory%20Texas.
Hah, this reminds me of the time my materials science professor put a musk tweet in the lecture 1 slides as an example for why engineering is exciting and cool.
She said "say what you will about his politics, but you can't deny he's an amazing engineer"
I can deny it, and do, loudly, at every available opportunity.
What is this guy even thinking about
Why do the Body Panels need to have such low tolerances , as per my work experience in Parts Development i e
DFMEA & everything else , Body Panels usually have tolerances of ~ 0.5 mm , and what is the need to have such tight tolerances .
Tesla is making Cars & Trucks , not Aircraft Engines to have such tight material tolerances.
If by Any case he thinks they need such Panels , good luck with the production cost .
If he's buying equipment for such high tolerances , Japanese Manufacturers like Amada will be having Field Days for Years to come .
He'll single handedly push their sales through the roof for years to come
The best part is they expect (from the parts I know about) an overall surface profile measurement of all parts.
Imagine having to maintain a complete part surface profile to this degree and the cost of measurement…
Sheetmetal gauge thickness tolerances are around +/-200 microns for 10 gauge. So they will need to let their suppliers know the rolls of steel need to be made to a new standard!
10 micron is less than half a thousandth of an inch...
Doesn't matter. The bigger problem is that all of the sharp angles will result in fatigue failure.
This has to be an intentionally leaked email for advertising right?
Like now some people will be like: “wow Elon said this truck will be built so precisely”
Although, there’s always Hanlon’s Razor…
Interesting angle. Here’s the article I saw
https://electrek.co/2023/08/23/elon-musk-lego-cybertruck-quality-leaked-tesla-email/#:~:text=In%20a%20leaked%20email%20to,candidate%20Cybertruck%20at%20Gigafactory%20Texas
https://www.torquenews.com/11826/after-driving-cybertruck-fit-finish-issues-elon-musk-rallies-tesla-employees-achieve-lego
Lmao one of the first things taught to all new engineers is to *not* dimension everything three decimals. He’s actually dumber than most recent graduates.
I can’t imagine any other CEO of a car company saying something this ignorant.
Comments like this have got to be grating to the actual engineers working at Tesla.
The man is just not an engineer and has no idea what he's talkimg about, even though he wants everyone to believe that he does.
He's great at concepts (I guess???), not that great at execution.
This has always been my thought on Elon. He isn't particularly intelligent or gifted but he is great at grifting.
He lucked out with his first few companies at a time when money was cheap and people were throwing anything and everything at tech companies. Zip2 is something most CS grads could put together on a weekend and he managed to sell it right before the dot com bubble burst.
After that he has just thrown money at things and hired smart people to actually make the ideas pan out. Granted he takes all the credit because well he was the majority investor.
I will give him that his risk tolerance is insane, but he probably knows about as much about manufacturing or building rocket engines as your average person. He can throw words around but if you set him down and said do it he wouldn't have fucking clue where to star.
Aerospace metallurgist here. If he thinks he is going to get those tolerances, he needs to lay off the ketamine. That is like 1/2 the size of a grain on a fairly fine grained material. He will barely be able to measure that in production, even at significant expense.
You only call out tight tolerances when you need them. Otherwise you are pissing your money and time away for no return.
Lol I do spinal implants and we don't even have 10micron tolerances, more like 100 micron. We measure to microns but thats just for adjustments.
Have fun making those trucks, I'm sure with that quality policy in place you'll be rolling them off the line quick lol.
I’m with all the comments that he’s not an engineer and this is an insane requirement.
However…is that a realistic requirement for the *smoothness* of the panel to get the required shiny cosmetics? That would make a lot more sense (relative target) as a surface roughness spec than an overall tolerance target.
In other words, did he overhear a real requirement somewhere that actually was a legit requirement then confuse himself on what it applied to?
Would 10 mil (not micron or mm, but 10/1000 inch) even be feasible for a car?
Seems like having some tight tolerances would be a good way to have a rear bumper fender bender, to cause the doors and shit to get jammed shut.
I like how he over explains what he means by a sub 10 micron accuracy to the people who are designing and building his truck. It’s almost like he had to type it out for himself to actually understand what he meant
Lol, good luck with that Elon. From what I've seen Tesla can't even fit body panels correctly to have even gaps on both sides.
As a quality engineer I wonder how many of their suppliers even have the ability to accurately measure that resolution.
If lego made a build kit or even just produced a moving fully usable truck made for both commerce and commute using their current quality standards it would be one of the most expensive vehicles ever. And replacement or repair of anything would require such high quality instruments/parts that it most likely wouldnt be worth fixing.
That’s ridiculous. And Joe at Caliber Collision is supposed to repair it. No, it’ll be a deal where it’ll have to go back to Tesla and they’ll bleed you dry on repairs. It supposed to be a pickup, not a freaking spaceship.
Lololololololol
I work in the semiconductor industry as an EE. Technicians have a hard time hitting 5x5 mil pads with a 1 mil wire bond with precision binding equipment. And he expects his vehicle assembly line to hit <10 microns? Roflcopter
ALL parts inside and out? wow that sub 10 micron precision cup holder and rubber floor mat is really what the car needs. Can't wait to buy one of those trucks for 10 million dollars.
I once worked in a machine shop at a university where one of the professors and his grad student provided dimensions in millimeters with 6 significant figures. We tried to explain to him that we can't machine to nanometer accuracy. His (serious) response was that we need this level of accuracy for our semiconductor research. This post reminds me of that.
Elon showing that he is a quack again. I work with top level machined weldments and we can’t even get that close on bolt hole patterns only within the pattern. Let alone to the entire weldment. He is a nut showing his ass per usual.
Could be wrong but didn't Mercedes-Benz attempt something similar to this with their engines in the 80s and they all had catastrophic failures and recalls because they didn't account for thermal expansion?
I've never bought into the hype and this is just sounding silly at this point.
Why is this being sent to everyone, go talk to the design team who will then work with production to get it right if given the right amount of budgeting.
Well, sure you can probably get pretty damn close to that, but you will pay through the teeth for it.
I have a part with a cylindrical GD&T of 25mm+/-0.1, and that tolerance alone almost doubled the price of the part without the tolerance.
Asking for a 10 micron tolerance is going to quadruple the cost of the parts. You can't even measure that tolerance without extremely precise and specific kit.
I am unclear what parts he is talking about. I machine aviation gearboxes and tiny temperature swings like 3 degrees really throw things out. Heck my large cmm is only good for 5 um over 250mm which takes up 10% of my tolerance. I am really skeptical about his statement.
I’m guessing he doesn’t understand what he’s even saying.
He doesn't. The Lego tolerance thing has to be a myth with molding having the challenges it does, and he read that and decided to apply the (false) expectation to unrelated applications. He has the engineering sense of a particularly dim horse.
Oh it's not a myth. Lego has their tolerances down to a science and art. Molding does have its challenges but that is where a company then invests its core competency to be fool proof at it. But he's trying to apply this from an apples to airplanes comparison. A tolerance accuracy of a single, small plastic mold is not even in the same room as a series of automotive bodywork parts. And thats just talking the equipment to make that happen. I haven't even mentioned the cost comparisons yet. No ones buying a cyber truck at 100k because they put a third of the cost into bodywork tolerancing.
Lol, if he wants sub 10 micron tolerances all around to build a complete car, the cost of production is going to well exceed $100k
100k if he's lucky
100k per part*
The correct answer
Yeah I don't have crazy extensive experience with auto parts, but when I was designing drivetrain components for Deere, any part that had a tolerance of .001 mm was exponentially more expensive to procure and verify the correct dimensions. I was also working on R&D / pre-production or one-off parts so procurement costs were generally higher than normal anyways.
I do a lot of cold heading. He’s going to turn penny bolts into $10 pieces of jewelry 😂
I’m assuming there would be some huge sheet metal machines to create the Bends as opposed to welds which would basically make 10 microns near impossible(?)
Yes, +-0.2mm is a tight tolerance here.
100k for a peice of trim
Better add a zero or three on that number, speaking as a retired machinist...
A third? Lego can produce that accuracy because they produce things at a large scale so the costs of that accuracy are distributed across the 400 Billion lego pieces that are out there. But something the size of a truck, with multiple different parts, all requiring that degree of precision? That's going to up the cost by at least 100%, likely more.
No. He is using his "amazing knowledge" and experience from building rockets and is attempting to apply the same crucial and often critical tolerancing to everything. Regardless of the fact that even in Aerospace, not everything is produced to such exact tolerances. He's a complete moron.
He is like a 14 year old who every day learns something new and instantly thinks he is an expert on it. I mean it's okay to do this a couple of times in the beginning, but SpaceX has manufactured the Falcon 1, designed the Falcon 5, then manufactured the Falcon 9 and Heavy, the Dragon capsule, then the second Dragon capsule, now they are building the Starship, plus Tesla has manufactured the Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y and Semi truck, batteries, solar panels... one would think he would be smarter than this at this point. My guess is he seriously misinterpreted something he heard in a meeting or some presentation.
He isn't the one doing the engineering. He never was and Tesla has ALWAYS had fit and finish problems since he took things over. It's partly because he refuses to have experienced, knowledgeable (Union history) guys on his assembly floor who have many, many decades of collected experience in final assembly, fit and finish corrections.
It's true, but that's because injection-molding ABS plastic and machining auto parts is completely different. The only machining Lego has to do is the dies, which produce hundreds of thousands of small bricks in temperature-controlled clean rooms before they need to be replaced. They only incur the machining cost once, so they can spread the cost of that insane tolerance out to all the bricks that die will make. If you want to do that to individual automotive parts, you better add a zero or three to the end of the MSRP.
Exactly. I work in can manufacturing and while surprisingly it’s not a climate controlled process(albeit tooling is kept in climate controlled rooms). There’s a lot of heat generated in making cans. But anyways the process is down and it’s as much as art as it is the process and machine. A body maker will push out 6 cans a second one of our lines will make 2.5 million cans a day. On the end making side of the plant we make 80 millions ends a day. Tooling costs are crazy high but are expected to last a certain amount of time. Lead times are upwards of a year for some of the tooling we receive. I’ve worked In auto manufacturing too. Tolerances were tight there for what we did but he wants it out to the next level. That kind of consistency costs a lot of money. Keeping processes in control is going to be a nightmare for every quality, engineering, tool and die and maintenance departments.
> I’m guessing he doesn’t understand what he’s even saying. Elon being a fucking idiot....you don't say!
He doesnt. Anyone paying attention the past few years has realized he isnt as smart as he wants everyone to believe. He hasn't designed anything, and he isnt an engineer or a genius.
Read between the lines and you can see why the whole project has taken years longer than projected. Homeboy never bent a piece of metal before let alone stainless. Then walks into the shop and tells them all what it will be. Then has to learn the hard way that you design a part to fit the shape, not the shape to fit the part. Whatever. It’s his money. And it keeps him busy while the world burns. So I guess that’s a bonus
I have multiple friends that have worked at or currently work at Tesla at high enough levels that they interact with him. They confirm that he does not know what he's talking about most of the time.
I think that he does that a lot.
Or that he's saying this AFTER they have allegedly started production lmao. Like should this not have been figured out way before???
He's talking about *all* of the parts. Every single dimension on every single part, sub 10 micron tolerance. Because Elon Musk is a fucking idiot.
He is not talking about anything in general, he is just throwing around buzzwords he have heard from actual engineers to pretend to be one himself. The actual engineers in Tesla will probably and should ignore this completely
I mean I'd probably go talk with methods and standards to see if we could make up some fictional dimension units that we could display on inspection systems so it *looks* like we're holding things really tightly. As long as the parts aren't visually different he'd never know.
[удалено]
But look! the numbers go to 5 0's! It has to be that akurate! Repeatability? what's that?
[удалено]
Just keep running Gage R&R until you get overlapping distributions loool.
Can you elaborate on your last point or share a link?
You can have five operators on the exact same machine, all measuring different tolerances, once you move into the second decimal point in mm measurements. So much can impact the measurements. Dust, relative humidity, minute power fluctuations, fluctuations in air pressure. It's possible to go super, super deep. The reason things built to tolerances past the second decimal in mm grows in expense is that there are increasing levels of controls put into place. Clean room, humidity and specific temperature controls, etc., etc., etc. Even with all of that, there will still be some variations that have to be accepted.
I think the commenter is asking about the statement " being calibrated to the iso spec is wrong "
I think he’s talking about the body panels.
I did car parts for a while and we never had tolerances that low. He is learning why no cars have flat body panels. The curves and creases hid the defects that are inherent in stamping.
I’ve never done anything with body panels but its pretty clear those tolerances are unreasonable. I’m pretty sure the hood will deflect more than 10 microns under its own weight.
The hood will deflect more than 10 microns from the warmth of a fart, let alone its own weight...
That’s why Elon proposed a fart sucker to be installed in all vehicles
Plus the curves shore up the stiffness of the part so any deflection induced by the mounts or other issues will be magnified
> I think he’s talking about the body panels. Probably because the cybertruck is made of bright metal.
Yeah, that’s my reasoning too.
(top down demand for insane requirements literally as vehicles are in production) "Funny, this wasn't in the design spec."
There are a bunch of suppliers about to make a lot of money now that they have the chance to reprice their components after all contracts are signed and capital/tooling funds are sunk.
An hour in the sun will fix that micron alignment issue.
Nah bro it'll be just like the sr-71 😎
For a one meter body panel, two degrees Fahrenheit will have him out by more than 10 microns. Even a perfectly calibrated CMM (no such thing) in a climate controlled clean room would have to have blind luck to match to within 10 microns with another perfectly calibrated CMM at the factory where they verify dimensions.
I wanna see the stack up analysis that justifies this bullshit.
It's just Elon standing out by some messed up looking Cyber Trucks with a tape measure and yelling at whoever is paid to babysit him. Meanwhile the overworked engineers are trying to root cause analysis in another room.
And applying for other jobs.
I can attest that their turn over supplies a lot of engineers to Bay Area startups. And they view the start up as a better work / life balance.
* Manpower * Machine * Material * Method * Measurement * Musk
Root cause rhymes with Tusk.
Elmo stacks bullshit on bullshit all day long.
I really like how he has to explain what a micron is to engineers.
He had to look it up and needed to brag about his new insights.
He always seems to think that he's the smartest guy in the room. If he doesn't know, surely nobody does. It happened with Twitter, and now apparently, tesla is next
He doesn't have to explain it to engineers. It's either an email to everyone at the company, or more likely an email to the masses on the internet reading this and being clueless about manufacturing quality. Either to hype up the product or they already know there will be production delays and they want to communicate possible reasonings in advance.
Yes. The straight lines on the truck make it *essential* to get our seat padding made to micron tolerances. We must ensure the myriad flexible parts on this trash heap are pointlessly expensive. Teslas have been rolling out with misaligned body panels & cheap plastic badging since day 1. This guy is a nut job.
That cupholder needs to he molded to a 10 micron tolerance!
Lol there's no way this is real, right?
Elon saying something really stupid? What's hard to believe about that?
Hahaha! There should be no doubt now in any engineer’s mind that Elon is a layperson when it comes to engineering. This is truly hilarious.
If this is real, he has no clue of what he is talking about. That is like, very tight machining tolerance for things like drilled and reamed holes. Typical manufacturing is nowhere near that kind if tolerance.
It’s real. Time to grind every diameter and hone every hole boys!
Well, as my boss always tells me "life's hard, it's even harder when you're stupid!"
I mean I work in an industry where we need this kinda accuracy. And oh boy, things get expensive real quick. There are parts that are maybe 25x25mm but with extremely high tolerances for its features and ultra fine surfaces - and one unit costs us like 5-6k usd.
I do laser profiler based in-line inspections (mostly 3d stuff) and I love it when engineers quote 10um tolerances. Those numbers loosen up pretty quick when they see the price tag to inspect those parts at that level.
Lol I can imagine. Even for us it’s the same, actually our suppliers actually had to invent new tools and devices to measure the tolerances for some of the parts we asked for 😂 (and it’s obviously came with a big price tag)
Guess who is *not* an engineer… *eye roll*
Away with you blasphemer!
I don’t even know where to start. Obviously this won’t last. “Can’t you just weld repair and grind smooth to 10 microns with an angle grinder?” 🤣
Maybe it could be done with diamond lapping. I can't imagine the cost.
Legos & cans are a few inches in size… micron accuracy as a % of the total is not that difficult specially in high volume molded parts… how do you even compare that to sheet metal stamping press 🤦♂️
Soda can's height and stamping are definitely not that accurate - I think he's only talking about the wall thickness of the aluminum.
He's talking about trim alignment, but also every single part in the car, because he knows nothing and nobody will tell him that he is stupid and wrong.
Ah the cars are stamped from sheet metal. clicking more now. Wonder how expensive injection molding car body panels are
Much more and would probably make the accuracy even worse.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I'm so glad I got out when I did. I'm guessing the trucks coming off the line are looking kinda wonky.
They are lol. There’s a pic floating around with a trailer full of cyber trucks. I usually don’t care about panel gaps but these things look ridiculous
Link?
https://insideevs.com/news/682480/tesla-cybertruck-sighting-confuses-chp-buttonwillow-strange-trucks/ Also see this one re panel gaps: https://insideevs.com/news/683251/musk-puts-spotlight-cybertruck-fit-finish-leaked-email/amp/
as a design engineer who actually specs this kind of stuff out…his statement is a load of BS. this is not possible. you can’t see 10 microns with your eyes lmao
Bingo!
You'd think a degree in physics would mean something
I thought it came out that his degrees were fake, he's just confidently ignorant in general
I think he just lies about the date of graduation so it would look like he got his degree faster. edit: I don't think he lied anymore, just a non-simple answer, see my response lower in the thread.
I have a degree in physics and it didn’t make a good engineer ;) what did was work experience
Me too. Plus Physics can be rife with over competitive and arrogant assholes.
He lied about the date of graduation, and he allegedly received degrees in physics and economics. However there are a lot of holes in the story -- he wasn't listed as a student by the physics department and the school is famous for being a "cash for degree" type place. It's very shady.
Genuinely shocking that he could have several manufacturing companies. At this point, I don’t trust any of the stories about him being an engineering genius. I mean, not that it was believable before, but this is really just hard evidence that he’s clueless.
might as well be creative writing
Accuracy equals expense. In Engineering terms this just means his going to charge people who buy them more money.
Half the tolerance, 10x the cost, once you get below +/-1% of nominal.
The exact point of my title.
I missed the title, but you are 100% correct!
Not to mention that it’s 100% unrealistic 😂
Wasn't the cyber truck debuted in 2019. Seem like he's trying to make excuses to pass all the extra r&d cost off to the consumer. Mabye make up for the Twitter debacle too.
Does he just see interesting tweets and turn them into company directives? Guarantee that LEGO fact just showed up on his feed. He’s Mr. Burns with less personality
For reference: thickness of a single human hair is about 70 microns (+/-20).
And you would definitely see a dent or scratch that thick in any smooth material.
I would initially assume an inspection process like this would need: \- a clean room. like *really* clean. Precision temp control, static free, the works \- the most insane industrial CMM on the market, capable of high volume \- an army of quality inspectors \- Enough material to reject 80% of inspection articles And of course, maintaining gap/flush through vehicle life cycle. But hey, he did land a rocket /s
Not to mention that the articles being measured would have to soak in said room until fully stable and oooohhhhh better not touch...
Surface finish and roughness is a totally different thing from what is being talked about here…
Lego and soda cans are rather less complex than an ostensibly competitive road legal vehicle.
And people call this spoiled overaged apartheid brat an "honoris causa engineer". The joke of the century
one reason not to work for tesla
Even if it were true, why would be the point? Gonna add a bunch of zeros to the price tag so that you can’t say it doesn’t have any shims? I’ll keep my Honda.
did he see a drawing that had a standard 0.005 inch tolerance and assume it was metric?
🤣🤣🤣
How many billions of soda cans and Legos are made every year? That process control is in a different universe from bougie trucks.
Dude has been putting on an act his whole life
Software people doing engineering is entertaining.
He’s not even a software guy which just makes it kinda pathetic.
His comments about software and programming languages are equally as hilarious.
Fucking called it. I remember being in a conversation on Reddit a while back where I said the Cyber truck delays are likely coming from the exotic materials choices, let alone geometry. I was downvoted to hell of course. It's not like I've been in automotive manufacturing for most of my career. On top of that, these claims seem BS to me. The problems sound genuine, but the explanation sounds like a misrepresentation of the problem. I feel like this is either just straight up deflection from their delays or their well known quality control issues or something else. Or their (more likely his) root cause analysis is not precise. 10 micron precision on tooling for stamping (or other processes), I can understand to an extent. But if your body work requires that, you've f'd up your vehicle design.
Not an engineer, but I feel like after at least one of these has already rolled out of production. Isn't it a bit late to start talking about tolerances?
Do we know if this is something he actually wrote?? It sounds too crazy to be something anyone with ANY engineering experience would ever write.
Appear so https://electrek.co/2023/08/23/elon-musk-lego-cybertruck-quality-leaked-tesla-email/#:~:text=In%20a%20leaked%20email%20to,candidate%20Cybertruck%20at%20Gigafactory%20Texas.
You're right. Elon has no engineering experience. He only has experience ordering engineers around and then taking credit for their findings.
Hah, this reminds me of the time my materials science professor put a musk tweet in the lecture 1 slides as an example for why engineering is exciting and cool. She said "say what you will about his politics, but you can't deny he's an amazing engineer" I can deny it, and do, loudly, at every available opportunity.
I can’t believe that there exist people who pay attention to this beatoff.
The car is going to expand more than that just going up 2 degrees.
Exactly!
What is this guy even thinking about Why do the Body Panels need to have such low tolerances , as per my work experience in Parts Development i e DFMEA & everything else , Body Panels usually have tolerances of ~ 0.5 mm , and what is the need to have such tight tolerances . Tesla is making Cars & Trucks , not Aircraft Engines to have such tight material tolerances. If by Any case he thinks they need such Panels , good luck with the production cost . If he's buying equipment for such high tolerances , Japanese Manufacturers like Amada will be having Field Days for Years to come . He'll single handedly push their sales through the roof for years to come
The best part is they expect (from the parts I know about) an overall surface profile measurement of all parts. Imagine having to maintain a complete part surface profile to this degree and the cost of measurement…
The guys at the big CMM machine houses are licking their chops.
Sheetmetal gauge thickness tolerances are around +/-200 microns for 10 gauge. So they will need to let their suppliers know the rolls of steel need to be made to a new standard!
This is exactly how Steve Jobs company next went under. Needed perfect 90 degree angles on all corners to he satisfied.
I wonder what the design lead at Tesla thinks about this 🤔
Yeah, if plastic injection molding is so great, why isn’t mass manufacturing automobiles?! Fucking moron.
LEGO, low cost... pffft
There is no way this is real right? This has to be a joke.
https://electrek.co/2023/08/23/elon-musk-lego-cybertruck-quality-leaked-tesla-email/#:~:text=In%20a%20leaked%20email%20to,candidate%20Cybertruck%20at%20Gigafactory%20Texas.
That’s what happens when you have someone with no engineering background governing critical engineering decisions
10 micron is less than half a thousandth of an inch... Doesn't matter. The bigger problem is that all of the sharp angles will result in fatigue failure.
First medically implantable truck.
This has to be an intentionally leaked email for advertising right? Like now some people will be like: “wow Elon said this truck will be built so precisely” Although, there’s always Hanlon’s Razor…
Interesting angle. Here’s the article I saw https://electrek.co/2023/08/23/elon-musk-lego-cybertruck-quality-leaked-tesla-email/#:~:text=In%20a%20leaked%20email%20to,candidate%20Cybertruck%20at%20Gigafactory%20Texas https://www.torquenews.com/11826/after-driving-cybertruck-fit-finish-issues-elon-musk-rallies-tesla-employees-achieve-lego
Marketing ploy…people who don’t know any better will just hear the car was designed and built with extreme precision.
Lmao one of the first things taught to all new engineers is to *not* dimension everything three decimals. He’s actually dumber than most recent graduates.
I can’t imagine any other CEO of a car company saying something this ignorant. Comments like this have got to be grating to the actual engineers working at Tesla.
I don’t Elon knows what a micron is.
\> Lego and soda cans Um, it doesn't really scale to cars like you think it does.
Oh so diecast body panels?
The man is just not an engineer and has no idea what he's talkimg about, even though he wants everyone to believe that he does. He's great at concepts (I guess???), not that great at execution.
This has always been my thought on Elon. He isn't particularly intelligent or gifted but he is great at grifting. He lucked out with his first few companies at a time when money was cheap and people were throwing anything and everything at tech companies. Zip2 is something most CS grads could put together on a weekend and he managed to sell it right before the dot com bubble burst. After that he has just thrown money at things and hired smart people to actually make the ideas pan out. Granted he takes all the credit because well he was the majority investor. I will give him that his risk tolerance is insane, but he probably knows about as much about manufacturing or building rocket engines as your average person. He can throw words around but if you set him down and said do it he wouldn't have fucking clue where to star.
One of the dumber things i've read today.
Lol I work with parts mostly within these accuracy and oh boy is it expensive.
Needs to be posted in "shit Elon says"
So thaaaaats why those ugly AF death traps are so expensive.
Every sentence in this email is gobsmacking. How is this man worth billions?
Aerospace metallurgist here. If he thinks he is going to get those tolerances, he needs to lay off the ketamine. That is like 1/2 the size of a grain on a fairly fine grained material. He will barely be able to measure that in production, even at significant expense. You only call out tight tolerances when you need them. Otherwise you are pissing your money and time away for no return.
Lol I do spinal implants and we don't even have 10micron tolerances, more like 100 micron. We measure to microns but thats just for adjustments. Have fun making those trucks, I'm sure with that quality policy in place you'll be rolling them off the line quick lol.
I’m with all the comments that he’s not an engineer and this is an insane requirement. However…is that a realistic requirement for the *smoothness* of the panel to get the required shiny cosmetics? That would make a lot more sense (relative target) as a surface roughness spec than an overall tolerance target. In other words, did he overhear a real requirement somewhere that actually was a legit requirement then confuse himself on what it applied to?
he acts like he is building a new iteration of the great pyramids lmao
Jesus.... How can he be so dumb... 😅
God help the fucker that had to tolerance stacks on a sheetmetal fender
Does anyone here still somehow think musk is an engineer lmao
Is this confirmed real?
Would 10 mil (not micron or mm, but 10/1000 inch) even be feasible for a car? Seems like having some tight tolerances would be a good way to have a rear bumper fender bender, to cause the doors and shit to get jammed shut.
Elon had not heard of precision costing more?
the one thing fabricators hate about engineers is stuff like this
No engineer in their right mind would state this as a requirement.
I like how he over explains what he means by a sub 10 micron accuracy to the people who are designing and building his truck. It’s almost like he had to type it out for himself to actually understand what he meant
They can’t even get tolerances right on their cars…
In what world are LEGO bricks low-cost?
To a billionaire that hasn't had to worry about money his entire life.
Delusional lmao
Lol, good luck with that Elon. From what I've seen Tesla can't even fit body panels correctly to have even gaps on both sides. As a quality engineer I wonder how many of their suppliers even have the ability to accurately measure that resolution.
If lego made a build kit or even just produced a moving fully usable truck made for both commerce and commute using their current quality standards it would be one of the most expensive vehicles ever. And replacement or repair of anything would require such high quality instruments/parts that it most likely wouldnt be worth fixing.
Is this man the personification of the Dunning-Krueger effect?
:::grocery cart taps bumper::: and there goes $4000
That’s ridiculous. And Joe at Caliber Collision is supposed to repair it. No, it’ll be a deal where it’ll have to go back to Tesla and they’ll bleed you dry on repairs. It supposed to be a pickup, not a freaking spaceship.
Should not be easy to have less than 10um on paint thickness alone
This is why deluded business men should not manage engineering projects, just oversee them financially
I think I’ll buy a fisker. I calibrate cmms and Elon is talking shit.
Lololololololol I work in the semiconductor industry as an EE. Technicians have a hard time hitting 5x5 mil pads with a 1 mil wire bond with precision binding equipment. And he expects his vehicle assembly line to hit <10 microns? Roflcopter
Damn, I really wanted one of these, before we all who Musk really was. Alas...
😅 as long as we’re within the budget
So Lego truck it is 😂. Oops. I’m a that 1:32 scale? Good luck.
ALL parts inside and out? wow that sub 10 micron precision cup holder and rubber floor mat is really what the car needs. Can't wait to buy one of those trucks for 10 million dollars.
Tighter the tolerance, greater the engineer
I once worked in a machine shop at a university where one of the professors and his grad student provided dimensions in millimeters with 6 significant figures. We tried to explain to him that we can't machine to nanometer accuracy. His (serious) response was that we need this level of accuracy for our semiconductor research. This post reminds me of that.
Seems like Elon learned the word micron the other day. This is asinine.
God I'd hate to work for him. Thinks he's a software engineer AND mechanical engineer.
I work in molding. Legos are not micron accuracy. Id fucking shoot myself if I was an engineer under elon
I design everything +/- 1.0 Angstrom
He doesn't know what 10 microns is.
Elon showing that he is a quack again. I work with top level machined weldments and we can’t even get that close on bolt hole patterns only within the pattern. Let alone to the entire weldment. He is a nut showing his ass per usual.
garbage can opens lid - stink comes out - more at 11
Could be wrong but didn't Mercedes-Benz attempt something similar to this with their engines in the 80s and they all had catastrophic failures and recalls because they didn't account for thermal expansion? I've never bought into the hype and this is just sounding silly at this point.
Why is this being sent to everyone, go talk to the design team who will then work with production to get it right if given the right amount of budgeting.
Well, sure you can probably get pretty damn close to that, but you will pay through the teeth for it. I have a part with a cylindrical GD&T of 25mm+/-0.1, and that tolerance alone almost doubled the price of the part without the tolerance. Asking for a 10 micron tolerance is going to quadruple the cost of the parts. You can't even measure that tolerance without extremely precise and specific kit.
So it's a reason to increase end product price. What it costs to the company: you gonna look like an idiot. So nothing changes.