Submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/cybertruck-steel-body-panel-gaps-production-issue-report-2023-11
The stainless steel body of Tesla’s Cybertruck is reportedly leading to issues with gaps in between the panels::The Cybertruck’s steel is made in “coils that resemble giant rolls of toilet paper,” WSJ reported.
The Cybertruck’s steel is made in “coils that resemble giant rolls of toilet paper,”
All steel is shipped from the stewl mill in coils just like that.
There’s a lot of legitimate things to criticize, why make stupid comparisons like this?
Other manufacturers of all manner of stainless products seem to have figured out a solution to the problem.
Two design choices probably make it worse:
I can’t get over the flatness… those panels surely rattle too? Or do they void-fill the doors and body with something?
Flat panels are not anywhere as stiff as curved panels
Same for windows. So much for “thermonuclear explosion-proof glass”, Elon.
Also, the shape has horrible aerodynamics. If it had a combustion engine, they couldn’t sell it in large parts of the world due to fuel efficiency.
Point 2 in particular is huge. Depending on the exact alloy steel can vary wildly in characteristics. One alloy might bend almost as easily as aluminum, while another might be nearly as hard as tungsten. Adding to that proper heat treatment and the difference in the mechanical characteristics of the finished product can be absolutely massive.
Don’t older cars have mostly flat panels? So it should be possible, right?
Seems like tesla has an answer too:
sell the poorly made trucks to rubes while you crank out more as cheaply as possible.
Company doing stuff they have no expertise with.
I saw one of the “RC” release candidates in the wild in San Francisco two weeks ago. It looked like shit in person. Marker lights weren’t aligned, the stainless already had fucked up scuffs and discoloration, etc. Water spots showed up just like my stainless kitchen sink.
You can see the stainless smudges and water spots here. I wish I got the tail lights when the brakes were off. Image
Also, the brakes flashed at you. Super annoying.
It’s not even smudge free stainless? LMAO
Similar to the one I saw in Oregon a few weeks ago. It had fingerprint smudges all over the body. Seems like it’d be a huge pain to keep clean and probably need a sealant or clear wrap over the top.
QC issues aside, the design is pure ass
That thing is hideous.
The lights look so shit. Never noticed before
Well, Duh. Everything is over promise, delay, underdeliver. All Teslas have crappy panel gaps. Why would anyone expect anything better?
I wonder how much better Tesla quality would be if they dumped Elon. Is it a systemic problem, or just poor leadership?
I’m hoping shareholders do push him out. They’re still in a great position to compete if they focus on the right things (build quality, designing cars people actually want, etc). The charging network is still the best around and they’re still ahead in battery tech, but they need to stop chasing FSD and give up on this cybertruck thing.
They said they’re a tech company and the car is tech on wheel, so i guess it’s just competency and inexperience issue.
Don’t you know that the revolution eats its children? The electric cars revolution is over. Tesla was part of the revolution. Now the others are going to take over.
I doubt anything but a man child would have gone with stainless steel.
But the normal Tesla build quality and gaps would still be there. Because that would involve major overhauls and retraining and is never going to happen while the company is successful… And won’t happen if the board is looking to sell
Not a Tesla fan but this article is garbage. Basically all sheet metal comes on coils “that resemble toilet paper” including the metal that other manufacturers use.
It definitely seems like an irrelevant point. All car sheet steel arrives in rolls.
I’d be more concerned about how it is formed into panels, how resistant it is to corrosion, what tolerances parts have, how easy is it to replace parts, whether there are visible production flaws due to it being naked steel, and if construction techniques or material thickness makes it more dangerous to occupants or pedestrians in collisions.
I certainly won’t be surprised if pictures start appearing in a year or two of cybertrucks that have been completely fucked by salt water corrosion, or heat warppage or other issues caused by their design.
I certainly won’t be surprised if pictures of that don’t start appearing in a year or two because the things still haven’t been delivered
(I know, I know, they’re supposed to be delivering the first ones in two days, but I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if that somehow falls through)
When they make plywood it comes wrapped up super tight in a tree
Has anyone complimented your genius today?
yeah. panel gaps aren’t a sheet metal issue, it’s been a Tesla issue since forever.
“Water? Like out the toilet?”
Please only wash your Cyber Truck with Brawndo™
Yeah, but other manufacturers don’t try to origami sheet metal into a car.
That’s almost exactly what they do…
The missing point is it’s a property of stainless steel that it remembers being a coil and can unflatten itself weeks later if the manufacturer doesn’t know how to work around that.
I’ve worked with stainless steel (specifically 304, 430 and 401) for 15 years and the steel shouldn’t have a memory after being run through a de-coiling machine that is configured properly. Excessive heat in a focused area would definitely cause it to warp but this can usually be overcome by adding geometry to stiffen the parts.
Flat panels suck for resistance to bending, the compound curves and folds pressed into most car panels give them more rigidity
If only someone had figured that out in the last 120 years. Oh wait…
What’s funny to me is how fast the Korean car companies learned “metal bending.” They went from generic easy shapes with little forming to adding in creases all over the damn car just to prove they could do it and replicate it, and they did that in the span of a couple decades at the most.
Well at least Elon can pretend that all the panels were within 10 microns of gap when they left the factory, warping 2 cm (20000 microns) by a week in.
So wait. You’re telling me that materials can expand and contract due to many conditions such as shifts in temperature? Ya don’t say.
Sure, he could say that. It’s still his/Tesla’s fault. Shipping the product is part of the process, and they’d still be responsible for that (or should be at least. Who knows in this dystopia).
He’d probably just say that it arrived in perfect shape, the customer just fucked it up and are lying. Or something like that.
Seems like the answer here is “you’re an idiot if you buy Tesla products”.
Essy lesson to learn, imo.
Good old fashioned blame the customer. He’s so good at it his fanbois will do it for him.
What a surprise! The other well known stainless steel car, the Delorean DMC-12, is FAMOUS for being a huge pain in the ass to work on. Dents and dings are tremendous problems, and stainless steel is super heavy.
Not to mention all of the manual labour it took to make all the panels to fit properly. No 2 delorean were the same
Depending on the grade, the weight difference between stainless steel and carbon steel of the same thickness is not much of any at all.
Don’t most cars use aluminum as well as carbon steel in their frames, to save on weight?
Well, it wouldn’t be a Tesla if it didn’t.
10 micron!
I think we all just misheard him and he actually said it had macron precision, not micron
Panel gaps are just a ubiquitous feature of a Tesla. This isn’t a surprise, and the apologists will say it’s no big deal.
I am not a car guy. Would gaps allow water to come in and causes issues as well as act like asail increasing air resistance?
Probably not in this case. Most vehicle doors are designed to channel any water that enters the gap. But, Tesla may not be aware of this practice and rely only on the seals.
Don’t ask questions, just hail Elon our overlord who can do no wrong!
It would slightly increase wind resistance. Every car has weather stripping, making water not a concern even for comparatively very large gaps.
You should see the videos of model Y owners (a model they’ve had many iterations on) roll down their window during rain to get a drive through order and the water pours into the car directly onto the, you guessed it: button console used to open/close the window and DOOR.
Tesla’s quality control just reflects Elons concern for all his biological children.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened to a Tesla, at this point this particular problem is just expected.
Much like the wealthy expert who built his own sub, there is a need to listen to other experts. Your employees that aren’t fired will be the “yes” people
Every single thing you’ve ever had that had sheet metal in it came from “coils that resemble giant rolls of toilet paper”. But it’s the WSJ, I just assume the writer has never met anyone who works for a living.
4x8 sheets are pretty popular, too.
This is a problem with all of their vehicles lol
Just today I took a quick look at a Tesla stopped in front of me and saw 3 misaligned parts. In like 10 seconds. Quality is shit.
Cybertruck would be the time machine in a Back to the Future shitty remake if they would make one.
Starring Jared Leto as Marty McFly
Don’t you put that shit in my head 🤮
Gary Busey as Doc Brown
And Gary Busey as Dr. Emmett Brown
I don’t like you.
A perfect replacement for the DeLorean: stainless steel body? Check. Failed ego-drive project? TBD but it’s not looking good.
Watch what happens when people eventually discover what completely flat panels of sheet metal do in heavy wind.
There is literally a reason why no other auto manufacturer uses flat body panels on cars.
Just so I know, what does happen?
Metal does not like to compress at all. But when you make it really thin it will be floppy like a spring you might find in a pen or wind up toy. However you can make it stiff again by making it curved so the sheet has structure/mass going on all directions. Infact believe it or not cars during the 1960/70s had quite a bit of curves dispute being a brick. And that’s because they didn’t want the panels to dent easily. So when a car has flat faces like the Cyber truck. Those panels don’t even have subtle curves to give them structure and they are soo suspectable to dents that a simple brease does the job of denting them.
I assume the flat panels have an aerodynamic effect like the underbody of race cars. They ultimately create forces sucking the surface into a direction. And since on the sides it will be never stable it will flap around all the time. You can see that the most with the vertical fin stabilizer of Formula 1 cars. old.reddit.com/r/…/alpine_flexible_rearwing/
Here is a lot of wobbling and while the vertical changes are intended, the horizontal ones surely aren’t and they tried to make it as stiff as possible. Certainly nothing a production car would achieve.
Correct me if I am wrong, as I didn’t study this particular area.
I love how this is a joke that just went too far. Elon presented a stupid design, just for attention, as with everything he does. And now they are seriously taking about releasing the ugliest car since the Fiat Multipla.
Fiat Multipla
Damn that’s a goofy lookin car. Looks almost like the car that Homer Simpson designed.
Should have just been left as a quirky concept car. Obviously divisive design but I think it looks best under specific lighting conditions.
If they were smart, they would pursue nitinol body panels or a similar memory metal. Get a ding in a panel? Take a heat gun to it or leave it out in the sun and the dent is gone. Another benefit would be a ~25% weight reduction.
All they would have to do is figure how to make large panels; which is no easy task, but neither is rocket science. The patent licensing could be a major revenue stream.
Isn’t this what Saturn did or is nitinol some sort of metal alloy?
Oh no! You have to respect the “Spaltmaß”! * cries in German *
I mean in the end it is a sign of sloppy craftsmanship. The gaps themselves might not be so bad, but they reflect an alarming lack of quality control, that could very well affect more critical systems.
If I can’t trust you to make a good looking turd, how can I trust you to make an actual quality product?
2 million idiots clambering over themselves to preorder this brainfart of a vehicle.
At this point Tesla customers deserve this crap
The regular Tesla cars have inconsistent panel gaps already, I feel this is a production issue, not a material issue.
Well, if Sandy Munro said to not worry about it we’re good. Oh who tf is Sandy Munro?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Cybertruck’s stainless steel body has been difficult to work with, especially when it comes to the vehicle’s fit and finish, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
In October, Tesla set a delivery event for the first Cybertrucks for November 30 after two years of delays — and there’s signs the truck will have a smaller release than initially expected.
Meanwhile, Musk has warned that it will be difficult to scale production due to the vehicle’s unusual design and said the company aims to produce about a quarter million Cybertrucks per year by 2025.
“When you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you’re trying to solve at scale,” Musk said during Tesla’s earnings call last month.
Yet despite the enthusiasm, some Tesla fans have already taken to criticizing the design, including the vehicle’s enormous windshield wiper and images of its finger-print smudged doors, as well as misaligned panels.
Auto expert Sandy Munro previously told Insider it’s unfair to judge the vehicle based off of images of early Cybertruck prototypes.
The original article contains 589 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I am just glad the man is distracted, keeps him away from spacex
Should have taken a closer look at DMC…
Worked for a car manufacturer doing statistical analysis on gap & flushness all over the exterior… And the door gaps are a bitch to get right. Probably the most difficult ones over the whole car. All the manufacturers struggle with this to a degree. This is also the one place where part quality is probably most critical.
The other gaps are usually handled by designing the angles in a beneficial way etc. When they show up in a bigger way it’s almost always bad design.
All steel coils resemble giant rolls of toilet paper no?
that the truck is not designed or built right has been obvious from the getgo. Similar issues are found in all Tesla products, i’m not sure why we’re pretending otherwise
electric ground vehicles are not going to save the world
drdiddlybadger@pawb.social 11 months ago
You mean the thing everyone said was going to happen actually happened. Lmao
BlackSkinnedJew@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
LMAO X2
Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
LMAO³