Tesla Model 3

[legion]

Sounds like Musk is a real peach to work for.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/

The young Tesla engineer was excited. Ecstatic, in fact. It was a Saturday in October 2017, and he was working at the Gigafactory, Tesla’s enormous battery manufacturing plant in Nevada. Over the previous year, he had been living out of a suitcase, putting in 13-hour days, seven days a week. This was his first real job. And now a colleague had tracked him down to say that Elon Musk—Elon Musk!—needed his personal help.
The previous year, Musk had made an audacious announcement: His company, which was known—fetishized, actually—for its luxurious electric vehicles, would soon begin manufacturing a new sedan that it planned to sell for just $35,000, putting it within reach of the middle class. The Model 3, Tesla hoped, would transform the auto industry by proving that a mass-produced, emissions-free vehicle was not only feasible but profitable. If successful, the vehicle would help end humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, slow climate change, and show that ingenuity and ambition could accomplish nearly anything. Within a year of that announcement, however, work on the car was behind schedule. There were problems in battery manufacturing, parts construction, development of assembly lines. Tesla’s goal was to build 5,000 vehicles a week; recently the company had been producing roughly three cars a day. Many inside the Gigafactory—not to mention at the Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto and the assembly factory in Fremont, California—had been working hard for months, trying to get things on track.

Musk was spending the weekend in the Gigafactory, attempting to discover why machines weren’t functioning, why parts kept misaligning, why the software was crashing. Musk had demanded that his factories be automated as much as possible. But among the consequences of this extreme roboticization were delays and malfunctions. Tesla had spent more than $1 billion building the Gigafactory, and almost nothing was going as planned.
At about 10 o’clock on Saturday evening, an angry Musk was examining one of the production line’s mechanized modules, trying to figure out what was wrong, when the young, excited engineer was brought over to assist him.
“Hey, buddy, this doesn’t work!” Musk shouted at the engineer, according to someone who heard the conversation. “Did you do this?”

The engineer was taken aback. He had never met Musk before. Musk didn’t even know the engineer’s name. The young man wasn’t certain what, exactly, Musk was asking him, or why he sounded so angry.
“You mean, program the robot?” the engineer said. “Or design that tool?”

“Did you ****ing do this?” Musk asked him.

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to?” the engineer replied apologetically.

“You’re a ****ing idiot!” Musk shouted back. “Get the **** out and don’t come back!”

The young engineer climbed over a low safety barrier and walked away. He was bewildered by what had just happened. The entire conversation had lasted less than a minute. A few moments later, his manager came over to say that he had been fired on Musk’s orders, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The engineer was shocked. He’d been working so hard. He was set to get a review from his manager the next week, and had been hearing only positive things. Instead, two days later, he signed his separation papers.
...
When he arrived, Musk began marching through the factory. He walked along the assembly line, red-faced and urgent, interrogating workers he encountered, telling them that at Tesla excellence was a passing grade, and they were failing; that they weren’t smart enough to be working on these problems; that they were endangering the company, according to someone who observed him.

Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career.
...
Then Musk walked off the stage. The remaining executives decamped to a conference room to continue working through a list of the Gigafactory’s problems. Musk, according to one participant, was gone—on to the next task.
Eight months later, Tesla would announce that it had managed to hit its target and produce 5,000 Model 3s in one week. Three months after that, it would report profits of $312 million, well beyond Wall Street’s expectations. Musk seemed, once again, to have snatched victory from the maw of catastrophe, proving his critics wrong through ambition and sheer force of will. But the path to that triumph would be more turbulent than almost anyone anticipated. Over the past year, Musk has fascinated, delighted, and horrified his fans and detractors alike by attacking strangers on Twitter, berating analysts on earnings calls, calling a man he had never met a pedophile, and, most consequentially, tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share with “funding secured,” when in fact there was no such funding secured. That tweet would cause the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue Musk for securities fraud and, in a settlement, to compel him to pay $20 million and abandon his company’s chairmanship. None of that, however, has chastened Musk, who tweeted in October that the tweet that cost him $20 million was “worth it.” The tiger was on the loose.

If it has been strange to watch Musk’s wild ride via news reports and social media, it’s been even weirder inside the company. Over the past six months I’ve communicated with dozens of current and former Tesla employees, from nearly every division. They describe a thrilling and tumultuous workplace, where talented engineers and designers have done some of their proudest work but where, as one former executive put it, “everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon.” Almost all these employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements or fears of being sued or fired by Musk. (Even those with positive things to say asked for anonymity.) Most wanted the best for Tesla and said the recent profit report made them hopeful that the company is finally climbing onto firmer ground.
...
On the day in 2017 that Musk gave his speech at the Gigafactory, he was both despot and savior. There were grand pronouncements, searing interrogations, and a laserlike focus on doing what no one had accomplished before. His speech deflated some and inspired others. “That was a pretty typical Wednesday, actually,” one senior executive told me. “That’s what it was like until I quit.”
...
As CEO, Musk was often an emotional leader, colleagues say, sometimes tearing up in front of employees when overcome by frustrations or the importance of the firm’s mission. He could also be socially awkward, prickly when others failed to show deference, defensive when corrected. To some he seemed to have a robotic lack of empathy and odd interpersonal mannerisms. “People used to tell me to hunch down lower in my seat during meetings,” one former high-*ranking executive told me. “Elon reacted better to people when he was sitting higher than them.”

In Silicon Valley, people are allowed to be strange. In fact, they are often celebrated for it. At Tesla, Musk’s oddness was accepted. He was, after all, the leader, the biggest stockholder, the visionary. But sometimes his impatience would turn into tirades. “We called it ‘the idiot bit,’ ” a senior engineering executive told me. “If you said something wrong or made one mistake or rubbed him the wrong way, he would decide you’re an idiot and there was nothing that could change his mind.” Musk would openly deride employees in meetings, according to numerous sources, insulting their competence, bullying those who had failed to perform, demoting people on the spot. Musk could afford to fire, because a long list of qualified people wanted to work at Tesla. “It’s one of the few companies that is genuinely changing the world,” a former executive said. “And everyone was so smart.”
...
Still, Musk’s storms were relatively easy to navigate. “He was surrounded by people he knew and trusted, who had been there for a while, who knew how to push back on him,” said a former executive who spoke to Musk regularly over much of the past decade. “He listened to us when we said he needed to dial it down. But then the Model 3 happened and everyone started leaving, and then everything started falling apart.”

[legion]

Part II:

Tesla didn’t have a chief operating officer, so over time Field and McNeill became de facto daily managers, recruiting or overseeing dozens of vice presidents and other executives. By the time Tesla started taking reservations for the Model 3, that staff had already spent many months planning how it would build the car. The strategy was to start vehicle assembly at the Fremont plant in October 2017, according to a former engineering executive. Initially the factory would start small, giving employees time to smooth out assembly-line kinks and refine work processes. Then Tesla would start ramping up to 5,000 cars a week, the benchmark Musk had said the company needed to achieve.

In the summer of 2016, however—soon after customers began reserving Model 3s—Musk called a meeting that changed everything, according to multiple people who attended or were briefed on the gathering. The company had to move faster, Musk told his senior executives. He wanted to start production in July 2017, almost four months ahead of plan. Musk was excited by a particular notion: He had recently had a dream, people in the room recall him saying, in which he had seen the factory of the future, a fully automated manufacturing plant where robots built everything at high speed and parts moved along conveyor belts that delivered each piece, just in time, to exactly the right place. He said he had been working on such ideas for a while. “This thing will be an unstoppable alien dreadnought,” he told his colleagues, causing some of them to pull out their phones and Google the phrase. (It returned disturbing images of sci-fi armored spaceships that looked like copulating squids.)

To make the dreadnought a reality, Musk said, departments would need to redesign their manufacturing plans. The familiar pattern kicked in: Executives told Musk what he was proposing was unrealistic. Tesla was already building the most advanced factory in auto manufacturing, and there would be plenty of time to make incremental improvements and add automation once everything was running smoothly. Overhauling all the lines would cost so much time and money that it might be impossible to meet his expectations.

Musk has said that nearly anything is possible unless it violates the laws of physics. We’re going to build the machine that builds the machine, he told the room. But they had to move fast. A fully automated factory, he said, was an investment in Tesla’s future that would help the company compete in the coming decades. Over the next few weeks, executives kept arguing with Musk. A steady stream of engineers began giving notice. And a troubling trend emerged, according to former executives: If someone raised concerns or objections, Musk would sometimes pull the person’s manager aside and order that the offender be reassigned, or potentially terminated, or no longer invited to meetings. Some executives began excluding skeptics out of self-preservation. “If you were the kind of person who was likely to push back, you got disinvited, because VPs didn’t want anyone pissing off Elon,” one former executive who reported to Musk told me. “People were scared that someone would question something.”

Musk himself would later estimate that Tesla was burning though up to $100 million a week as thousands of employees tried to build Musk’s dreadnought. The threat of firing became a drumbeat. One former employee recalled hearing about a colleague who was eating breakfast at his desk when he was called away. His banana went brown and the milk in the cereal bowl formed a film before his officemates realized he’d been fired and cleaned up the mess. Musk “would say ‘I’ve got to fire someone today,’ and I’d say, ‘No you don’t,’ and he’d say, ‘No, no, I just do. I’ve got to fire somebody,’ ” one former high-*ranking executive told me. (A Tesla spokesperson disputed this but added that Musk makes “difficult but necessary decisions.”) At one meeting Musk, agitated, broke a phone. During another, he noticed that an executive was missing and called him. The man’s wife had recently given birth, and he explained that he was taking time off as she recuperated. Musk was angry. At a minimum, you should be on phone calls, Musk told the man. Having a kid doesn’t prevent you from being on the phone. (A Tesla spokesperson said that while Musk “was once upset that a particular executive did not dial into an important conference call several days after his child was born,” the company would not penalize an employee for taking paternity leave.)
...
By the summer of 2017, more than a year had passed since Tesla had started taking reservations for the Model 3, but the company was still nowhere near ready to make the car in volume. Engineers were still trying to figure out how to get robots to recognize and reliably grasp different colored wires, how to get parts where they were needed via a maze of conveyor belts. The company was far behind schedule, and some customers were starting to ask for their deposits back. On July 28, the firm hosted a huge press conference and celebration called the Model 3 Handover Party at the Fremont factory. Events like this were important, because Tesla does not spend money on advertising. Instead, it relies on glowing press coverage and ecstatic reviews to help sell cars.
At the party, Musk was scheduled to give the first 30 Model 3 customers—most of them employees—their automobiles. Because the assembly line was not fully functioning, those vehicles had been painstakingly built. Nevertheless, Musk, with a showman’s zeal, had tweeted earlier that month that Tesla would be making 20,000 cars a month by year’s end.

Once the event started, though, executives became worried. Musk, sitting in a room with his colleagues waiting for the press conference to start, seemed unresponsive, almost dead to the world. He had been dating the actress Amber Heard, but recently they had broken up. Now there was a vacant look on Musk’s face.

Executives squatted next to their boss and delivered pep talks. They told Musk he ought to enjoy this moment, when his dream of changing the world was finally becoming real. Musk stared ahead, silent. Eventually he walked into the room where journalists were waiting. His comments started off oddly dark. “We’re going to go through six months of manufacturing hell,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty great, but it’s going to be quite a challenge to build this car.” He began listing all the things that might go wrong. “Floods, fires, tornadoes, ships sink, if anything interrupts one of our supply chains, that will interrupt the production ramp.” Musk answered a few questions. “Sorry for being a little dry,” he said. “Got a lot on my mind right now.” To some, he appeared irritated to be there.
...
At work, Musk sometimes seemed almost giddy, occasionally interrupting meetings to insist that his colleagues watch clips of Monty Python episodes on his computer, according to several people. A particular favorite was a skit of aristocrats debating the virtues of words like antelope versus sausage. He would play it more than once, laughing uproariously each time, as his colleagues waited to return to the issues at hand.
...
Some managers feared that by taking on more prominent roles they increased their risk of termination or public humiliation. One former executive described Musk shaming her in front of colleagues. “He was shouting that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was an idiot, that he’s never worked with someone so incompetent,” she told me. In a company with so many male employees, “as a woman it was particularly humiliating,” she said.
...
Whether it was because of Musk’s management style or in spite of it, progress continued. “And that was the weird part,” a high-*ranking engineering executive said, “because we were doing amazing work. I don’t want it to seem like the whole experience was negative, because when people were shielded from Elon, Tesla was amazing. We did incredible things.”

By the fall of 2017, parts of the Model 3 assembly line were starting to function smoothly. Production was beginning to pick up. Advances sometimes felt Pyrrhic, though, given Musk’s tendency to announce ambitious milestones. (Shareholders have sued the company over such announcements, and the Department of Justice has opened a probe into whether Tesla misled the public about Model 3 projections and production. Tesla, in a statement, said it was cooperating with the Department of Justice and that “Tesla’s philosophy has always been to set truthful targets.”)

Then, one evening in late October of that year, as things were still going badly inside the Gigafactory, Musk climbed onto the facility’s roof and posted a video on Instagram of himself and a few others roasting marshmallows, drinking whiskey, and singing a Johnny Cash song. “That did not go over well,” said a former high-*ranking engineering executive. “All these people are working super hard, and he’s drinking and having a campfire.” Soon afterward, the company revealed that it had lost $671 million in the previous quarter and had built only 222 Model 3s; it had lost $1.5 billion in the first nine months of the year.

[legion]

Part III:

All told, more than 36 Tesla vice presidents or higher-ranking staffers had left the company in the previous two years. Some of them weren’t replaced. Soon, according to various sources, there were 19 people directly reporting to Musk and another 11 executives who did not have superiors. (Tesla disputes those numbers.) Musk had enormous oversight responsibilities, particularly as he was running other companies at the same time. “It felt like the adults were leaving the building,” one senior finance person told me. “There was really no one left who could push back on Elon anymore.”

By then, even Musk had conceded that the company’s fully automated factory vision, the “alien dreadnought,” wasn’t working. Workers ripped out conveyor belts inside the Fremont plant. Employees began carrying car parts to their workstations by hand or forklift and stacking boxes in messy piles. In April, Musk halted production for an entire week to make repairs. On some level, Musk seemed to recognize that he was undermining Tesla. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk tweeted. “To be precise, my mistake.” He once told a colleague: “We just have to stop punching ourselves in the head.”
...
Rumors of Musk’s behavior made their way to potential hires. One story that numerous people recounted involved a candidate for a retail development position. When he came to his interview with Musk, he wore blue shoes. Musk turned to a colleague and said he didn’t like the candidate’s shoes. The colleague explained the candidate’s qualifications. But Musk was unmoved; he rejected the candidate. (In a statement, a Tesla spokesperson said that Musk rejected the candidate because his experience wasn’t right for Tesla, and “the fact that Elon also mentioned in passing that he didn’t like the candidate’s shoes had nothing at all to do with why he wasn’t hired.”)

The story, however, came to be seen as an example of Musk’s impulsiveness. “After hearing about that, you stop recommending to friends they should apply,” a former executive told me. “You don’t want to put friends through that.”
...
On July 1—more than two years after opening reservations for the Model 3—Musk finally sent the jubilant email many employees had been waiting for. “I think we just became a real car company,” he wrote. Tesla had manufactured 5,031 Model 3 vehicles during a seven-day period. They had hit their goal, six months late, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and dozens of executive departures. “What an incredible job by an amazing team,” Musk wrote. “Couldn’t be more proud to work with you.”

Employees inside the company also thought it was amazing, though some cite different reasons.

“For me, the fact that we were able to build at scale, amid all that craziness, that’s the real accomplishment,” one former engineering executive told me. “Just think about it: We designed a car that is so simple and elegant you can build it in a tent. You can build it when your CEO is melting down. You can build it when everyone is quitting or getting fired. That’s a real accomplishment. That’s amazing.”

[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by Deschodt

I agree with you wholeheartedly and have been saying the same thing those past 2 years... Yet, those aforementioned germans seem to be taking their sweet time to deliver... My E-Golf is coming off its dirt-cheap-lease in 4 months. There's *nothing* out there to replace it from BMW, Audi, Mercedes or Porsche. And the few offerings are way up there price wise.

There's a new Leaf (yawn), The Bolt/I3 (like driving the box it came in), E-Fiat 500 (Looks like a can of Yoplait) and the Tesla 3 (Sadly fugly from all angles). Seems VW gave up on their Golf which is annoying because at least it looked "normal" and they could have done a GTI version or something.

I test drove the T3 at lunch from a recent owner, work colleague. I'm very impressed by the power and extra range vs my E-Golf, but as a car guy, I don't picture myself paying $50K for something this ugly, with no gauges, and a giant iPad that landed mid dash. The rear door seals also looks gnarly and overall it feels a little cheap inside for 50K.

I was hoping Audi was going to release something and was invited to the Etron party, but that's $75K starter price for a ho-hum crossover that does 5.5 sec to 60! "Meh."

Not sure what the germans are waiting for, or if batteries don't scale well cost wise, but seems like I'm going back to gas in a few month, annoyingly (can't tell you how much I've enjoyed instant torque and not visiting gas stations these past 2 years)

Maybe they are actually making sure the cars are fully developed before introducing them? Tesla owners always seem to be beta testers to some degree. Most of the new electric cars are also driving big investments in factories, which I'm sure (unlike Tesla) they will have running smoothly before manufacturing starts.

[Sooner or later]

Legion, I worked at several greenfield plants as part of the project and then later start up teams. One of them very similar to what was going on at Tesla.

It was 1985 and it was a 300 million dollar plant with all new technology. The goal was "A perfect start up" Nearly a year behind schedule in the end. Some process machines ended up getting the deep six and old technology brought in. It was hell. I remember one conference call when the prez of manufacturing asked us if we were incompetent or just didn't give a damn. Threatened to can us all. Several in the room were relieved of duty that week.

Needless to say the atmosphere in the facility was in the dumpster

[CurtEgerer]

[cairns]

Is there an electric car in the world that is profitable? Just wondering. I'm pretty sure the Taycan will be but it ain't here yet. And GM shut down the Volt after losing millions- even with all the subsidies.

[Deschodt]

Also, we are probably one 60 minutes episode away from E-disaster.. When people see the 4y old kids in congo or wherever mining the earth for their lithium ion batteries, and dying in the process, electric will become the next dirty diesel... Never thought I'd say that but hydrogen might make more sense, if you can stand driving with a grenade under your seats...
My E-car is going back in 60 days, I've enjoyed immensely it as a proof of concept. Probably not getting another until the tech improves however (more battery density, less weight, cheaper).

[red-beard]

If you are going to do Hydrogen, you might as well do Electric/fuel cells. They are less energy efficient than Li-Ion, but you can store the equal of 20 gallons of gas in about 50 lbs! This is equal to the storage of 360 kWh. Fuel cells don't weigh much, so I expect that even with the Compressed Hydrogen tank, Fuel cell, etc., the car will weigh less.

360 kWh would give you a range of 800 miles with a Tesla, and probably lighter. I do expect you will need a small battery (10-20 kWh) for high power.

90kWh battery weighs 1,200 lbs. Replace with a 15kWh battery (weight 200), 100 lbs for the fuel cell, 50 lbs hydrogen. That is 350. I doubt the hydrogen fuel tanks will weigh more than a few hundred pounds for 50 lbs of hydrogen.

[cairns]

Also, we are probably one 60 minutes episode away from E-disaster.. When people see the 4y old kids in congo or wherever mining the earth for their lithium ion batteries, and dying in the process, electric will become the next dirty diesel...

But it's so greeeen.....I'm saving the planet after all.

[red-beard]

Here is a person who installed a Power Wall 2. Cost $32,500 with 5kW of solar. So a 10kW install will cost around $65,000. Also, look at his roof install. Goofy! Not all of the panels are installed the same direction. Finally, 10 months to install.

https://youtu.be/6s6kN9Ezws0

We just did a Mi-Grid install. 10kW, with ground mount array (more expensive than roof) for $44,500. And Mi-Grid includes a 20kW backup generator. Signed contract in mid November and they were online before Christmas.

Oh, and in the video, he notes the system will not work in the event of loss of INTERNET access. So, won't work off-grid.

[onewhippedpuppy]

James hits on the most promising hybrid technology thus far, the hydrogen fuel cell. Consume the most prevalent element in our universe, emit water, and very good energy density. Unfortunately hydrogen is difficult, dangerous, and expensive to transport and process. Also, every hydrogen fuel cell vehicle made thus far has cost dramatically more to build than people would ever pay.

[GH85Carrera]

Hydrogen power is like Nuclear fusion. A dream that is always “just twenty years away” and not likely anytime soon.
I hope I am wrong about that.

[Kraftwerk]

1.1 Percent of German vehicles are fueled by liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).. it cost about 1/3 the petrol price. The emissions are favorable compared to normal gasoline, 15% lower... nothing to really write home about.