Tesla is facing issues with the bare metal construction of the Cybertruck, which Elon Musk warned was as tricky to do as making Lego bricks
High accuracy, low precision.
@stopthatgirl7 silly man
These tolerances are very possible to hold while machining, but speaking from my perspective having been a machinist by trade for 20+ years, holding those tolerances for every single part on a vehicle is going to get prohibitively expensive really fucking fast.
Micron, as in 0.00004"? Yes you COULD hold it, with second ops and temp control.
The article states “sub 10 micron”, which I interpreted to be +/- .0004" in practice
The total tolerance is .0004". In equally disposed bilateral tolerancing it will be ±.0002".
Eh, if someone tells me to reduce a tolerance from 5 to 10 thou at work, it’s understood that it’s +/-5 and 10. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the full range of a tolerance in conversation. If the tolerance isn’t bilateral, it would be said like plus 5, minus zero. Anyways, +/- .0005" is our standard tolerance on the span of all dowel hole pairs.
Bilateral tolerancing is a Machinist’s first introduction to tolerancing so it’s no surprise to run that as default. And I suppose GD&T is not heavily used where you are.
If you’re given a parallelism tolerance of 10 micron are you assuming that to be ±10 micron? True position? Angularity of 5 thou? Etc… The only feature control that could be interpreted as bilateral by default is profile and it’s still communicated by its total tolerance.
Simple ± tolerancing isn’t the industry standard anymore. And if Tesla prints are anything like spaceX ones… It’s basically all GD&T and minimal title block tolerances.
I use GD&T on all my drawings, including 100% of my hole callouts. However I’m one of the more enthusiastic adopters of ASME Y14.5 at the place I work. Therefore, I get what your saying regarding the tolerance range, but since most of my coworkers are still relying on block tolerances, I’ll refer to a .010" positional tolerance as a “+/- .005” equivalent" in conversation so there is no miscommunication. I can see how this is not the norm.
On the dowel hole point, just measuring this stuff is going to take at the bare minimum an automated and purpose built CMM, which will drive the cost up even more. If we are to assume +/- 5 microns for every single part - we are talking about the level of manufacturing that Mitutoyo or Starrett have. This will be a multi-million dollar vehicle that noone would buy.
Just curious… what does Starrett have that Tesla will need?
Starrett isn’t known for quality precision metrology.
Well, in terms of for real metrology, you are correct. A better comparison would have been Brown and Sharpe. However, Starrett has more than enough reputation of everything that they produce being of a very high standard- primarily layout tools like calipers, precision levels, etc.
ETA: This could very well be my bias as an American showing. I know from experience that the fit and finish of a high end pair of Mitutoyo calipers have what I consider to be subpar to the Starrett equivalent in terms of fit and finish. There is also a $500 ish price difference which could also be a subconscious bias.
Elon: “Stacking” tolerances? No, we will not tolerate anything less than micron precision on every aspect of the design.
He’s probably hyper self conscious about people ripping into Teslas over their clearances (with inconsistencies measured in millimetres). But, no, instead of saying “VW can produce stuff that doesn’t look like it fell from a truck and you will figure it out, too” he’s going overboard.
If we’re going overboard, why bother with cars at all? Just use this cheesy blueprint, make it work and solve all of humanity’s problems! This is what California should invest in instead of trains.
Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.
It sounds to me like the reasonable conclusion to draw from this would be to modify the design of the car. I’d also assume you don’t need tolerances to be the same for literally all parts inside and out. I’d also think that, if the car looks that bad if things are 10 or more microns out of place, these cars are going to age terribly after regular use.
But what do I know? If I were smart, I’d be rich, right? And Elon is so rich, he must be a genius!
The awkward moment where you sit on the car watching the sunset with your sweetheart and the next day your stainless steel car is bent.
Tesla is know for shoddy panel alignment correct? This is gonna look horrific.
They are, and that undoubtedly gets under his sub micron thick skin, which is why he’s going overboard about it with this.
Yeah heat that mf up on a sunny day vs a cold day lol what an idiot.
It’s not like “accuracies” doesn’t add up either ha ha what a genius.
Usually car makers solve the expansion and contraction using glue, curves, and trim to deal with expansion and contraction.
The cybertruck has no curves and not much trim, the glue would have to be very flexible, which would lead to separation.
I am going to bet that we will see cybertruck with panels flying off or flapping at highway speeds not long after release.
Oh yes, I’m all with you here, either make a frame and stick the “panels” to it individually (probably good if you make a cheap tank vehicle or something IDK) or make a chassis that take the deformation forces and distribute them as evenly as possible.
My bet is they have him as a stupid publicity monkey drawing attention to Tesla, cybortryck etc (I mean all publicity is good right?) and away from bad things like Tesla didnt self drive end 2019(?) and still doesn’t, child labour, … etc
It’s just marketing. Elon wants dumb tesla bros to think their truck is built to that accuracy. No need for it to be reality.
I know it’s supposed to make them sound good and might indeed be meant for leaking, but all I can think of is the demands on quality assurance and risks of failures down the road if such precision is paramount for the operation of the vehicle and assumed by the teams building it.
So give me a less finicky vehicle, please, and leave that precision for devices not subject to highly varying road conditions at very high speeds and housing people.
Cybertruck, Cybertruck,
Engineers say “what the fuck”
Micron fits for auto steel?
Those are not a thing that’s real
So deal! Deal with it, Cybertruck.I read that in the Spiderman themesong’s rhythm lmao
This is what the refrance
A pretty good refrance… Macron should take notes
Why does Space Karen still have all his fanbois? Do they really think he’s some kind of software/technology/business genius, even after all that has come out about him?
He is talented, just not at engineering or science particularly.
His talents lie in obtaining government subsidies and trolling.
Him and his companies have achieved some very impressive things, most notably Tesla being so far ahead of the pack with EV technology, and Space X with their reusable rockets.
Regardless of your opinion of him as a person, he has achieved some impressive things.
I wouldn’t say I was a fanboy, but I liked him before … I don’t know, he was always crazy. These days he’s even more crazy and I’m not touching anything he does.
I can’t stand him but Starlink is so fucking awesome. Having high speed internet fucking everywhere is a game changer.
Thanks for sharing this article. We’re all at the mercy of the rich and powerful.
wow that was a really interesting article. the only thing impressive thing elon musk has done is getting the smart people together to form spacex, and i sure hope its out of his hands at this point so he cant drive it into the ground.
the dude blew up a launch pad recently.
it’s hard to believe americans are funneling their tax money to prop up a guy like that.
yeah not adding a water deluge system like every other launchpad ever was an obvious mistake. the pad (and tower) were mostly fine though, it just destroyed the concrete directly under the engines.
personally i find it interesting to watch them messing around, but i dont really support them. if starship doesnt work out, oh well, it was cool to see them try (and fail) anyway.
and elon musk is clearly a bad person.
Eh, not saying starlink isn’t good, but it’s not exactly novel. It didn’t take a genius to come up with the idea, which I very much doubt musk did, but the work that needed to be done and the service provided is impressive.
Musk did very little in that effort beyond paying the bill. I don’t really think that’s something to be commended for. Bill Gates could’ve paid for it and the result would have been identical.
Bill Gates still doesn’t get the internet thingamajig
Nah, he caught on late but he got it. He’s been out of the game for a long time, so people don’t remember when he was running MSFT. Guy was the real deal.
Nobody gets it, but that wasn’t my point.
I’m definitely not praising Musk, I’m just saying that I’ve been really happy with my Starlink dish. I don’t like that I’m supporting him financially in this small way but it fits my needs too well.
I didn’t think you were. The dude is so mind bogglingly rich that the concept of currency starts to unravel.
It’s not gonna be high bandwidth though, just low latency over long distances. It’s primarily for stock exchange information.
Mate, it’s the opposite that’s true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
Umm, high latency means slow reactions. I think you and OP meant the same thing, but you have the terms mixed up
I did more digging and:
- Starlink bandwidth is better than I was expecting.
- I can’t find the video that did all the math, but basically by using a low Earth orbit network you can get information long distances faster than you can with cell towers and fiber because you’re significantly reducing the number of repeaters you need without significantly increasing the distance the information has to travel.
“Traditional” satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they’re the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I’m not a physics dude, so I don’t know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there’s a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn’t a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The “genius” of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn’t really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
LEO orbits have been practical for decades, but things like GPS use MEO.
MEO was the standard, until now, for reasons. First of all, there is higher drag in LEO orbits as you are passing through the thermo- or else exosphere. This means more energy (and therefore mass) is required to maintain the orbit. And the more mass, the more gravity is pulling on you (LEO gravity is nearly the same as on the surface - you’re falling, but you’re missing the planet… until you’re not).
SpaceX’s “revolutionary” idea was to let/make them deorbit, and to use the space freight program to replace them. Of course, this was possible before, and planned obsolescence is already an important part of designing satellites. However this is insanely expensive and is only practical long-term because SpaceX is already being paid to launch their rockets. And more importantly, the volume of the LEO surface is the lowest of all orbits… there is minimal space available, and anything traveling to a higher orbit must pass through it. So there is a real risk of Kessler syndrome, where debris makes it impossible to continue using the orbit. And the debris of concern is usually small so they stay in orbit longer. This debris comes from launches, collisions, and potentially deorbits.
SpaceX is the only group that has chosen to utilize LEO as a consumable that is inherently limited in nature. They externalized the cost of pollution to society due to operating in an under-regulated domain. Now regulators are scrambling to find solutions for orbital pollution - enacting rules requiring deorbiting, supporting efforts toward satellites that cleanup debris, and so on.
Whether these efforts will be enough and whether they will come to fruition quickly enough, I do not know. But I do know that the rocketry industry involves a lot of pollution, is growing into a significant GHG contributor, and depletes ozone in the atmosphere (the hole in the Antarctic is still estimated to be 50+ years from healing, and one 8 times larger was just discovered in the tropics).
Same. I think it happens with any billionaire the longer the media focuses on them the more of their crazy comes out.
I honestly think that is anybody. Anyone can appear crazy once you get to know them.
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You’ve obviously not met my grandma, the difference is she isn’t in the public eye.
I think everyone just has a tiny bit of crazy in them, but they meet enough people to realise they need to temper their worst instincts.
The more rich/powerful you get, the more yes men you meet, and the more you think “hey i’m actually right all the time after all”, and the more you start justifying your own craziness.
Crazy and racist are two different words. Wonder if they have two different meanings?
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Well I was responding to crazy. Not racist. And saying most people are crazy is poignant. Saying most racist is not the same.
No you guys just got fooled by his very good PR team
I think they do , two of my school friends are his fanbois and even after his open goofup at twitter they be like , Elon musk , rocket boi , innovator and genius , first to invent sattelite internet ,he has enginnering degrees in making cars and rockets and should stick to it ! ( i was like no he does not have the degrees) 😏
If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.
This man is a certifiable idiot, and I feel bad for anyone working for him.
I mean, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong, you can get that accuracy on larger parts given sufficient time, materials, tools, expertise, etc.
But a car has more parts than a Lego brick
What happens when you put that large metal part in the sun? He is entirely wrong.
Well, of course. It doesn’t change my statement though.
And the guys down the lab could go “well, we don’t have to make it out of metal.” And then it starts a rabbit hole of further insane requests that are technically possible, but to people unfamiliar with engineering (Elon) say “damn the cost” betting (incorrectly) that the time or financial cost to fulfill the requests is still profitable.
Happens to a lot of products, unfortunately. People making demands are better off knowing what the demand entails. When they do not, this is what we get.
He’s also probably confusing his experience with Space-X too. He can’t think critically, and it’s going to be his undoing. I hope at least.
Which will balloon the cost exponentially.
Yeah anything is possible with enough time and money, it’s just that is about the most textbook example of comparing apples to oranges I’ve seen IRL.
Also, I suppose Lego bricks might be considered low cost if you’re a billionaire, but in the grand scheme of molded plastics they are very much a premium product.
Yeah compared to car plastics they’re crazy expensive
Maybe he can build the truck out of LEGOs - it would cost about a bajillion dollars to make something that size, but maybe less than the parts he’s demanding would be.
This man is like an unintelligent P.T. Barnum.
Like an inverse Barnum: a sucker who understands how smart people operate. Or sound, at least.
TP Barnum
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I’m not even sure the Space Shuttle was built with those ridiculous tolerances. Maybe some internal engine parts like turbopump rotors and shafts. Does he know what he’s saying?
10 micron (0.01mm) is pretty reasonable tolerance for a lot of stuff. The laminations in Tesla’s motors will be held to somewhere around that, possibly even tighter. Things like motor winding insulation coatings will be far tighter.
For something like body panels or plastic interior pieces it’s utter overkill and a waste of resources.
Something like a body panel is going to expand/contract a couple of orders of magnitude more than 10 microns just from the weather changing day-to-day.
It’s pretty common for a CMM to be in its own climate controlled room. Parts will be placed in the room and allowed to reach reference temperature for a several hours prior to measurement.
On production lines you usually skip the absolute measurement of a CMM and use go/no-go gauges. One should fit, one should not. They’ll be made of a material with similar thermal expansion coefficients as your parts. As long as they’ve both been sitting around for a while they’ll be at the same temp. They’ll have expanded or contracted the same amount from reference so their relationship of go/no-go will still hold true.
The whole field of metrology is a never ending rabbit hole - really interesting the more you get into it.
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They’ve had five years to figure that stuff out. If they haven’t done it by now, they never will.
“Bad news guys… We’re gonna have to delay production for just TWO MORE YEARS because of these woke microns! The good news though, you can get re-premium upgraded waitlist VIP positioning with a renewal deposit of only $500”
