Stories like this are a Rorschach test for how one views Tesla. This can be a lazy and dangerous design process that shows the company's unprofessionalism or it can be a smart hack to get the job done while minimizing costs and supply chain restraints.
I have no views on Tesla, I know a bit about the cars and the company, but not much. I honestly can't understand how anyone can see this as anything but a lazy and dangerous design process that shows the company's unprofessionalism. MAYBE it's not dangerous, but if they're doing this, what else have they done that no one has found yet? It's crazy that a car that costs this much would have something like that in place from the factory.
I recall reading that basically, unlike most other cars, where a 2018 Toyota Camry XLE can be reasonably expected to have X configuration, every Tesla is pretty much serial-number-specific from a service standpoint, because of the ridiculous number of mid-model iterations Tesla is doing on their fleet.
A big part of their hesitation to allow outside service is probably the fact that any given Tesla may have any number of slight adjustments that require slightly different parts or repair tactics, and they don't really want to publicly admit how many different variations of everything there is.
You can see in these pictures that in addition to them using some stock wood trim pieces... those wood trim pieces differ a bit from car to car. One would hope if the materials used between these cars differ, that their system knows this, in case one approach proves to be defective or dangerous, and they need to track down every car that they employed this hack in.
OMG! This isn't a joke? Part of the reason you want uniformity is so you can learn what kinds of problems your customers are going to run into and your service personnel understand how to resolve them. If every Tesla is essentially unique then they've gone straight back to the 18th century! Wow!
But what if they can iterate and fix the problems on the next car on the line. That's an advancement, as long as all the differences are well documented, it should be a step forward in car manufacturing and repair.
> But what if they can iterate and fix the problems on the next car on the line.
Cars aren't software; to do that with cars without large identical (by intent) production runs (to control for process noise) it would seem like you would need extraordinary process control (and every indication I've seen has that Tesla varies from incumbents in the opposite direction), otherwise you are chasing process noise.
> as long as all the differences are well documented
Yeah, I’m gonna stop you right there. I have serious doubts a company that sees no problem with making a quick Home Depot run for some faux wood trim in order to get a car out the door is meticulously documenting all their little hacks.
The purpose of these pieces of fake wood appears to be to spread out the stress from the strap. I have no idea whether this method is any more likely to fail than a purposely designed part or what the dangers are if this does fail, but that isn't a particularly complicated or demanding task. It is possible that a purposely designed part would provide no real benefit over this seemingly hacky solution. If that is the case, why not go this route if it makes assembling things easier?
I have no idea the risk/reward equation here. I am guessing most people voting and commenting here have no idea the risk/reward equation. My comment was only pointing at that lots of people are going to have an opinion on this that is mostly dictated by their previous assumptions about Tesla as a company.
Reminds me of that time the psychologist kept showing me pictures of my parents fighting. She insisted that they were just blots of ink. I'm not sure what she was playing at.
But that's not failing the test. The point is that you are supposed to see it as A or B, and that will give the test administrator insight into your viewpoint.
I see it from both sides, and I think a person's view of this type of hack all comes down to trust.
Do you trust that some engineers at Tesla needed a solution to a problem, modelled it out, did some materials testing and discovered that this plastic panelling was the right material for this job?
It does look bad because it's obviously not produced by Tesla, but so many parts are outsourced already in car manufacturing, this could be a solid engineering choice that's getting some bad publicity.
Of course, it could also be because some intern was tasked at solving a design problem and slapped this together overnight, and no one ever checked his work, and it went into production.
> Do you trust that some engineers at Tesla needed a solution to a problem, modelled it out, did some materials testing and discovered that this plastic panelling was the right material for this job?
That would be more credible if it was the same in all cars; it is not (see the source).
It not just not the same in each car but the pieces have rough cut edges and each piece is a different length. I would hope a production fix would at least buy a saw with a stop so that it looks standard.
Assuming this really is random consumer crap, and not just an automotive product that is designed to look like something from the cheaper end of Ikea for some reason, I really don't see how this could possibly be seen in a good light. How will this material react to the 10+ years of hot/cold cycles it'll be exposed to? What are its fire properties? Will it decay/mold (if it's an MDF-ish product, which it _looks_ like, though who knows). And so on. There are just too many unanswered questions and the whole issue could be solved by doing things properly.
And if they need to do this (due to part shortages?) what OTHER bizarre substitutions might they be making?
Again, there's an outside chance that this is a proper product that just looks really cheap-DIY-y, but I wouldn't bet on it.
First, they designed this cool octovalve thing so they could use the one heat pump for all the heating and cooling needs of the car.
Second, they have this LCC hanging off the side of it, a top heavy part mounted laterally with no support other than where it's bolted to the octovalve at its base.
Third, they realise there's a problem and need to relieve stress from the mounting point. So there we get the metal strap with a spreader.
Fourth, they realise there's no point getting plastic moulded parts specially made when they can just use bamboo, wood, or fake wood which are not only cheaper but have better vibration damping qualities than the plastic part.
No doubt they'll redesign this part at a later stage, but since it's a contract-manufactured part they need to give the contractor time to roll out the new part and they need to deplete inventory. Will the new design involve modifications to the octovalve? Perhaps the new design will simply have a bracket down the side to provide vertical support?
> This can be a lazy and dangerous design process that shows the company's unprofessionalism or it can be a smart hack to get the job done while minimizing costs and supply chain restraints.
It can be a dessert topping and a floor wax; its a hack, potentially smart depending on the constraints posed to those doing the hack, to get the job done whole minimizing costs and supply chain constraints.
It's also, quite arguably, something evidencing a lazy and dangerous design process at a higher level than the level at which it is a potentially smart hack.
Laziness at one point of a design process could imply a theme, is what I think they're getting at. I still think about this Twitter thread, for example:
> The LCC (Liquid Cooled Condenser) was probably not designed to be mounted horizontally so they added the cinch strap which needed edge protection to prevent crushing the condenser contact surfaces... enter corner molding from Home depot. Will be interesting to see if that corner molding holds up over time. The cheap stuff is mostly air, the better stuff has more plastic content. If you do 3D printing you know what "fill" means..... look how the strap crushed the plastic corner molding in this photo. If it crushes/compresses it more over time.. the strap will be lose and the condenser will shake/possibly stress crack at it's base?
I did like this sarcastic response to it:
> See OP??? The Home Depot wood trim on yours exceeds the factory spec! At least it will not get crushed by the strap because it's not cheap plastic corner trim from Lowe's like others have.
Looking at the part and where it is used, I would guess that the purpose is strain relief to keep the strap off the metal assembly.
There are a couple things I notice when I look at the shortage workaround.
1.Fake wood pieces are longer than the proper plastic piece(Why?).
2.Fake wood pieces are wrapped in green tape, proper plastic piece is not.(Speculation, metal strap edge cuts into fake wood. If so, how long will tape hold up with vibration?)
3.At least 2 different materials were used as a substitute, are these materials equivalent? Is there confidence in the supply chain of these parts that there was not a bad batch that will fail under heat or stress?
4.Overall quality of workmanship. In two of the 3 pictures, the lengths of the 2 fake wood pieces do not match. This points more to a production line workaround than a sanctioned fix.
5.The proper plastic piece has a larger area in contact with the cooler assembly than the fake wood pieces. This will result in more force being transferred to a point and possibly resulting in crushing damage to the assembly.
I work in a facility that assembles heavy off road equipment, we do sometimes use BOM parts if we encounter a shortage. Unless the part is identical in fit and function i.e. using a slightly oversized hose clamp, we will go back and rework the machine so that it conforms to our quality standards before we ship it.
The fact that it's needed in a precisely made complex machine, suggests something is wrong. I think a better question is where's the evidence this is safe?
People have had their car AC blowing out hot air which can be annoying to downright dangerous in parts of the country.
At least one has had his car refuse to start due to battery overheating. I can't for sure say THIS is the reason for any of those issues or that THIS is a dangerous bit unto itself but HVAC generally for an electric car is pretty important to get right given the battery powered system and this particular model's new "Octovalve" Thermal Management setup.
I think there are two sets of burdens of proof here.
The engineer who made this decision has a burden of proof to his boss (and maybe regulators, don't know) to show that this is safe.
The random internet commenter suggesting it is unsafe has a burden of proof to show that either it is actually unsafe, or that at least that Tesla didn't internally meet it's burden of proof.
This seems like a perfectly good solution to me. You're trying to stabilize the cooler, spread the clamping force, and avoid sharp edges and wear. The part chosen seems perfectly suitable for that, albeit slightly unconventional looking.
(I say this as someone who is short $TSLA right now [and a non-practicing Mech E]; this looks perfectly reasonable to me.)
I agree that if you dug into the engineering the math probably works[1]. It's just a weird culture to be out on the floor substituting random materials in a load-bearing, if perhaps not life-safety-critical, part.
1: Compressive strength of wood perpendicular to the grain varies but you can estimate with a healthy safety margin about 200 PSI. 100x - 1000x weaker than metals, but still not zero.
I (pretty strongly) suspect that engineers were involved, rather than this being an assembly line worker floor-level decision.
The same company that erected a factory-in-a-tent (unconventional but also appropriate) to hit aggressive production targets seems like one that would consider and execute appropriate but unconventional substitutions.
I guarantee you that the materiel is not "wood" and is indeed much weaker in all relevant parameters. And I suspect that no one at TESLA has any real handle on the compressive strength of this material.
I think this is cool! It reminds me of how Ferrari did a very similar thing with the dabs of yellow paint they used to mark bolts that had to withstand intense vibration:
That's standard operating procedure in a whole lot of industries where proper torque is mission critical. If you ever find yourself near high precision manufacturing or industrial lifting equipment (think hooks and lifting eyes where a crane picks a load up) you can't miss the torque marks on bolt heads and/or nuts.
Same deal with GM restoration judging. Judges at Bloomington Gold will get very specific about the bolts used on a car, but a panel was held with a retired GM factory employee who put together first or second-gen Corvettes, and he said something similar: Sometimes they ran out of bolts at the factory, and when they did somebody would run down to the local hardware outlet and just buy whatever bolts fit the spec.
This kind of thing is done in aviation, and the stuff is called Torque Seal or Inspection Lacquer. You tighten the nut to the proper torque, and put a dab of lacquer across the thread and nut. Whenever you inspect the part later, if you see the seal broken or mis-aligned, you know the part has vibrated out of spec, and need to replace and re-torque the bolt.
Unfortunately it's more the opposite - literally cutting this corner would be not bothering with the extra material that's presumably there to keep the strap off the heatsink, i.e. so giving it a wider corner.
It looks like a bit of a bodge, but plenty of that goes on, and the less automated a process the more it will happen. (Because if highly automated it's more difficult/expensive vs. ditching the problem unit, or waiting for the designed-in part rather than re-tool.)
There is a lot of room for cutting corner in manufacturing and it all translates to quality and consistency.
My brother in law has a law firm and he happen to work with two different car manufacturing brands. He was explaining how two brands choose the glue differently to build the same part of their products. While for the Chinese brand it was only important that the glue has the minimum standard to be used in their production line, the Japanese brand was very specific about which exact glue from two particular brands can be used there. Which both happen to be more expensive than similar products with same standard on paper. But Japanese would only use that particular product because they did all their quality and durability tests with that.
This is something you saw all the time back in the day from normal car manufacturers (heck, some GM cars were famous for coming off of the production lines with bottles and trash inside of panels).
This only seems so chintzy to us today because of how much we take for granted from manufacturing today. Modern automakers are running lean operations that are insanely optimized (being able to keep consistent production with barely any inventory). Tesla has famously had problems achieving lean production (keeping huge inventories of other parts, and consistently running out of others).
This wouldn't be so embarrassing if Musk had not spent so much time throwing shade on other car manufacturers.
This looks and sounds bad, but is it actually bad? Regardless, beyond the simple perception of "cheapness", the humor value lent by the specific choice of material certainly doesn't help the optics.
Besides looking like a kid's go-cart, I think it's bad in the sense that cars go through safety testing and are governed by a ton of rules and regulations, and it's unlikely they've tested the cars with parts scrounged from Home Depot.
Assuming it's safe, then the worst part, for Tesla, is probably just the terrible optics. It's one thing for a do-it-yourselfer to hack their own car, but I suspect nobody really wants to drop $60k on a new car that's hacked together.
If there's any reason for that metal strap to exist (i.e. it meaningfully prevents the part from falling off the car) then the crush strength and so forth of that wood needs to be considered.
I was on a call with Tesla salesperson to purchase a Model Y. After watching a few Youtube videos on quality and now this I'm 100% backing off from it. A BMW is cheaper and much better built
Yeah, you don't buy a tesla for build quality. You buy a Tesla if you want and EV that has solid self driving with top performance. It lacks in premium service and manufacturing quality.
The base Model Y is $50k but the seats and comfort are straight out of the Model 3. It’s not exactly the peak of luxury and comfort. However, luxury and comfort aren’t necessarily what people are paying for when they buy a Model Y.
For me personally, I’d rather daily drive the X4. The Model Y wins in pure track performance but the X4 is serviceable. Where the Model Y really falls behind is comfort and luxury. The X4 is just miles and miles ahead in those two categories.
There are other considerations, like maintenance, resale value, gas, etc. I wouldn’t necessarily buy either of these cars but if I had to choose I would rather have the BMW.
To each their own, I guess. The Model Y pulled the seats straight from the Model 3 and literally just put them on a pedestal. The materials are about as “luxurious” as what you would find on a upper trim CRV.
His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.
When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.
"What’s shim?"
"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."
"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"
"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"
"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."
I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!
Ach, du lieber!
Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.
You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.
I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.
In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.
For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.
That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.
What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
From Jalopnik, Munro is quoted as saying:
“The metal bad routes through the Plastic housing for the Thermal system and the band cracked a portion of it.”
I’m still kind of in shock that Tesla still sells software upgrades for things like disabling traction control “Drift Mode” or for turning on the rear seat heaters. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but if I’m purchasing a vehicle I can be allowed to wrench on it without being banned from supercharger stations
I would expext this on Yugo. I dont mind the fix if it works, but I would expect this from someone doing it at home not from a $50k car. If I would find this in my car I would just return it to the factory and the linked article is right. What else can be found?
Electrics don't.. all of the intense heat from an internal combustion car comes from the combustion process itself. There's probably some heat built up in the drive components on the Tesla and surely by the wheels from the braking, but not in the 'engine bay'/frunk.
Right.. but the liquid cooled condenser that the wood is attached to isn't going to approach anything close to the ignition temperature of wood... whereas the temp inside the cylinder of an ICE car can reach 2,500ºC. I think the Tesla hack in the article is ridiculous but 100x safer than a similar hack in an ICE engine bay would be.
the "official" part is a piece of clear plastic, which is probably acrylic, which melts around 160C. (it could be something else, but it's transparent and there's no reason to make it transparent other than that's what's cheap. and making transparent non-acrylic plastics isn't cheap)
…an electric car? Unless there’s a V8 Hemi option for the Model Y I’m not aware of.
And anyway, this is seemingly taking the place of a plastic part, and if the heat exchanger wasn’t melting the factory-spec plastic, I imagine it’s not hot enough to start this wood smoldering.
(I still would prefer my fancy car have the proper, automative grade plastic.)
The question is, how will it handle years of the daily heating and cooling cycles that the cooling system will undergo? I don't know and likely no-one does ... because it hasn't been rated or approved for that task. it isn't even a standardised part, how can it be?
>The question is, how will it handle years of the daily heating and cooling cycles that the cooling system will undergo?
...you'll find out at the regular inspection and service that you are required by law to have at intervals far more frequent then "years"? That's part of the point of them, both to notice fleet issues that will be reported back up and conversely to implement directives ("it needs to be replaced with this updated strain relief at the next service") coming down.
This is only visible by substantially disassembling the car (the person who originally reported it found it when fixing panel work). As far as I know that's not routinely done _anywhere_.
Even the states that do require inspections are inspecting things like brakes, mirrors, and signal lights, not disassembling vehicles. Here's an example of what Massachusets does: https://www.mavehiclecheck.com/motorists-basicinfo/
If safety and longevity weren't concerns I would say:
If it's stupid and works it's not stupid.
There's a difference between quality, and the perception of quality.
How do you know it works? If it is indeed a cut corner that has a negative impact, it wouldn't present itself immediately or in all cases. I couldn't even begin to guess.
That doesn't apply to automotive. Many, many things that work in the factory will fail miles down the road. We don't know the design criteria for this and whether they were verified for the replacement. Maybe it needed to be free of a specific chemical or have specific properties within a temperature range and the supply chain can't guarantee that in the replacement.
Sure, it's more likely than not that the fix was signed off on and totally acceptable, but the story doesn't have enough information to be certain of that.
What's interesting is going to be just how polarizing the discussion below plays out. Discussing Tesla has become so Balkanized that it quickly moves beyond rational. Musk/Tesla is either a low quality sham of a company with inflated stock price or a genius undervalued company sticking it to big oil and stodgy old car companies.
I can understand the perception that this is an unreasonable cut corner with potential consequences, or that it's unknowable if it's reasonable or not without knowing more, but it's hard to wrap my mind around the 3rd option I keep seeing: That this is obviously a harmless example of scrappy ingenuity. Where do people get that kind of confidence in something with so many variables, both physical and financial?
I imagine there’s industrial-grade 3D-printing material, but if they’re in such a time crunch to get these out the door for Q2, it was probably quicker to just send an intern to Home Depot.
"The original poster of the thread had reportedly spent more than ten hours disassembling their Model Y to correct poor panel fitment when they came across a large chunk of metal secured with green tape and a small strap."
Bad quality followed up by bad quality.
When I benchmarked Tesla years ago, the exterior(and interior) panels were awful in their Autoshow build. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't fixed it yet.
I gave them a pass at the time because everything was new and in low runs. Now with 500k/yr, there's really no excuse.
