Musk endeavours

[odysseus2000]

A follow up video shows a nightmare problem with their Tesla 3. The virtually new car was backed into a garage wall in April causing a dent in the bumper and boot. However the construction of the car meant that the repair is ridiculously complicated and still hasn't been completed. Cost estimate to date is $10,000 because of the problems with the bonded glass panels and slow supply of spare parts.

If this is anywhere near typical of repair costs for the Model 3, it is no wonder that insurance premiums are high. Who can believe a small bump can take a car off the road for 3 months and counting! I'm guessing this type of repair for an ICE car would take a couple of days in the UK and cost less than £2k.

These guys have been Tesla enthusiasts for years, but they are fast losing their good humour.

My question to engineers - is the design of the Model 3 and the non-availability of spare parts going to cause serious problems for the brand as more customers experience this type of problem?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlJ7lPdazyw

regards

Howard

The engineering constraints that the 3 has been designed to are that the car must be leading in its class safety and as light as possible. To do this Tesla have used a number of special alloys which have directional strength and can not be repaired by conventional techniques such as being pulled back into shape.

Looking at the damage it looks to me like it was not just a mild bump but something more substantial and this has tested the cars structure and caused some of the damage alluded to. The story of needing to take out the glass may be because of the way it is internally wired, but it seems strange to me.

Car body alloys have since the days of monocot construction begun to be important structural parts of the car and this trend is accelerating with many components now held in by stretch bolts that have to be torqued to a specific setting and then rotated another 180 degrees or similar. The days when one could take a piece of 20 gauge mild steel and knock it into the needed shape have mostly gone in modern cars if the original safety strength is needed and body shops always put back to original. This is presumably why the parts take so long to arrive. They have to be made from special alloys not just pressed out as used to be the way. Tesla also likely operate a just in time system so that they stock just enough parts for production and only make additional ones when a definite order comes in.

The interesting part to me was that the labour costs were low. The labour cost on an Audi a neighbour had near me were £160 per hour. He took his car in for a service and ended up with a bill of several thousand, much of it labour, but I doubt the mechanic saw much of that.

I imagine Tesla will address the parts issue, but for now they are coming up well short.

Regards,

[Archtronics]

I disagree that damage is off to the left.
Any other car with that damage there is minimal chance its creased the boot floor and caused structural issues.

[redsturgeon]

The video explains part of the problem being due to the shortage of body shops that are both registered to work on Teslas and approved by the car insurers. Apparently other body shops may have been able to provide a faster service but he was not able to use them for this reason.

For me the whole issue of after sales service is where Tesla has a job to do to build up a network from scratch that will provide an acceptable level of care that most owners will expect.

John

[PeterGray]

The engineering constraints that the 3 has been designed to are that the car must be leading in its class safety and as light as possible. To do this Tesla have used a number of special alloys which have directional strength and can not be repaired by conventional techniques such as being pulled back into shape.

Judging by various reports that have been posted here Tesla's repair issues fall into two main categories. The first, is the obvious one - lack of spare parts, lack of service staff and service centres. That's annoying for early adopters, and could impact negatively on Tesla's reputation. And it illustrates Tesla's lack of experience and planning. They've concentrated so hard on meeting very high targets claimed by Musk that they have failed to do the boring groundwork.

However, all of that is really teething problems, and provided they don't take a big hit to reputation over it (which I'd say is not yet a given), then it may do little harm long term.

The second category seems to me much more serious, and reflects my quote from Oddy above. Tesla have set themselves a series of very challenging engineering targets, which they have, at least to some extent, achieved. But it's beginning to look as though, for reasons related to the first category - lack of experience in the real business of mass producing cars - they have not adequately considered real world issues relating to repairability. A very safe light highly integrated body, made using special alloys etc has many virtues, but if it turns out in practice that means that minor accidents can lead to massive repair costs Tesla will end up being faced with major redesign issues and/or loss of reputation. They won't be the first new car producer to run into these sorts of issues of reliability and repairability. They are potentially survivable, but they do demonstrate the sorts of major advantages the experienced major car manufacturers have, and how leaving legacy auto in the dust is a great deal harder than it looks.

[odysseus2000]

PeterGray
The second category seems to me much more serious, and reflects my quote from Oddy above. Tesla have set themselves a series of very challenging engineering targets, which they have, at least to some extent, achieved. But it's beginning to look as though, for reasons related to the first category - lack of experience in the real business of mass producing cars - they have not adequately considered real world issues relating to repairability. A very safe light highly integrated body, made using special alloys etc has many virtues, but if it turns out in practice that means that minor accidents can lead to massive repair costs Tesla will end up being faced with major redesign issues and/or loss of reputation. They won't be the first new car producer to run into these sorts of issues of reliability and repairability. They are potentially survivable, but they do demonstrate the sorts of major advantages the experienced major car manufacturers have, and how leaving legacy auto in the dust is a great deal harder than it looks.

It depends what a consumer wants. For many years cars were made as cheaply as possible with no consideration for the occupants or pedestrians who might be hit. Such cars were mostly made from mild steel 20 gauge & anyone with a some sheet metal knowledge could easily repair them, forming body parts as needed, weldinging in, filling, primer, top cost etc. That market then fell away as new body parts became so cheap that no one bothered to make their own & just got new parts & fitted them. Going on in parallel with this was the government mandated need to both improve average fuel consumption & make car occupants & pedestrians less liable to being injured in collisions & this has had substantial results. We have gone from about 20 deaths & serious injuries per day to about 10 which is still way too high, but better.

Tesla have now made a car which is both extraordinarily efficient & which can be powered for a hundred + miles per week from a 4kw solar roof with UK sun levels & which at the same time is the safest in its class. If some one has an accident in a model 3 the chance of them walking away is better than in any other car in that class.

Should Tesla now make an inferior car or should other auto makers make Tesla class safe cars? As I rate safety very highly I would go for the latter, but the market place might suggest the former in the classic pile em high & sell em cheap. The wild card being the politicians & what safety standards they mandate. All big auto has fought improved safety & improved gas mileage at every turn but has been generally forced to improve both.

Anyhow the choice is clear. If you want a state of the art car that is leading class safe you buy a Tesla, & which you can drive a lot of the time for no fuel cost if you have roof top solar, if not then you buy something which is inferior but likely lower cost & faster to repair if damaged.

Me? I am sticking with my 2002 Volvo V70 which is close in safety to the model 3, but emits diesel fumes etc, but I am trying to cycle more places locally as I was doing till I had a close encounter with a 4x4 that frightened me enough to curtail my cycling for a while. I am currently too busy to drive much anyway. Where I would once be regularly going for parts etc I now let the post office bring them via eBay. It is surprising how much more productive this makes me & I waste less money by avoiding all the catch penny stuff in stores. I am though a minority. The local School becomes part of a huge car park at pickup & drop off, some do walk or cycle & that is true of the super markets & out of town retail sites. Looking at neighbours it seems to me that most could do what they do now with an electric car fuelled most of the year from roof top solar, but for now almost no one does, but I expect that to change.

Regards,

[odysseus2000]

New Mercedes competitor to Tesla:

https://twitter.com/Lord_Sugar/status/1 ... 9295726594

Regards,

[odysseus2000]

NIO have produced 10k of these:

https://en.xiaopeng.com/g3.html

Regards,

[Archtronics]

Me? I am sticking with my 2002 Volvo V70 which is close in safety to the model 3, but emits diesel fumes etc, but I am trying to cycle more places locally as I was doing till I had a close encounter with a 4x4 that frightened me enough to curtail my cycling for a while. I am currently too busy to drive much anyway. Where I would once be regularly going for parts etc I now let the post office bring them via eBay. It is surprising how much more productive this makes me & I waste less money by avoiding all the catch penny stuff in stores. I am though a minority. The local School becomes part of a huge car park at pickup & drop off, some do walk or cycle & that is true of the super markets & out of town retail sites. Looking at neighbours it seems to me that most could do what they do now with an electric car fuelled most of the year from roof top solar, but for now almost no one does, but I expect that to change.

Regards,

I agree with you.

I would quite happily (electric even) cycle to the office if only the roads weren't lethal.

[odysseus2000]

First Tesla pickup on the road (warning: strong language):

https://youtu.be/jKv_N0IDS2A

Regards,

[odysseus2000]

First Tesla pickup advertisement:

https://youtu.be/R35gWBtLCYg

Regards,

[Howard]

First Tesla pickup advertisement:

https://youtu.be/R35gWBtLCYg

Regards,

Sophisticated engineering! Get a girl to do it!

By the way Ody, can I just test you on a claim you made about how safe the Model 3 was compared with other cars? I agree it does well in the "theoretical" crash testing by safety organisations (getting a 5 star rating, like larger cars made by German manufacturers). However, there are a number of ICE cars in the USA where no driver has ever been killed in a road accident but an increasing number of fatalities amongst Tesla drivers.

I know the Tesla driver fatalities are immediately publicised and picked over by sceptics in the media but for a small manufacturer producing only larger (and so hopefully safer) cars in smaller quantities why don't they have a better safety record in real-time driving?

regards

Howard

[odysseus2000]

First Tesla pickup advertisement:

https://youtu.be/R35gWBtLCYg

Regards,

Sophisticated engineering! Get a girl to do it!

By the way Ody, can I just test you on a claim you made about how safe the Model 3 was compared with other cars? I agree it does well in the "theoretical" crash testing by safety organisations (getting a 5 star rating, like larger cars made by German manufacturers). However, there are a number of ICE cars in the USA where no driver has ever been killed in a road accident but an increasing number of fatalities amongst Tesla drivers.

I know the Tesla driver fatalities are immediately publicised and picked over by sceptics in the media but for a small manufacturer producing only larger (and so hopefully safer) cars in smaller quantities why don't they have a better safety record in real-time driving?

regards

Howard

Hi Howard,

Data on US auto deaths, latest available as far as I know, is shown here:

https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocum ... t/pdf/52/3

Interesting, but dealing with thankfully small numbers of deaths per model is going to lead to lots of statistical fluctuations although Hyundai seem the worst maker its not clear to me who is the best of if the data means enough for one to base ones analysis on it. Ideally one would want to normalise by miles driven which only Tesla can currently do.

Regards,

[BobbyD]

Data on US auto deaths, latest available as far as I know, is shown here:

https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocum ... t/pdf/52/3

Interesting, but dealing with thankfully small numbers of deaths per model is going to lead to lots of statistical fluctuations although Hyundai seem the worst maker its not clear to me who is the best of if the data means enough for one to base ones analysis on it. Ideally one would want to normalise by miles driven which only Tesla can currently do.

Comparing raw data in this situation isn't going to be all that useful. As well as miles driven the US is a quite a big place encompassing no end of potentially confounding variables which are likely to both affect the distribution of car models across the country and the risk of being killed in a car accident (climate, geography, variability of climate etc) , the typical driver will vary state to state in terms of age and experience, as will the penalties and enforcement of driving offences including DUI, the type and quality of the roads, population densities...

[BobbyD]

Sophisticated engineering! Get a girl to do it!

Gender and ethnically diverse team of you-tubers...

Favourite phrases from the build video so far '2 clips right next to each other, what the f Elon?' and 'Every clip is designed differently'...

I think the Truckla would have one major advantage over the Tesla pickup, other than actually existing though. I note that the Truckla has gone for a traditional western themed branding, while Elon is teasing a cyberpunk aesthetic, I would guess one of those has a bigger crossover with pickup owners than the other.

[Howard]

First Tesla pickup advertisement:

https://youtu.be/R35gWBtLCYg

Regards,

Sophisticated engineering! Get a girl to do it!

By the way Ody, can I just test you on a claim you made about how safe the Model 3 was compared with other cars? I agree it does well in the "theoretical" crash testing by safety organisations (getting a 5 star rating, like larger cars made by German manufacturers). However, there are a number of ICE cars in the USA where no driver has ever been killed in a road accident but an increasing number of fatalities amongst Tesla drivers.

I know the Tesla driver fatalities are immediately publicised and picked over by sceptics in the media but for a small manufacturer producing only larger (and so hopefully safer) cars in smaller quantities why don't they have a better safety record in real-time driving?

regards

Howard

Hi Howard,

Data on US auto deaths, latest available as far as I know, is shown here:

https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocum ... t/pdf/52/3

Interesting, but dealing with thankfully small numbers of deaths per model is going to lead to lots of statistical fluctuations although Hyundai seem the worst maker its not clear to me who is the best of if the data means enough for one to base ones analysis on it. Ideally one would want to normalise by miles driven which only Tesla can currently do.

Regards,

Yes, your source is interesting and page 3 reveals that there are a number of German cars with zero fatality ratings. BMW and Audi particularly.

Two recent thoughtful analyses make interesting reading:

“Even without making any adjustment whatsoever for missing fatality data, Tesla drivers are much more likely to die than their peers driving other luxury cars. Eleven deaths in 265,290 vehicle-years is a stunningly high driver fatality rate of 41.46. That’s quadruple the rate of Audi and BMW, and more than triple the rate of all luxury cars combined.”
https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/tes ... 3670ddde17

And this analysis records 16 Tesla driver fatalities since 2015 and concludes:

While these updated numbers for Autopilot are encouraging, it’s clear that Tesla’s claims of its vastly superior safety—at least in terms of fatal accidents—are still vapor. It’s way too soon to come to any firm conclusions about Autopilot safety.
Musk has compared Autopilot’s fatality rate to government figures for the overall U.S. traffic fatality rate. Surely someone as smart as Musk realizes that comparing Tesla’s Autopilot numbers to the NHTSA figure is not just apples-to-oranges. It’s apples-to-aardvarks.
NHTSA’s Fatality Rate per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled, the figure repeatedly cited by Musk as the Autopilot benchmark for comparison, includes bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, and buses. Musk is essentially equating a Tesla Autopilot crash to a pedestrian getting run over by a bus.
Using this bogus comparison, Musk has claimed that “approximately half a million people would be saved (every year worldwide) if the Tesla Autopilot was universally available."
To be blunt, that statement can charitably be described as utter poppycock.
But compared to the more reasonable benchmark of human-pilot Teslas, after more than a billion miles of driving, it’s starting to look like the fatality rate of Teslas on Autopilot may at least be in the same ballpark as their human-piloted counterparts.
We certainly hope this positive trend continues, and we can’t wait to crunch the numbers in 2020.”

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/11 ... an-drivers

The jury is still out on the safety of Tesla cars with at least 16 recorded driver fatalities up to 2018.

In the end, motor insurers are going to collect much better data than even Tesla. Their verdicts (and premiums) will be more important than any claims by any car manufacturer or short-seller.

Hopefully Tesla won't end up attracting the "wrong kind of driver"?

regards

Howard

[BobbyD]

But compared to the more reasonable benchmark of human-pilot Teslas, after more than a billion miles of driving, it’s starting to look like the fatality rate of Teslas on Autopilot may at least be in the same ballpark as their human-piloted counterparts.
We certainly hope this positive trend continues, and we can’t wait to crunch the numbers in 2020.”

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/11 ... an-drivers

Surely human driven Tesla miles and Tesla driven Tesla miles are likely to be very different, with many HDTM being driven on road types and scenarios in which AP was unavailable or unsuitable? This still sounds like a very dubious comparison.

[odysseus2000]

But compared to the more reasonable benchmark of human-pilot Teslas, after more than a billion miles of driving, it’s starting to look like the fatality rate of Teslas on Autopilot may at least be in the same ballpark as their human-piloted counterparts.
We certainly hope this positive trend continues, and we can’t wait to crunch the numbers in 2020.”

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/11 ... an-drivers

Surely human driven Tesla miles and Tesla driven Tesla miles are likely to be very different, with many HDTM being driven on road types and scenarios in which AP was unavailable or unsuitable? This still sounds like a very dubious comparison.

Kind of think the important thing here is that after just a few years of operations in the wild, there is currently similar performance between humans and machines. If one thinks about how every other technology has developed, it has been humans far superior and only after many revisions and new hardware did the machines begin to catch up and in some cases over take humans.

If these numbers are accurate it looks to me like machines will soon get a lot better than humans.

Regards,

[BobbyD]

Kind of think the important thing here is that after just a few years of operations in the wild, there is currently similar performance between humans and machines. If one thinks about how every other technology has developed, it has been humans far superior and only after many revisions and new hardware did the machines begin to catch up and in some cases over take humans.

If these numbers are accurate it looks to me like machines will soon get a lot better than humans.

Regards,

But the point is that the data is not of sufficient quality that it can be used to support such a claim.

[BobbyD]

The Audi eTron Has Now Outsold Tesla Model X And S

Summary
Audi eTron has been on sale for approximately two full months and I analyze its sales numbers - thus far from Europe and the U.S.

I then compare those sales numbers against its three sole competitors in the market: Tesla Model X, Tesla Model S, and Jaguar i-Pace.

The Audi was the best seller in Europe in April and increasingly so in May. When adding the U.S. numbers, it essentially matched the Model S and X.

In May, the Audi eTron broke out and became the segment best seller in these geographies combined.

The competitive impact on Tesla’s global sales (and margin) opportunity will only worsen for each year as approximately 200 electric cars make it to market by the end of 2022.

- https://seekingalpha.com/article/427112 ... -model-x-s

2019 Audi E-Tron Takes Charge Among New EVs
Our testers give it high marks in their first impressions

...CR’s Take
The E-Tron has an air of maturity that exudes quality, and it’s likely because it comes from an established luxury automaker. On the other hand, its appearance doesn’t scream “I’m electric” the way that Teslas do, and that may not be enough to draw in EV enthusiasts.

It’s early yet, but so far our testers have liked what they’ve experienced with the E-Tron. The combination of luxury touches, a smooth powertrain, intuitive controls, and a quiet, comfortable ride make this a strong competitor.

We’ll see how it holds up through our testing.

- https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids ... ve-review/

..and finally

Audi, one of the rare automakers investing heavily in advertising electric vehicles, is expanding its movie product placement of electric cars with an e-tron appearance in the new Spider-Man movie.

Earlier this year, Marvel Studios’ “Avengers: Endgame” featured the all-electric Audi e-tron Sportback concept and the Audi e-tron GT concept in product placement.

- https://electrek.co/2019/06/19/audi-ele ... placement/

[BobbyD]

This reminded me of the quote in the above post

The competitive impact on Tesla’s global sales (and margin) opportunity will only worsen for each year as approximately 200 electric cars make it to market by the end of 2022.

- https://electrek.co/2019/06/19/tesla-sl ... ations-us/