"…[Tesla] is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern." https://t.co/XriEM71kpG — Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 22, 2023 Since a lot of people will be traveling this weekend… Albert Burneko, at Defector — “You’re …
Friday Evening Open Thread: Watch Out for Exploding Teslas…Post + Comments (81)
… In general I don’t like spoiling the kicker of somebody else’s article, but I’d like to call your attention to the following quote, which ends the Reuters piece and crystallizes, I think, something important. The context is: A Tesla driver has brought his wife’s Model 3 in for servicing because the power steering ceased operating after the car went over a normal speed bump. The service manager (note that Tesla, unlike other car manufacturers, owns and operates all of its dealerships, so the workers there are Tesla employees) identifies the culprit: A system component has become corroded—probably, he says, because the car went through a car wash. The repairs will cost $4,400. The driver observes, reasonably, that he has never heard of a car’s wiring being damaged by simply taking it through a car wash.
Lundeen [the driver] said he was so shocked by the manager’s frank explanation of Tesla’s part failures that he wrote it down: “All I can tell you,” the Tesla manager said, “is we’re not a 100-year-old company like GM and Ford. We haven’t worked all the bugs out yet.”
Imagine offering this as a defense, as you charge a customer $4,400 to fix your own shoddy product. Look, pal, all I can tell you is that I don’t know how to make the thing I sold you at great expense. Contained in this doofus Tesla service manager’s quote is the ethos shared among all Elon Musk’s ventures. It is the defining ethos of Silicon Valley.
The engineers who work at GM and Ford (or at Toyota or Honda or Nissan or Mercedes-Benz or any other company whose cars you can drive through a car wash without corroding their power steering components) are not themselves 100 years old; they are not the original discoverers of how to design and manufacture power steering systems. The reason those companies, and not Tesla, know how to build cars that (in general) can drive from here to there without dropping a wheel or bursting into flames is not that they are staffed by a bunch of centenarian Lore Wizards who learned the secrets of auto manufacture back in nineteen-aught-dickity and now hide this sacred knowledge in a walled mountaintop abbey. What those car companies know about building cars is collective industry knowledge. It is best practice. It is, that is to say, Out There. It can be had by any car company that wants it.
What keeps Tesla from having that knowledge, then, isn’t that the company is too young to have acquired it, or that it simply cannot be had except by learning it from scratch. The knowledge can be had in the person of any number of far-less-than-100-years-old engineers Tesla could hire; moreover it can be had by reverse-engineering a frickin’ Miata. The reason Tesla hasn’t “worked all the bugs out yet” is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern. There simply isn’t as much investment money and credulous tech-media adulation to suck up in the promise of iterating on what already works. You must reinvent, almost literally in this case, the wheel—this time, apparently on the premise of “…and what if it sucked?”…