Parts of Model 3 Were Being Made by Hand | Hacker News Reader

Parts of Model 3 Were Being Made by Hand

wsj.com

13 pointspetethomas15 comments

> Unknown to analysts, investors and the hundreds of thousands of customers who signed up to buy it, as recently as early September major portions of the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand, away from the automated production line...

Why is this so accusatory? Was there some guarantee made that the Model 3's production line would be 100% autonomous, ever?

Sounds more like Tesla's doing what it needs to do to ship what it can.

Disclaimer - I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context.

As the full story lays out, production experts commented that its highly unusual to be shipping production cars without the line being fully installed. It’s not that the process should be autonomous, it’s that workers are literally hand-muscling parts of the body into place and aligning them by hand while they hand-spot-weld them.

As someone with 15 years of high-volume manufacturing experience (not in automobiles, though), I’d agree that it’s very odd to be shipping units to customers or claiming to be in mass production before your final tooling is installed on the line and qualified, even if it might change later.

> I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context.

https://outline.com/AbbLRj

Thank you. This should be the link in the title. Better still, we should reassess https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938 and ban direct links to pay walled sites.

There are still numerous ways to circumvent the paywall [0], or else linking to WSJ would be against the guidelines [1]

[0]: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The factory that one starts shipping a product with is never the same as the factory 100, or 1000, or 10000 units later...

I can't believe Tesla is bringing hand-crafted cars to the consumer market! /s

I would have been surprised if this wasn't the case, I think people need a reality check!

It is unusual. The article outright quotes an expert on that.

It's not unusual. It's in fact a common practice to hand craft components when building new products to full production scale at various stages.

The story came from the WSJ which has a reputation of making things up when it comes to Tesla. A second confirmation source would be nice but it doesnt look like anyone else is touching this.

I agree, but the Tesla spokesperson didn't deny, and instead shot back with:

> For over a decade, the WSJ has relentlessly attacked Tesla with misleading articles that, with few exceptions, push or exceed the boundaries of journalistic integrity. While it is possible that this article could be an exception, that is extremely unlikely.

I want Tesla to succeed, but as far as I see it, the burden of proof is currently on Tesla as they fell incredibly short of their claimed production goals for Q3.

it’s not their first car and with a company that claims to be worth more than most of other car producers the inability to build and run a production line/process looks just ridiculous. What is going on there? Maybe they should outsource to China and get the whole manufacturing running in few weeks?

Tesla has officially replied to this and denied the WSJ article accusing them of being wrong and purposefully misleading along with images of the production line. https://electrek.co/2017/10/08/tesla-model-3-elon-musk-image...

Thanks for the downvotes, god I hate HN karma.

Yes, their legal/bs/accusations department is the only one delivering as planned

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