tesla model y – GTSteeringWheels.net

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):

Image for article titled 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'

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.

Illustration for article titled Real-World Video Of The Tesla Yoke Steering Wheel Is As Bad As You Think — Screenshot: Tesla

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.

Tag: tesla model y

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’

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