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Best Of 2021: In Epically Nerdy Interview, Elon Musk Discusses Build Quality Problems With Engineer Who Compared Model 3 To ‘A Kia In The ’90s’

Tesla’s CEO then fesses up to his company’s build-related mistakes and dives into why they’ve been happening. When asked about panel gaps, Musk says: “It took [Tesla] a while to…iron out the production process,” going on to discuss how the company struggled to get details right while production was in “vertical climb mode.” Really early production cars, and the cars that come out after production has leveled off, Musk says, are the ones likely to have the best fit and finish.

Munro, having met with a number of Tesla owners during a recent road trip, noticed variations between two vehicles built in the same short time-span. Confused as to how this could happen, he asked Musk. “We actually did improve gap and paint quality quite a bit towards the end of last year,” the California-based engineer-CEO told the Michigan-based engineer-CEO, “Even in the course of December.”

Musk also mentions that while ramping up production, his team rushed cars in a way that didn’t adequately allow paint to dry, causing issues with quality. “Production is hell,” Musk puts it frankly.

What about the rear part of the Model 3’s body, which Munro criticized for consisting of far too many pieces with far too many different fastening methods? (shown below):

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The image above shows this problem on an early Model 3 build, though Munro’s 2021 model does show some improvement. For example, there are now 17 spot welds on one particular plate instead of 26 on the old car, and there’s one fewer bolt. Oddly, though, even newer Model 3s don’t share the Model Y’s more intuitive “mega-casting” rear wheelhouse — i.e. a single piece instead of various panels fastened together.

Musk discusses this Model 3 design weakness.

“The organizational structure errors, they manifest themselves in the product,” he begins. “We’ve got probably the best material science team in the world at Tesla. Engineers would ask what’s the best material for this purpose…and they got like 50 different answers. And they’re all true individually, but they were not true collectively,” he admits.

“When you try to join all these dissimilar alloys…you’ve got gaps that you’ve got to seal, and you’ve got to join these things, and some of them need to be joined with rivets, some of them need to be joined with spot welds, some of them need to be joined with resin or resin and spot welds,” he continues.

“Frankly, it looks like a bit of a Frankenstein situation when you look at it all together.” Musk then talks about how sealing the gaps between the different pieces in the body is a nightmare. “That might be the most painful job in the factory, is spackling on the sealant,” he describes, mentioning how even a small error can cause leaks and NVH problems.

Munro asks why newer Model 3s still make use of such a multipiece rear body design instead of a single casting like on the Model Y. “It’s hard to change the wheels on the bus when it’s going 80 mph down the highway,” Musk responds, saying the Model 3 represents such a large portion of the automaker’s volume that the company “[needs] an opportunity to redo the factory without blowing up the cashflow.”

He talks about how important going to a single-piece casting was for the Model Y: There are no gaps, there’s no sealant and there’s no risk of galvanic corrosion at the interface of dissimilar metals. That choice alone, Musks says, allowed Tesla to reduce its body shop size by 30 percent. “We got rid of 300 robots just with that rear body casting,” he tells Munro.

Musk then discusses with Munro the plans for Tesla to move to a structural battery pack that leverages the individual cells as structural elements that resist shear forces. “The cells today in every car are carried like a sack of potatoes,” Musk explains. “They actually have negative structural value,” going on to say how today, cells don’t make vehicles any more rigid, and that especially because there is isolation material needed between the cells themselves and the pack housing to help the batteries handle shock loads, batteries are just a liability from a mass standpoint. Musk wants to change that, and get dual use from those batteries.

The rest of the interview remains thoroughly nerdy. There’s discussion about cars’ natural frequencies, about how reducing polar moment of inertia by bringing mass toward the car’s center of mass yields better handling. There’s discussion about tolerance stack-up and how that leads Tesla to almost always err toward fewer pieces and Lego-like parts precision.

Munro mentions his company’s BMW i3 findings, lauding the German automaker’s excellent build quality for the carbon-fiber body. Musk replies that one of his major concerns about use of carbon fiber is that it has a vastly different coefficient of thermal expansion than aluminum or steel, and this can cause fitment issues when the vehicle is subjected to certain thermal environments.

Musk also talks about how Tesla’s casting sizes on the Model S and X were limited because heat treatment led to shape distortion once the part reached a certain size. To facilitate larger castings, Musk states, company’s material scientists had to make a custom alloy that didn’t require an additional treating step after casting.

Musk also mentions that he wants to do away with 12-volt systems on EVs — a holdover from earlier designs and a way to easily integrate already-existing components from prominent auto suppliers. A 48-volt system, Musk and Munro agree, could have lots of benefits including reduced wire size and weight. Musk mentions that the S and X are now getting lithium-ion 12-volt batteries, which add capacity and last longer than traditional lead-acid ones.

The discussion concludes with talk about the future of EVs and the speed with which they will enter the marketplace in coming years. There’s also talk about shortsellers because of course there is.

Throughout the interview, especially in the beginning, Munro compliments Tesla’s excellent seats, with Musk talking about how the key is to reduce pressure peaks on the body. The two enginerds examine the value of making seats in-house versus buying them from suppliers.

It’s all nerdy and fascinating, and in some ways, a truly magical moment between two total math and science geeks. I love it. I also love how, when Munro says he was having issues with Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assistance system because of bad road markings in Texas, Musk straight-up says: “Even if the road is painted completely wrong and a UFO lands in the middle of the road, the car still cannot crash and still needs to do the right thing…It can’t be dependent upon the road markings being correct….It’s just gotta be ‘no matter what, it’s not gonna crash.’”

The whole interview is just gold. I talked with Munro & Associate’s president Cory Steuben, and he told me about how this interview even came to be. Steuben and Munro are in the middle of a road trip right now in a Model 3 that they spontaneously decided to purchase.

The two planned a trip out west to see some EV automakers, and hung out in Fremont to see if Musk would be there. He wasn’t. Serendipitously, Steuben received an email from an individual saying he could set up an interview with Musk. Musk’s assistant, at 11 p.m. on Monday, scheduled an interview in Boca Chica, Texas for Friday, but by that time, Steuben and Munro were in Eugene, Oregon.

So Steuben and Munro had to bee-line it 2,500 miles, 40 hours in the Model 3, planning charging stations and really putting electromobility to the ultimate test in driving from Oregon all the way to Texas to see the king of EVs himself, Elon Musk.

Luckily, Steuben and Munro made their meeting, with the former saying the billionaire came off as “one of the most enjoyable, humble, stoic…people that I’ve met who’s in a position like that.”

Musk, Steuben said, spent three hours with the two engineers from Michigan, and was seen working at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday.

As if the interview weren’t epic enough on its own.

Tesla’s Latest FSD Beta Doesn’t Seem Ready For Public Use, Which Raises Big Questions

What I like about this test is that it presents a very good mix of everyday, normal driving situations in an environment with a good mix of traffic density, road complexity, lighting conditions, road markings, and more. In short, reality, the same sort of entropy-heavy reality all of us live in and where we expect our machines to work.

There’s a lot that FSD does that’s impressive when you consider that this is an inert mass of steel and rubber and silicon that’s effectively driving on its own through a crowded city. We’ve come a long way since Stanley the Toureg finished the DARPA Challenge back in 2006, and there’s so much to be impressed by.

At the same time, this FSD beta proves to be a pretty shitty driver, at least in this extensive test session.

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Anyone arguing that FSD in its latest state drives better than a human is either delusional, high from the fumes of their own raw ardor for Elon Musk or needs to find better-driving humans to hang out with.

FSD drives in a confusing, indecisive way, making all kinds of peculiar snap decisions and generally being hard to read and predict to other drivers around them. Which is a real problem.

Drivers expect a certain baseline of behaviors and reactions from the cars around them. That means there’s not much that’s more dangerous to surrounding traffic than an unpredictable driver, which this machine very much is.

And that’s when it’s driving at least somewhat legally; there are several occasions in this video where traffic laws were actually broken, including two instances of the car attempting to drive the wrong way down a street and into oncoming traffic.

Nope, not great.

In the comments, many people have criticized Kyle, the driver/supervisor, for allowing the car to make terrible driving decisions instead of intervening. The reasoning for this ranges from simple Tesla-fan-rage to the need for disengagements to help the system learn, to concern that by not correcting the mistakes, Kyle is potentially putting people in danger.

They’re also noting that the software is very clearly unfinished and in a beta state, which, is pretty clearly true as well.

These are all reasonable points. Well, the people just knee-jerk shielding Elon’s Works from any scrutiny aren’t reasonable, but the other points are, and they bring up bigger issues.

Specifically, there’s the fundamental question about whether or not it makes sense to test an unfinished self-driving system on public roads, surrounded by people, in or out of other vehicles, that did not agree to participate in any sort of beta testing of any kind.

You could argue that a student driver is a human equivalent of beta testing our brain’s driving software, though when this is done in any official capacity, there’s a professional driving instructor in the car, sometimes with an auxiliary brake pedal, and the car is often marked with a big STUDENT DRIVER warning.

Image for article titled Tesla's Latest FSD Beta Doesn't Seem Ready For Public Use, Which Raises Big Questions — Image: JDT/Tesla/YouTUbe

I’ve proposed the idea of some kind of warning lamp for cars under machine control, and I still think that’s not a bad idea, especially during the transition era we find ourselves in.

Of course, in many states, you can teach your kid to drive on your own without any special permits. That context is quite similar to FSD beta drivers since they don’t have any special training beyond a regular driver’s license (and no, Tesla’s silly Safety Score does not count as special training).

In both cases, you’re dealing with an unsure driver who may not make good decisions, and you may need to take over at a moment’s notice. On an FSD-equipped Tesla (or really any L2-equipped car), taking over should be easy, in that your hands and other limbs should be in position on the car’s controls, ready to take over.

In the case of driving with a kid, this is less easy, though still possible. I know because I was once teaching a girlfriend of the time how to drive and had to take control of a manual old Beetle from the passenger seat. You can do it, but I don’t recommend it.

Of course, when you’re teaching an uncertain human, you’re always very, very aware of the situation and nothing about it would give you a sense of false confidence that could allow your attention to waver. This is a huge problem with Level 2 semi-automated systems, though, and one I’ve discussed at length before.

As far as whether or not the FSB beta needs driver intervention to “learn” about all the dumb things it did wrong, I’m not entirely sure this is true. Tesla has mentioned the ability to learn in “shadow mode” which would eliminate the need for FSD to be active to learn driving behaviors by example.

As far as Kyle’s willingness to let FSD beta make its bad decisions, sure, there are safety risks, but it’s also valuable to see what it does to give an accurate sense of just what the system is capable of. He always stepped in before things got too bad, but I absolutely get that this in no way represents safe driving.

At the same time, showing where the system fails helps users of FSD have a better sense of the capabilities of what they’re using so they can attempt to understand how vigilant they must be.

This is all really tricky, and I’m not sure yet of the best practice solution here.

This also brings up the question of whether Tesla’s goals make sense in regard to what’s known as their Operational Design Domain (ODD), which is just a fancy way of saying “where should I use this?”

Tesla has no restrictions on their ODD, as referenced in this tweet:

This raises a really good point: should Tesla define some sort of ODD?

I get that their end goal is Level 5 full, anywhere, anytime autonomy, a goal that I think is kind of absurd. Full Level 5 is decades and decades away. If Tesla freaks are going to accuse me of literally having blood on my hands for allegedly delaying, somehow, the progress of autonomous driving, then you’d think the smartest move would be to restrict the ODD to areas where the system is known to work better (highways, etc) to allow for more automated deployment sooner.

That would make the goal more Level 4 than 5, but the result would be, hopefully, safer automated vehicle operation, and, eventually, safer driving for everyone.

Trying to make an automated vehicle work everywhere in any condition is an absolutely monumental task, and there’s still so so much work to do. Level 5 systems are probably decades away, at best. Restricted ODD systems may be able to be deployed much sooner, and maybe Tesla should be considering doing that, just like many other AV companies (Waymo, Argo, and so on) are doing.

We’re still in a very early transition period on this path to autonomy, however that turns out. Videos like these, that show real-world behavior of such systems, problems and all, are very valuable, even if we’re still not sure on the ethics of making them.

All I know is that now is the time to question everything, so don’t get bullied by anyone.

Something About Tesla’s Model S Plaid Nürburgring Run Doesn’t Sit Right

Musk May Have Lied About Modifications For The Plaid’s Ring Run

Twitter user @Benshooter later walked back the accusation of Musk lying about the record. Tesla posted onboard video to its own YouTube channel of the record run, and it appears that the only modification made was to put an aftermarket digital gauge readout in front of the driver, even retaining the stock yoke steering wheel. The video was also posted to The ‘Ring’s YouTube channel, corroborating the authenticity of the record. The official lap time for this onboard video is 7:35.579.

So what gives? What’s with the other time listed, a 7:30.909? Clearly Tesla has more speed up its sleeve. Judging by the onboard video being set in a red car, it appears Tesla may have had two red cars on hand, one stock and one seriously modified. There was also at least one black car on hand as well. Maybe Tesla ran several iterations of the Plaid at the track, including some future track-focused version with carbon ceramic brakes and a round steering wheel.

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With the results having been certified as a record by the necessary officials, Tesla seems to have gone through the motions of getting this done the right way. There’s no reason not to be a little skeptical of Elon Musk claims, but at least this time it appears that everything is on the up and up. It’s a little sketchy that Elon didn’t explain the actual “record” was the slower of the two lap times he posted on Twitter, but it’s entirely possible he doesn’t know the difference.

Real-World Video Of The Tesla Yoke Steering Wheel Is As Bad As You Think

We’ve discussed the refreshed and technically impressive 2022 Tesla Model S before, and especially some of the UX decisions made, including the inclusion of the cut-down, yoke–style steering wheel that now comes standard on the Model S. While we’ve had a grand time speculating about how shitty using such a steering not-wheel might be, we haven’t really had any direct, empirical evidence. Until now. Yes, someone has driven a brand-new Model S with the yoke, and, yeah, it looks like it kinda sucks.

After last week’s post about Elon Musk equating of human input and error, you’d think I’d have had enough of dead-eyed Muskovites berating me on social media and via-email, but it’s become so common now that I think my body is starting to crave it, like a drug.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at this little neighborhood drive with the yoke:

…and, a part two! This time with verbal commentary:

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He does say that it’s getting easier, and he has to think about it less, especially when you stop using “round wheel steering techniques,” or, as many of us like to call it, “all of your previous driving experience.”

At best, I’d say this looks awkward. The elimination of control stalks in favor of those little buttons for turn signals I just can’t see as an improvement, especially because the orientation and location (though I guess your thumb is always near them, or should be, but the whole side that thumb is on can change) of the signal buttons changes as you move the wheel, something that just isn’t a problem with a column-mounted indicator.

Why is this a good idea, again? Because stalks are bad?

Incidental controls aside, it’s the main function of this thing — steering, arguably a big part of driving a car — that seems difficult.

I know there’s an argument that F1 cars use yoke-type wheels, but, remember, F1 cars are set up so that lock-to-lock turning can happen without the hands crossing. F1 cars themselves don’t move the front wheels more than 14 or 20 degrees even on the tightest tracks. F1 designers also don’t want drivers putting hand-over-hand like they’re parallel parking, so F1 cars make do with steering wheels that don’t even do one full turn from lock-to-lock. Again, even on the tightest tracks, they only move between 300 and 400 degrees at most.

The Model S wheel turns about two and a quarter full rotations, or around 800 degrees lock-to-lock according to one owner, which is pretty close to the standard 900 degrees/2.5 turns for most cars, as Jalopnik’s own automotive engineer David Tracy tells me. That is not what a yoke is designed to do.

The only car I’ve driven with a yoke was this:

…which you might recognize as being from a dragster, a car specifically designed to just go straight as much as possible. A yoke is a wheel design that’s shaped that way to discourage a lot of turning, which is why for cars that may need to do a lot of low-speed maneuvering and turning, like a normal street car, a yoke is a pretty crappy design.

I’m sure it’s something a driver could eventually get used to, but that’s very much not the same thing as a new design that actually makes the operation of the machine better.

Here’s a dramatic example of why yoke-type wheels aren’t great for a lot of turning, as demonstrated by installing a yoke in a drift car. If you click the link you can watch and see why it’s not ideal, particularly for the structural integrity of your thumbs.

The yoke design also forces crossed arms a lot, which would be bad if the airbag deployed, and while that’s possible to happen with any wheel, the design of the yoke exacerbates it. The yoke precludes letting a wheel slide back into position and forces your hands to be locked onto the 9 and 3 positions. (I know a lot of track driving demands this, but there aren’t airbags there in track cars and, come on, the Model S is a street car.)

It’d be one thing if this was just an option you could decide to get or not, and I thought that might be the case, but if there’s a place on the Tesla build-and-order-your-Model S section of the website that lets you pick your wheel, I haven’t been able to find it.

Most of the tweets commenting on the video aren’t particularly positive, save for the sprinkling of Tesla apologists and evangelists, but I’d encourage you to watch it and come to your own decisions.

Ideally, you should be able to test it out yourself to see, but in the interim, I guess you could hacksaw off the upper half of your steering wheel and decide if this path is for you.

Oh, and my editor-in-chief (I want to say Ronnie somebody?) all but demanded I make you aware of his yoke bon mot, so here you go:

I’m all for innovation and novel approaches to things we take for granted; often, great new solutions can be found that way. The yoke, though, is different. It’s not really new, as cars with yokes (even sentient cars) have been around for decades. If drivers really wanted a yoke, they could have had a yoke, long ago.

The point is, nobody wanted one. Because for most normal driving, they suck. That seems to be the part Tesla forgot.

Battery Swap Stations Are Gaining Momentum In China

The simplest and most genius-brain solution to charging times and range with EVs isn’t one you’ll find in America. In China, though, it’s gaining ground. All that and more in The Morning Shift for June 2, 2021.

1st Gear: China Is An Alternate Universe For EVs

China is like the American car market in so many ways. It’s huge, for one, (the biggest in the world while we’re number two) and filled with people inexplicably buying sedans and not hatchbacks or wagons. It’s also the biggest market for electric cars in the world, and you see as many Teslas bopping around Shanghai as you do here in New York or Los Angeles.

But China also offers us a market where GM builds small, adorable, unbelievably popular EVs as opposed to 9,000-pound hulking Hummers for the rich. It feels like an alternate reality where everyone takes EVs as a given, not as a radical tech.

This is a long intro to the point that battery-swapping stations are taking off there, as noted in this overview story by Automotive News China:

Until 2019, state-owned BAIC Motor Co. and EV startup Nio were the only two automakers offering battery swap services for customers.

[…]

Competition from Tesla and Nio’s success in gaining customers with battery swap services have prompted other Chinese EV makers to take bold steps.

[…]

While Geely is constructing battery swap stations on its own, other Chinese automakers have opted to build facilities along with domestic companies to share costs.

In September, state-owned Changan Automobile Co. launched its first battery swap station in Chongqing along with a consortium of other major domestic companies.

The partner companies include CATL, China’s largest EV battery maker; Aulton New Energy Vehicle Technology Co., a Shanghai-based battery swap station operator; and State Grid, a state-owned power grid operator.

In March, SAIC Motor Corp., another major state-owned automaker, also teamed up with Aulton to kick off operation of the first battery swap station for its EVs.

Aiways, an EV startup, tapped Blue Part Smart Energy, an EV charging facility operator under BAIC, in April to offer battery swap services.

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This is all interesting to see from an American perspective, especially one based out of New York City. Around the turn of the century, NYC was home to the largest electric car company in the world, the Electric Vehicle Company, and it operated using battery-swapping stations right in the middle of Manhattan. The tech is basic. We could go down this route if we wanted to.

2nd Gear: Another Tesla Recall

Some 6,000 Tesla Model 3 and Model Ys are getting recalled for loose brake caliper bolts, as Reuters reports:

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) is recalling nearly 6,000 U.S. vehicles because brake caliper bolts could be loose, with the potential to cause a loss of tire pressure, documents made public on Wednesday show.

The recall covers certain 2019-2021 Model 3 vehicles and 2020-2021 Model Y vehicles. Tesla’s filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it had no reports of crashes or injuries related to the issue and that the company will inspect and tighten, or replace, the caliper bolts as necessary.

Tesla said that loose caliper bolts could allow the brake caliper to separate and contact the wheel rim, which could cause a loss of tire pressure in “very rare circumstances.” The company said that, in the “unlikely event” there is vehicle damage from a loose or missing fastener, it will arrange for a tow to the nearest service center for repair.

Hey, at least they got the bolts on there this time!

3rd Gear: Everyone Is Copying How Elon Talks

Another interesting Tesla story comes from Bloomberg, which has taken notice that everyone is not just copying Tesla’s plans to make attractive and desirable electric cars, but also how Tesla talks them up with ever-grander terminology. Per Bloomberg:

Many of the words speak to the sheer scale of Musk’s ambitions, which are always far grander than people realize initially. A battery factory isn’t just a battery factory, it’s a Gigafactory. (Giga comes from the Greek word “gigas,” or giant.)

A fast charging station for Tesla’s electric cars isn’t just a charging station, it’s a Supercharger. (Tesla has more than 25,000, giving them the largest network in the world.)

The battery packs that Tesla sells to utilities that promise “massive energy storage?” Megapacks.

There are no signs of him stopping. At Tesla’s “Battery Day” in September 2020, Musk talked about reaching “Terawatt-hour” scale battery production. “Tera is the new Giga,” Musk said on stage.

We’ve now reached the point where every battery factory — even those being made by competitors — is called a gigafactory, regardless of its physical size or planned output. “Nissan in advanced talks to build battery gigafactory in UK,” reported the Financial Times. “Stellantis discussing conditions with Rome to build gigafactory in Italy,” said Reuters.

Would Tesla be where it is if everyone just called gigafactories what they are? (They’re just regular factories.)

4th Gear: Toyota Scaling Back Olympic Plans

The Olympics in Japan seem to be still on somebody’s schedule, even if the people of Japan seem less than stoked on a global travel-fest in the midst of a still-ongoing global pandemic. Of course, this has huge implications for … high-profile industrial manufacturing that hopes to use the Olympics as a sales and marketing opportunity! Reuters has a broad report on it, and I’ll just take out this little section on Toyota:

For global sponsor Toyota Motor Corp., the Games were a chance to showcase its latest technology. It had planned to roll out about 3,700 vehicles, including 500 Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell sedans, to shuttle athletes and VIPs among venues.

It also planned to use self-driving pods to carry athletes around the Olympic village.

Such vehicles will still be used, but on a much smaller scale — a “far cry from what we had hoped and envisioned,” a Toyota source said. A full-scale Olympics, the source said, would have been a “grand moment for electric cars.”

A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment on whether there were any changes to its marketing.

5th Gear: Biden Blocks Trump Plan For Arctic Drilling In Alaska

This is not a total win for climate, but it’s something, as the Financial Times reports:

The Biden administration has announced it will suspend the Arctic oil drilling rights sold in the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, reversing a signature policy of the previous White House and handing a victory to environmentalists.

[…]

Tuesday’s decision marked a victory for environmentalists and activists, a pillar of Biden’s support in last year’s election, who have begun to grow impatient with some of the White House’s climate actions. The administration recently opted not to intervene to force the closure of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline and has supported a major Alaska oil project approved during Trump’s term in office.

“In general the Biden administration is acting vigorously on climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “This action on ANWR is quite consistent with that. The actions on the other two projects do not seem so consistent.”

I’ll take anything I can get at this point!

Neutral: How Is Your Car?

My Bug refused to start the other day just as I had loaded the car up for a multi-day road trip. With rain coming down, it refused to start even when I flagged down a ‘90s Infiniti for a jump. I ran out and got a new battery and it did start, but was running like shit until I found a half-bare wire leading to the coil. Some electrical tape later and we were on the road, though I’m still finding the car getting hot and leaking oil around some seals I know I just replaced. Stopping after one mountain pass I saw vapor rising out of one of the two carburetors. Time for a tune-up!

I Figured Out How Chevy Can Sell A Ton Of Bolts And It Involves Tesla

By now you’ve possibly heard that there’s a new Chevy Bolt coming, and it’s going to have a very competitive range of 259 miles and a very competitive price of just under $32,000. You likely haven’t heard all that much about it because even though it’s a modern, capable EV built by a company that’s been building cars in quantity for over a century, it’s not a Tesla. And, as a not-Tesla EV, nobody gives a shit about it. But I have a plan to fix that, a way for Chevy to really sell a crapton of Bolts. And it involves a whole new kind of engineering.

You’ve heard of reverse engineering, right? Where a company takes a competitor’s product and figures out how it works? And you of course know about badge engineering, where a carmaker slaps its name on some other carmaker’s car to somehow make money, yeah? Well, consider this concept: reverse brand engineering.

What I’m suggesting is that Chevrolet needs to work out a licensing deal with Tesla that lets them offer an option to sell people Bolts re-branded as a Tesla. Let’s call it the Tesla Model 2.

It could be one of the Bolt’s trim packages, like this:

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The TLS trim package is the one we’re talking about here. This package would offer a full Chevy badge/bowtie delete, ideally even in the little white print in the corners of the windows, too. No Chevy badging anywhere, as that will all be replaced with Tesla badges, which includes a new faux-grille panel without Chevy’s distinctive diamond pattern.

So, we’d go from this:

…to this:

Just the nose badge, the “grille” panel, and a Tesla badge on the tailgate, along with a MODEL 2 badge. Oh, and wheels without the Chevy logo.

There would be an adapter included so you could charge your disguised Bolt at any Tesla Supercharger station, and then be able to rub well-lotion’d, world-saving elbows with fellow Tesla owners, where you can talk about Bitcoin and make jokes with the numbers 69 and 420 in them.

Also, all of the Bolt’s instruments will get a UI re-skin to match Tesla’s look-and-feel (this is easy! It’s just software on a screen!) and the Bolt’s center-stack infotainment display screen will get a similar makeover, along with some ability to run Tesla infotainment applications, like the one that makes fart sounds or shows a fireplace or plays Atari games.

Hardware permitting, it should just run some licensed variant of Tesla’s infotainment software, but even if it’s just emulated or copied, that’ll probably be just fine.

Also, it should have GM’s SuperCruise Level 2 semi-autonomy system installed, just re-named Autopilot SC. This could be considered an upgrade, depending on who you ask, even.

Another very important part here is the very obviously Tesla-branded key fob. This should be big and showy and unmistakably Tesla. The key is key.

All that, plus a glossy 8×10 headshot of Elon Musk, ideally signed and with some sort of Tesla Certificate of Authenticity printed on the back, to be produced in case of arguments from gate-keeping Tesla owners, should complete the package.

I’m telling you, with this package, Chevy will move Bolts like they were electric hotcakes. It’s got everything people want in a modern electric car: a Tesla badge!

Plus, unlike a Tesla-built Tesla, the Model 2 will have bumpers that stay on in the rain and novel Sta-Put™ roofs and the parts and service side of things won’t be a total mess.

As far as what Tesla gets out of it, I guess it’s mostly money from their sweet licensing deal with GM, and an entry-level model below the Model 3 on the road with zero effort from them. Plus, plenty of brand visibility, too!

Also, it may help Tesla’s perceived reliability, kind of like how Pontiac benefited that way when it sold Toyota Matrixes as Pontiac Vibes. Kinda.

This is really Chevy’s best bet to finally get people buying Bolts, because, as we’ve already seen with the perfectly fine first-gen Bolt, nobody really gives a rat’s rectum about them. But mainstream culture is absolutely smitten with Tesla, for reasons that transcend logic.

Why fight it, Chevy? Just pay Elon some cash and start slapping Tesla Ts on your Bolts, and watch those things fly off the lots. You think I’m kidding, but deep down, you know there’s some painful truth here.

As always, you can just Venmo me my cut.

NHTSA Has A Lot Of Catch-Up Ahead

It’s happening too often. Someone spots a Tesla owner sleeping while motoring down the freeway, their car under the control of Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system. Next thing you know, it’s all over social media.

You may wonder how Tesla was able to release this product onto public roads. Are there no regulations covering such features? Isn’t this a safety issue? According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, it really breaks down to oversight from the government.

The Trump administration focused its efforts on rolling back fuel economy requirements. Its arguments for doing so was that cars would become both cheaper and safer. That didn’t happen, and it’s a mystery why Trump thought it would. One explanation is he didn’t know shit about cars.

Unfortunately, fuel economy and emissions control rollbacks were just about the only things Trump’s NHTSA did get around to doing. NHTSA’s important regulatory oversight work stalled for four years with no director at the helm. Now, the Biden administration has a backlog of neglected tasks to dig through. As the Times report shows, NHTSA has been pretty much hands-off when it comes to driver-assistance systems, specifically when it comes to Tesla’s misleadingly named Autopilot:

Officially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discourages such behavior, running a public awareness campaign last fall with the hashtag #YourCarNeedsYou. But its messaging competes with marketing of Tesla itself, which recently said it will begin selling a software package for “Full Self Driving” — a term it has used since 2016 despite objections from critics and the caveats in the company’s own fine print — on a subscription basis starting this quarter.

That NHTSA has so far declined to confront Tesla directly on the issue is firmly in character for an agency that took a hands-off approach to a wide range of matters under the Trump administration.

”Inactive,” is how Carla Bailo, chief executive of the Center for Automotive Research, summed up NHTSA’s four previous years. “Dormant,” said Jason Levine, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety. “No direction,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor and expert in autonomous vehicle law at the University of South Carolina.

The agency went the full Trump term without a Senate-confirmed administrator, leaving deputies in charge. It launched several safety investigations into Tesla and other companies, but left most unfinished. “A massive pile of backlog” awaits the Biden administration,” said Paul Eisenstein, publisher of The Detroit Bureau industry news site.

While NHTSA has been absent on a number of issues, its lack of oversight on autonomous driving is perhaps the biggest. The Times says Level 2 autonomy is the biggest safety challenge since Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed. Silly Nader references aside, the Times does have a point.

How to deal with emerging autonomous driving technologies is a long term issue. But one thing is for sure, the way Tesla uses its customers as beta testers raises alarm bells with experts.

Whoever takes charge must balance the long-term potential for next-generation cars to reduce pollution, traffic and greenhouse gases against the near-term risks of deploying buggy new technologies at scale before they’re fully vetted. In the “move fast and break things” style of Silicon Valley, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has embraced those risks.

While other driverless car developers — from General Motors’ Cruise, to Ford’s Argo AI, to Amazon’s Zoox, to Alphabet’s Waymo, to independent Aurora and more — all take an incremental, slow rollout approach with professional test drivers at the wheel, Tesla is “beta testing” its driverless technology on public roads using its customers as test drivers.

Musk said last month that Tesla cars will be able to fully drive themselves without human intervention on public roads by late this year. He’s been making similar promises since 2016. No driverless car expert or auto industry leader outside Tesla has said they think that’s possible.

While law professor Smith is impressed by Tesla’s “brilliant” ability to use Tesla drivers to collect millions of miles of sensor data to help refine its software, “that doesn’t excuse the marketing, because this is in no way full self-driving. There are so many things wrong with that term. It’s ludicrous. If we can’t trust a company when they tell us a product is full self-driving, how can we trust them when they tell us a product is safe?”

The Detroit Bureau’s Eisenstein is even harsher. “Can I say this off the record?” he said. “No, let me say it on the record. I’m appalled by Tesla. They’re taking the smartphone approach: Put the tech out there, and find out whether or not it works. It’s one thing to put out a new IOS that caused problems with voice dictation. It’s another thing to have a problem moving 60 miles per hour.”

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A late 2016 NHTSA directive under the Obama administration considered “predictable abuse” as a potential defect in autonomous driving tech deployment. Unfortunately, under Trump NHTSA did nothing. For context, the directive came about a year after the software that enabled Autopilot driver assistance in the Tesla Model S was released.

The inaction of NHTSA drew ire from another federal safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB — which is most known for its investigations of plane and train incidents — blamed predictable abuse for a 2018 crash where a Tesla Model X crashed into a concrete divider.

Part of the issue is the lack of transparency from Musk and Tesla regarding how safe the Autopilot driver-assist system is as well as a lack of data in general. From the Times:

Musk regularly issues statistics purporting to show that Autopilot and Full Self Driving are on balance safer than cars driven by humans alone. That could be, but even if Musk’s analysis is sound — several statisticians have said it is not — the data is proprietary to Tesla, and Tesla has declined to make even anonymized data available to university researchers for independent confirmation. Tesla could not be reached — it disbanded its media relations department last year.

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In 2019, after a series of Tesla battery fires, NHTSA launched a probe of the company’s software and battery management systems. Later, the agency said allegedly defective cooling tubes that could cause leaks were being investigated as well. At the time, the agency did not make public information it held about battery cooling tubes prone to leakage that were installed in early versions of the Model S and Model X.

Since late 2016, many Tesla drivers had been complaining about “whompy wheels” on their cars — a tendency for the suspension system to break apart, which sometimes caused a wheel to collapse or fall off the car. Chinese drivers lodged similar complaints, and last October, China authorities ordered a recall of 30,000 Model S and Model X cars. A Tesla lawyer wrote NHTSA a letter arguing no U.S. recall was necessary and blamed driver “abuse” for the problems in China. NHTSA said in October it is “monitoring the situation closely.”

Four days before Biden’s inauguration, NHTSA announced that defects in Tesla touchscreen hardware can make the car’s rear-view camera go blank, among other problems. Rather than order a recall, NHTSA said it asked Tesla to voluntarily recall approximately 158,000 Model S and Model X cars for repair. On Feb. 2, Tesla agreed to recall 135,000 of those cars.

Check out the full Los Angeles Times report, it’s well worth the read!