I saw this video in my YouTube recommended videos and it is fascinating.

It wasn’t so much the Tesla that I found interesting but what it revealed about Tesla and Tesla’s engineers that I found fascinating.

I am a meat space engineer.

My undergrad degree is in Chemical Engineering from way back in 2006.  My graduate degrees are in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering.

I don’t know jack about programming.  My Excel-Fu is strong but that’s about it.  I do not know how to run AutoCAD, Solid Works, or any other modeling software.

My work is in real world physical testing, often destructive testing.  I do a lot of manufactureability assessments.  What materials to use, how to heat treat them, what order of operations to put them together with, in order to get the most cost efficient process.

Tesla is a Silicon Valley company, based in Palo Alto, California.  What is strange is that they are a Silicon Valley company that does meat space engineering.

Using the Halback effect  to develop a very efficient electric motor is brilliant.  Their battery is a thing of beauty.  It is pretty much a 1,200 lbs cell phone battery.

You can tell that the electrical engineering that went into the Tesla is borrowed straight from the laptop and tablet manufacturers up and down the road from them in Silicon Valley.

Their monocoque is an awful pile of overly complex, barely assemblable, excessively expensive garbage.

Absolutley no design for manufacturablty went into the body of the car.

Sandy Munroe, the engineer who did the analysis of the Tesla in the video wondered why this was not caught.

Here is why I think it is.  I have experienced friction in my life with the Silicon Valley mindset.  It is “we are cutting edge and everything that isn’t cutting edge is a dinosaur.”

Lithium ion batteries, digital electric motors, those are cutting edge.  Car  monocoque, chassis, and suspension design is old meat space technology.  The drive in that is production efficiency.  Every once in a while new technology comes along, adaptive damping or something, but a lot of that is actually borrowed from aerospace or racing, where light weight performance is critical.  Then the progress of technology and economy of scale eventually make that cost effective for the consumer car.

I have the feeling that Tesla, the young startup, has very few (if any) experienced car designers who built a career cutting weight and cost out of car building for Toyota or Ford, where the profit margins are razor thin.

If they do, I can all but guarantee that those few engineers are treated like ignorant dinosaurs by the hip Cal Tech designers working on the solid state computer system under the hood.

The frame stinks of the “let’s launch the platform and keep issuing patches and updates” attitude of software design.

Every time they needed to make a change, they patched it here, altered it there, and never had any consistency in assembly.

I have more evidence to back up my theory.  This video on this guy who fixes his own Tesla.

This is the Apple warranty.  Once your iPhone is off warranty, you buy a new one.  Don’t crack it open, you will not get replacement parts, you can’t update anything.

That works for a $900 phone.  Not for an $80,000 car.

And look at the shoddy, shitty assembly.  That’s a lot of miles but not a lot of time, so headlights, taillights, and trim shouldn’t be leaking like that.

This car was built to be the iPhone of cars.  It’s great and loved by the people who own is just long enough for the next model to come out two years later and upgrade it.  If you are not that fanboi customer, fuck you.

The Tesla really is a physical manifestation of the differences in thinking between Silicon Valley engineering and classical real world, meat space, engineering.