What Engineers Found When They Tore Apart Tesla Model 3

[T3sl4co1l]

I'm not sure why you insist on being facetious. I acknowledged that flex is part of a car's design, so even if you completely ignored any context it would be fairly obvious that diamond is not an option being discussed. Taking an argument to an extreme is generally considered a fallacy and bad form. Meanwhile, it's rather clear that "as stiff as possible" refers to a conventional car body made with somewhat conventional techniques, which means steel, aluminium and possibly composites. I may have missed some options. There really isn't something like "stiff enough" the context discussed in this thread, as it's mostly a case of a car handling worse or better. It's a gradient without well defined borders.

The underlying lesson, is to be specific, and to say what you mean, leaving nothing to context or interpretation.

If you asked a genie for a frame that's "as stiff as possible", what do you think you'd get?

Why are there so many stories involving genies that are jerks that do what you literally tell them and it turns out to be completely not what you meant?

It's a dangerously thing, a lesson well worth understanding in the field of engineering -- and this thread is as good a place as any to make another example of.

What is "possible"?  If you meant, "can be done at all, given current knowledge", then I gave a perfectly plausible example, you must agree!  But if you meant, "can be done, given budget, time and knowledge constraints at this particular company", you'd get something a lot closer to what was actually built.  But why not say so, why leave it open to context, or interpretation, or guessing?

Cheers!
Tim

[nctnico]

I'm not sure why you insist on being facetious. I acknowledged that flex is part of a car's design, so even if you completely ignored any context it would be fairly obvious that diamond is not an option being discussed. Taking an argument to an extreme is generally considered a fallacy and bad form. Meanwhile, it's rather clear that "as stiff as possible" refers to a conventional car body made with somewhat conventional techniques, which means steel, aluminium and possibly composites. I may have missed some options. There really isn't something like "stiff enough" the context discussed in this thread, as it's mostly a case of a car handling worse or better. It's a gradient without well defined borders.

The underlying lesson, is to be specific, and to say what you mean, leaving nothing to context or interpretation.

I agree but the root of the problem may be that nobody at Tesla knew/knows how stiff the car should be. One factor to consider is that the construction of the body has to be different compared to a regular ICE car because the batteries are located under the passengers. All in all it is a learning process. AFAIK the other car builders seem to adhere to more classical designs where the battery is put in the booth and/or where the fuel tank used to be.

[nfmax]

An electric car is not the same as an ICE car and the optimum design will not be the same either. Most things will be similar, but sometimes a fairly minor difference can push the optimum through a 'cusp' and you end up with something radically different. Maybe the high stiffness body is one of these. You want to protect the occupants in the event of a crash, but you also want to protect the battery, which the occupants are basically sitting on. As has been said, the absence of an engine block means the crumple zones can be much deeper than an ICE car, so you end up with a 'citadel' type design.

Another constraint that ICE cars don't face is end-of-life dismantling. You have to be able to safely remove the battery - you aren't going to stick nearly a tonne of lithium batteries through a car crusher (not more than once, anyway). This is true even if the car has been in a collision. And you don't want to use a cutting torch, or even a disc cutter. So maybe the 'too many parts' are there to allow multiple dismantling options, reducing disposal costs.

Engineering is always a compromise - and you have to understand what is being traded off against what.

[nctnico]

ICE cars are also being dismantled. You can't put an airbag through a shredder.

[T3sl4co1l]

I agree but the root of the problem may be that nobody at Tesla knew/knows how stiff the car should be. One factor to consider is that the construction of the body has to be different compared to a regular ICE car because the batteries are located under the passengers. All in all it is a learning process. AFAIK the other car builders seem to adhere to more classical designs where the battery is put in the booth and/or where the fuel tank used to be.

Now we enter even more speculation, of course -- take this with as much grain of salt as I'm shaking upon this already...

I suspect it wasn't a problem of ignorance.  They've done several cars at this time: passed all the tests, road tested, even somewhat into maintenance by then.

It may be a problem of management.  It's very much Musk's style to consider something done and final, and to keep innovating in the next new shiny thing, rather than boring optimization of already-solved problems.  Which of course forgets that the latter is predominantly what the automotive industry is about: small variations in a gradually changing marketplace.

Tim

[T3sl4co1l]

ICE cars are also being dismantled. You can't put an airbag through a shredder.

Or all the various and sundry fluids they contain, from battery acid to gasoline.

Tim

[tpowell1830]

ICE cars are also being dismantled. You can't put an airbag through a shredder.

A little off-topic, but imagine a Tesla here:

[TK]

There was another teardown by Munro, a company that specializes in disassembling and creating a full detailed report.



Munro was impressed by the design and quality of the electronics, battery packs and suspension.  He found the mechanical assembly to be so-so, but highly impressed by the test drive of the Tesla 3.

He shows the auto-pilot (self driving) board and compares it to military and aerospace grade (integration, quality).

[rsjsouza]

Keep in mind, the calculus extends all the way to the life cycle of the product, and of the customer.  Remember back when Fiestas were blowing up in crashes?  Management made the decision that so-and-so risk factor was an acceptable cost.  Lives are worth money, both in and of themselves (a typical person in a developed country is worth something like $5M in productive economic output over their lives -- a statistic you won't see thrown about very often, nor be all too willing to give out in polite company!), and in direct impact to the company (the more important consequence: how much will they sue us for).  If the risk is very well known, and small, it is perfectly rational (even if questionably ethical) to make the decision to go ahead with that risk.  (In that particular example, of course, it wasn't as well known as they thought, and they screwed up badly as a result.)

This article seems pertinent regarding this comment. Good reading.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament

The Youtube comments are hilarious on how they point out some flaws on the video.

[JPortici]

There was another teardown by Munro, a company that specializes in disassembling and creating a full detailed report.



Munro was impressed by the design and quality of the electronics, battery packs and suspension.  He found the mechanical assembly to be so-so, but highly impressed by the test drive of the Tesla 3.

He shows the auto-pilot (self driving) board and compares it to military and aerospace grade (integration, quality).

@15:18, the entire world's supply of MLCCs

[nctnico]

Maybe the electronics are spectaculair compared to the average ECU but if you take a generic video card or PC motherboard you'll see something with similar densities.

[tooki]

ICE cars are also being dismantled. You can't put an airbag through a shredder.

Or all the various and sundry fluids they contain, from battery acid to gasoline.

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

[james_s]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

[TK]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Me too, but it is an accounting requirement.  I know supermarkets and coffee shops donate the food that is left at the end of the day, but with cars, I think there is a liability to the manufacturer that goes with it and it is better to destroy them.  I don't think it is a practice to avoid someone else getting them.

[rsjsouza]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Me too, but it is an accounting requirement.  I know supermarkets and coffee shops donate the food that is left at the end of the day, but with cars, I think there is a liability to the manufacturer that goes with it and it is better to destroy them.  I don't think it is a practice to avoid someone else getting them.

Yeah, it is the old adage: it makes economic/legal sense but not moral sense.

[tooki]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Without wanting to get into it in detail, they could not conclusively guarantee that those cars would be just as safe and reliable as ones that hadn’t spent a month sideways (as well as the forces involved in arriving at that position to begin with). Safety is a liability issue, and reliability is a reputation issue. So they and their lawyers and insurance company decided the conservative approach was to make sure they never made it to the public. Imagine if Mazda had sold them (even at a discount) and then it turns out that those cars, to totally imagine a fault, had brake systems that no longer worked reliably 100% of the time, resulting in accidents and deaths. What would happen? In USA, the answer is multi-million dollar lawsuits, plus the mark on their reputation.

As a former Mazda owner, it pained me to see those lovely cars be destroyed, but I absolutely do understand why they chose to do it.

[MT]

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Nothing new, they already did in the car over production years of the 1920-30ies.  Crushing of new cars was even filmed.
Many examples of destroying new cars (for various reasons, not sold, test fleet, etc), GM EV1 1200 built, everyone love that one, recalled and crushed ,  BMW Active E made more then 1000, newer sold, just crushed , Mercedes Smart ED 2000-2500 built used Tesla bat newer sold just crushed , Honda etc, etc . 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car for example, 55-60 made, shown to public then crushed!

There was another teardown by Munro, a company that specializes in disassembling and creating a full detailed report.



Munro was impressed by the design and quality of the electronics, battery packs and suspension.  He found the mechanical assembly to be so-so, but highly impressed by the test drive of the Tesla 3.

He shows the auto-pilot (self driving) board and compares it to military and aerospace grade (integration, quality).

He compares it to "mobilphone tech" density , whats so fantastic about that? Doesnt make Tesla any better then any other high density PCB manufacturer/designer whatnot. The dude is just blabbering marketing crap as if he was paid by Tesla , say some little bad to pretend being objective then go full bore on how fantastic, spectacular, fantastic etc BS Tesla is, cant even pronounce neodymium right!  At least he had read little about Sun Tzu yet then fall into the "let-me- tell-ya" trap he made him self by become the dismisses'er he whines about!   No objective analysis about the BMS all japping about component density, he dosent even know if the electronics is made by Tesla or outsourced as he says. Old  jappin Detroit man! Detroit is dead as car manufacturing town dude Munroe!

Dead Packard factory 2018!

[james_s]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Without wanting to get into it in detail, they could not conclusively guarantee that those cars would be just as safe and reliable as ones that hadn’t spent a month sideways (as well as the forces involved in arriving at that position to begin with). Safety is a liability issue, and reliability is a reputation issue. So they and their lawyers and insurance company decided the conservative approach was to make sure they never made it to the public. Imagine if Mazda had sold them (even at a discount) and then it turns out that those cars, to totally imagine a fault, had brake systems that no longer worked reliably 100% of the time, resulting in accidents and deaths. What would happen? In USA, the answer is multi-million dollar lawsuits, plus the mark on their reputation.

As a former Mazda owner, it pained me to see those lovely cars be destroyed, but I absolutely do understand why they chose to do it.

So send them to salvage yards. I frequently buy parts in unknown condition out of cars with completely unknown history in order to keep mine going. The responsibility for determining a part is safe to use falls on me.

[maginnovision]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Without wanting to get into it in detail, they could not conclusively guarantee that those cars would be just as safe and reliable as ones that hadn’t spent a month sideways (as well as the forces involved in arriving at that position to begin with). Safety is a liability issue, and reliability is a reputation issue. So they and their lawyers and insurance company decided the conservative approach was to make sure they never made it to the public. Imagine if Mazda had sold them (even at a discount) and then it turns out that those cars, to totally imagine a fault, had brake systems that no longer worked reliably 100% of the time, resulting in accidents and deaths. What would happen? In USA, the answer is multi-million dollar lawsuits, plus the mark on their reputation.

As a former Mazda owner, it pained me to see those lovely cars be destroyed, but I absolutely do understand why they chose to do it.

So send them to salvage yards. I frequently buy parts in unknown condition out of cars with completely unknown history in order to keep mine going. The responsibility for determining a part is safe to use falls on me.

That's not how safety works. You could look at parts think they're ok and find out they aren't. Even morally the right thing to do was destroy the parts if there was even a chance they were defective. Maybe you're an expert but another guy sees one of those cars and assumes it's all new parts. He gets a seat belt and the pre tensioner or locking mechanism fails and he gets hurt? A radiator that had internal corrosion issues you couldn't determine and end up stranded, or damaging the engine from over heating. Legally, ethically and morally you don't flood markets with potentially faulty parts especially ehen they might seem brand new.

[Nauris]

ICE cars are also being dismantled. You can't put an airbag through a shredder.

Or all the various and sundry fluids they contain, from battery acid to gasoline.

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

General practice at least here is that airbags go as-is with the rest of car thru the shredder. To my knowledge, it has not caused any problems ever.
Tanks full of gasoline on the other hand - they don't like the least bit when someone forgets to empty...

[nfmax]

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Without wanting to get into it in detail, they could not conclusively guarantee that those cars would be just as safe and reliable as ones that hadn’t spent a month sideways (as well as the forces involved in arriving at that position to begin with). Safety is a liability issue, and reliability is a reputation issue. So they and their lawyers and insurance company decided the conservative approach was to make sure they never made it to the public. Imagine if Mazda had sold them (even at a discount) and then it turns out that those cars, to totally imagine a fault, had brake systems that no longer worked reliably 100% of the time, resulting in accidents and deaths. What would happen? In USA, the answer is multi-million dollar lawsuits, plus the mark on their reputation.

As a former Mazda owner, it pained me to see those lovely cars be destroyed, but I absolutely do understand why they chose to do it.

After the claim, those cars would probably belong to the insurance company - that's the way it normally works. They get to decide what to do with them, although it was probably written in to the insurance contract that they be prevented from ever being sold. Marine insurance is an odd business.

[Mr. Scram]

The underlying lesson, is to be specific, and to say what you mean, leaving nothing to context or interpretation.

If you asked a genie for a frame that's "as stiff as possible", what do you think you'd get?

Why are there so many stories involving genies that are jerks that do what you literally tell them and it turns out to be completely not what you meant?

It's a dangerously thing, a lesson well worth understanding in the field of engineering -- and this thread is as good a place as any to make another example of.

What is "possible"?  If you meant, "can be done at all, given current knowledge", then I gave a perfectly plausible example, you must agree!  But if you meant, "can be done, given budget, time and knowledge constraints at this particular company", you'd get something a lot closer to what was actually built.  But why not say so, why leave it open to context, or interpretation, or guessing?

Cheers!Tim

The problem with your assessment is that it's proven to be impossible. I pride myself on expressing myself with measure and accuracy, but practicalities prevent us from defining and constraining everything we say every time we have a conversation. Even texts that are written to be as well defined as possible and that are barely legible as a consequence leave enough room for interpretation to need a whole specialised industry to interpret them correctly. Luckily the regular human brain is in essence a context machine and consequently, people can communicate in a pleasant and not too cumbersome manner.

I'm glad you referred to the genie stories, because the very reason those work is that the audience understands what's actually asked. The genie then wilfully and maliciously breaks the context. In those days these were called genies, in modern internet lingo wilfully disrupting a reasonable conversation is called "trolling". The fact you refer to the genie stories shows that you're aware of the disruptive nature of your remarks.

Again, I'm not sure why you are being facetious and malicious. It may be for your personal gratification, it may be an attempt to appear smarter. However, I have no interest in a pissing match. It wouldn't be much of a contest anyway.

[tooki]

ICE cars are also being dismantled. You can't put an airbag through a shredder.

Or all the various and sundry fluids they contain, from battery acid to gasoline.

This reminds me of the demanufacturing faculty Mazda set up to destroy the 5000 cars that were aboard the Cougar Ace when it nearly capsized 12 years ago. 5000 brand new cars, dismantled and every single part destroyed to make sure nothing entered the used parts market. (Insurance paid for it and demanded this, as well as nobody being quite sure what effect a whole month of near-horizontal storage would have on a car in the long run.)

They even had to design and build an airbag deployer.

General practice at least here is that airbags go as-is with the rest of car thru the shredder. To my knowledge, it has not caused any problems ever.
Tanks full of gasoline on the other hand - they don't like the least bit when someone forgets to empty...

I encourage you to go find the old videos and articles about the process, it was (grimly) fascinating.

It’s got nothing to do with safety in shredding. This was not a “general practices” kind of situation. It was a requirement to ensure that not a single component from those cars EVER made it into the used parts market, not even a single lug nut (literally!). So the demanufacturing process was designed around this, and for recyling.

I think it began with draining all fluids, popping the airbags, taking out the battery, removing the wheels, crushing the rims, removing and slashing the tires, and so on, until left with a stripped down chassis. Each bin of a particular part was then dealt with individually. It was much more methodical than ordinary car scrapping.

[tooki]

So send them to salvage yards. I frequently buy parts in unknown condition out of cars with completely unknown history in order to keep mine going. The responsibility for determining a part is safe to use falls on me.

Again, consider if they did this, and it later turns out that some safety critical part had been affected in a way nobody could predict, and suddenly you’ve got 5000 unsafe parts out there, many in cars driven by people who have no idea there’s an unsafe part in the car. (“I can choose to acccept that risk” doesn’t work in this situation. Garages also buy salvage parts for their customers, and cars get sold.) Now when deaths start happening, who are they going to go after? The salvage yard, with its super-deep pockets, or Mazda?

And if this happened, and you were the Mazda engineer or manager who OK’d that, how would you feel if your decision to let them be sold resulted in dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of accidents and deaths?

Yes, it’s a lot of “if’s”. But I totally understand why they did it, even if it hurts to see it happen.

[tooki]

This sort of thing really bothers me. It is simply criminal to destroy something in order to keep it out of someone else's hands. If I had my way, people who order this sort of thing would be stripped of their assets and banished from society.

Nothing new, they already did in the car over production years of the 1920-30ies.  Crushing of new cars was even filmed.
Many examples of destroying new cars (for various reasons, not sold, test fleet, etc), GM EV1 1200 built, everyone love that one, recalled and crushed ,  BMW Active E made more then 1000, newer sold, just crushed , Mercedes Smart ED 2000-2500 built used Tesla bat newer sold just crushed , Honda etc, etc . 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car for example, 55-60 made, shown to public then crushed!

Non-production vehicles (such as test fleets, concept cars, prototypes, etc) are only temporarily street-legal under specific exemptions the car maker must apply for. They can’t be made permanently steet-legal after the fact. From the sound of it, people in the auto industry are actually surprised that BMW managed to get permission to repurpose some of the ActiveE cars in a car-sharing program.