Comment on ‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

• HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  By your logic then, capitalism is great, because that means no one would’ve engineered these crazy locks but instead just used the tried and true ones.

  Wait. That’s not what happened?

  Oh.

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  • ZMonster@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    engineered these crazy locks

    I would joke that since they don’t work then I doubt any engineering went into them at all. But I know that isn’t true.

    So I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by “crazy locks”? I did a lot of work investigating the manufacturing equipment and their use, so I remember a bit about their components, design, and assembly; but I did not work with those directly so I could be missing something entirely. I don’t remember there being anything groundbreaking about the mechanics of the door locks. But the general build always felt… “thinner”. Most manufacturers stay away from minimum standards by at least the standard deviation or two, so if the required gauge was 18 ± 1, a typical mfr would use 20+. Tesla would use 18. On the nose. That was a lot more common in automotive but even hyundai/kia used wide margins for safety. All that to say, I have a hard time believing the door locks were so complex that a sizable investment would be anything other than reinventing the wheel, but even moreso that it was even worth the superfluous cost.

    One of the last jobs I had there was a machine that they picked up third hand and cobbled together with some very sketchy safety systems that wildly failed requirements. I was there for days and it was one of the more extensive reports I’ve ever made on a single installation. The control system was designed by the onsite engineers and passed flawlessly. But they had a lot to do to get the equipment usable.

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    • lemming741@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I stopped reading when you suggested 20 gauge was heavier than 18 gauge.

      Rookie mistake you can’t come back from.

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      • ZMonster@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Lol, I saw that after I sent it, but was absolutely not confident enough to change it. I don’t work in that field any more so that is not the only thing about materials that you probably know better than me. And I’m sorry for the wall of text. My bad.

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• theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No, the problem is they engineered something they didn’t need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)

  Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses

  Maybe it’s something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something… But even that they could’ve done better by starting from very common, cheap technology

  Let’s be clear… The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering

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  • ZMonster@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool.

    I strongly disagree. Things are getting more and more electric across all manufacturing because it is cheap. A single touch screen that drops in place under a snap on bezel with a premade cable harness and some programming time is so much faster and cheaper than designing, installing, wiring, coding, and testing physical buttons or mechanical linkages. PCBs can be tested in a negligible amount of time.

    Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper.

    No. Sorry, but no. The locks were going to be electrically operated no matter what. But the inclusion of standard mechanical components would increase the cost significantly.

    very common, cheap technology

    Yes, but that would be electrical components. It’s not very intuitive, I agree. But cost is the sole reason things are becoming more “electronic”. Electronics are extremely cheap compared to their analog ancestors. And not only that, but since very few mfrs are using off the shelf mechanical components, they are now less supplied and harder to get. So their cost is going up. Electronics are going down.

    I don’t know the engineering endeavors that he may or may not have been directly involved with. I’m not entirely sure what “from on high” means, but I would presume you are referring to his net value and authority. In that case, I would say he is no different than literally any other CEO. He made decisions that made him a profit. That’s what they do. GE is a great test case for this. Nearly destroyed the company in the long term so that board members see a small financial gain in the short term, then dump the carcass on the next guy. It’s just money. That’s all.

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    • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, electronics are very cheap… But remember the part where they also have a mechanical mechanism? They have two systems, where most cars have this very simple lock that connects to a tiny motor assembly. It’s literally a piece of plastic and a few wires

      The tablet thing is true, they’ve changed cars to computerize everything, and once you’ve done that you can connect everything over a network. Every button needs to do back to a chip to become a digital signal, so before you had these complex one-off wiring harnesses for everything

      But the tablet thing is again, common. It makes sense, it’s just worse

      But Elon is a unique case. Elon likes to actually make decisions, because he thinks he’s Tony Stark. He actually goes down into teams and hangs out, and they have to just work around whatever decisions he makes. It’s present in all of his companies, but you can see it most in Twitter, because they didn’t have time to build a team to strategically distract him when he comes to visit

      This absolute idiot has spent the last month trying to get grok to be a literal Nazi. First, he added a bunch of white genocide to the prompt, making it change the topic to that from any question for a few days.

      Now it’s responding all confused, and saying things like “I never gave Jeffrey Epstein tours of spaceX or Tesla” when asked it Elon did it. Seems to me they fed Elon’s tweets in the RAG system in a amateur way

      He micromanages and meddles constantly… That’s what he does at his companies

      For a counterexample, Jeff Bezos. He was heavily involved in the fire phone, and had some genuinely cool ideas… But the priorities were all wrong, so it flopped. He learned his lesson

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• Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

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  • ZMonster@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Luigi: lol same

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