Three pins on the back of that appearance plate that push into starlock style fasteners in the pedal are cheaper than the appropriate glue, faster to install than glue, more reliable, trivially verified, impossible to misalign, and that's why it's a common solution that auto manufacturers use in this exact application. This was a confoundingly stupid place to rely on glue.
IDK anything about manufacturing so I wonder if this was due to incompetence, to save costs, ignorance or something else?
I remember reading about the original iPhone's manufacturing operations in China - how the Apple engineers spent a ton of time making sure that the right way is also the easy way for the factory workers.
I have no knowledge of Tesla but here would be my guess:
Assembly worker found pad hard to put on pedal in sub-assembly area and used a spray bottle with soapy water on the pad to slip it on.
Story time: Called out to final assembly, machine starts and runs but not moving. Troubleshoot and find brakes not releasing. further troubleshoot and find it is due to pressure not getting to brakes(configuration is such that brakes come on if there is loss of hydraulic pressure). Replace hydraulic line, machine is working. Remove contaminate from line, no one know what it is. Assembly pointing fingers and saying sabotage. I walk around the assembly area, I find that paint decided to use packing peanuts to mask holes that the hydraulic fitting go in instead of masking tape as directed. The packing peanut tore while being removed and the assembly working inserting the fittings did not notice.
TBH, something like this might even get approved by a foreman. "Thanks for coming up with a clever way to save a few seconds on assembly!"
If I did it for everything I encountered I wouldn't be doing my core work duty. It's more pragmatic the majority of the time to work around the issue and immediately get back to work.
That’s not how I had envisioned car manufacture at all.
We had a big kerfluffle around our OTA update system at one point because they did a big round of updates and "none of them worked." And then I dug into the system logs for each of those components and 95% of what they claimed didn't work actually did. But meanwhile you've got product managers and other people wading into the conversation to try to tell you to fix something that isn't actually the problem.
We're never truly going to get away from this until we stop excluding people from the conversation about product problems. I'm just sitting here hoping we adopt a quality management system of some sort before the company's product implodes.
* There's probably a small chance it actually would get fixed, and therefore a decent probability that reporting it would be a waste of their time.
* They needed a solution sooner than reporting it and waiting for fix to maybe eventually appear. Once the workaround was in place there was no need for a fix.
* Sometimes the people running projects you use can be hostile, which makes reporting stuff very unappealing and even stressful. Much better to avoid interacting with them if at all possible.
* They didn't know who to report it to, or how to report it.
* They simply didn't have time to report it.
Even as a dev, I resist doing it because of how unpleasant it can be. If I can come up with a workaround without having to report the issue, that's what I'll tend to do. And if I have to talk to tech support rather than the devs? That's simply not going to happen unless I'm trapped into using the product.
We still haven't cracked this problem as an industry.
Heck the only support Google offers for many products is a community forum that their own employees never post on, and I assume few even look at. People have largely been conditioned to think that tech companies don't care about their feedback.
This is a Support task, not a Dev task. Support should be working the tickets and reporting unsolvable issues with the code, so the Devs can address. You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work.
Also, we Ops folks truly appreciate undocumented work arounds by the Devs. We love spending hours pouring over a given system, trying 107 different versions of some framework, causing lots of downtime, and working nights/weekends, just to learn that some UNDOCUMENTED cludge fucking bullshit is what's actually causing the issue.
Do better man. You're shitting on more than just the users.
With open source, you're usually reporting to devs. With commercial software, usually to tech support or to nobody.
> You've been dealing with bad support teams, because your experience is not how support is supposed to work.
Yes, I know -- but it is how the majority of support actually is, if there is even support available at all. In a whole lot of cases, there is none.
I'm talking about software meant for consumer use. Software for business use is much better on these issues, although you still do find them. At my workplace, we recently took a large financial hit (and almost lost an important customer) because of bad and unresponsive tech support from a supplier. It happens.
Because in the real world messengers get shot.
By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place.
We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done.
In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?
"I sleep on the floor" .. "You're fired for not proactively fixing a problem I just thought of a solution to". Is my speculation off-base?
I've always suspected it was apocryphal. But just think, if the workers had installed that fan beforehand, we might be reading a story about how important workers are at solving little production problems.
Everyone thinks this mentality of having workers fix problems is great, until they use soap to put glued parts on.
Complex work is hard.
Self-management is a big, under-appreciated part of that.
So Irresponsibility maybe not on the individual Worker's shoulders, but on all of us for under-appreciating the risky challenges of being a motivated worker in a complex job.
?
EDIT: here is the flaw
https://www.tiktok.com/@el.chepito1985/video/735775817650408...
yeah IDK if the Worker is to blame, seems like an obvious design flaw, e.g. they should not rely on 'soap' to keep a flat pedal cover attached to another flat pedal.
The soap revealed the issue, but why aren't the peddles a single piece? Why do they have a sticker on them?
Even without the soap step, what happens if the cabin gets too hot or the factory has too much dust in it?
If you look at your car's peddles (and I'm including mine, a Tesla model 3) you'll notice they are basically a single piece mechanically fit together. Not some sticker glued for style.
But sometimes you get something like "The blue wire ran out, but I still had a bunch of light blue, so I just used that instead". It can be a killer.
You just solve problems all the time, every day, and it's really up to the technician to know when something requires notifying Engineering or not. Notify too much and they'll get rid of you for being annoying... notify too little and shit like this can happen, but in the very large majority of cases, it doesn't.
Same story everywhere.
Then what was the whole point of the Andon cable lesson that American manufacturers had to learn from Toyota?