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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect the first cars that they sell will roll off the VP tools and not off the main lines anyway.

There a story a couple of months ago about the fact that they've saved a lot of time by going straight to the main production lines rather than building a testing line first?

Is this a good plan? Time will tell but I'm sure glad I'm not involved. :S

Sources:

http://www.newsweek.com/tesla-skips-traditional-manufacturin...

http://autoweek.com/article/green-cars/tesla-wont-test-model...

Edit: From the second link:

> Let's recap: Tesla's flawed Model X launch was partly due to not taking the time to adjust for problems identified in the soft-tooling phase of pre-production. The lesson Tesla learned? Don't bother with soft tooling for the Model 3.

Wow. Is it just me or does that sound like "The unit tests kept failing and made us miss a deadline. No more unit tests!"

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No, this is not a good plan at all, it's incredibly risky.

To get the car all road legal it needs to be crash tested - that is usually what the pre-volume builds are used for. If they fail (and they sometimes do, because you can't do a finite element analysis on an assembly as complex as a car in the variety of scenarios that you would crash test it) then you need to reengineer the car. This usually means panel gauge increases, sometimes it means additional reinforcement parts (boron steel inserts and brackets a lot of the time). If that happens the production could be delayed by months as they'd need to find a way to feed those parts to the line and modify any tooling that might be effected.

So these all sound like very true and good things. No reason to doubt there is a reason current big auto does it the way they do.

On the other hand, Musk hasn't been one to just say stuff and totally fail. By and large he is getting what he says he is getting, and on a close to reasonable time frame. If we stuck to what big auto said, there would be no autopilot, and EVs would still be a toy with a tiny range.

I have at this point little reason to doubt that they will pull this off.

Clearly making cars is a solved problem, millions are made every year. It SEEMS like Musk hires people that know their stuff.

So I am going long on Tesla, and short on existing big auto. Time will tell what happens ;)

> and on a close to reasonable time frame

woah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. when elon says years, it's martian years as the meme goes, and not without reason. he's getting a better at estimation but is still an extreme optimist.

But Musk's numbers are much lower than everyone else's and he usually some percentage late, Not decades. Sometimes he is even on time.

He does things that many claim are literally impossible, who cares if they come 10% later and that is 3 months. If Telsa hits the production numbers by June they are still doing something that GM and Ford once said was decades in the future.

This is where I am too, I could see him aiming for 500k cars in 2018 and only shipping 425k due to some shortage. I could not see it taking until 2022 for him to get to the 500k mark.

Elon tweeted a couple of days ago that Model 3 had all needed regulatory approvals, so I guess it passed the crash test. I can believe that you know a lot about building cars, but you don't seem to have any actual information about what's going on inside Tesla's Fremont factory.

Aren't we already past that point, though? This seems a bit like worrying that the horses might bolt today because the barn door was left open yesterday.

Yes, and that's the scary thing.

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