It boggles my mind that anybody thought gluing exterior panels to the car was a good idea. Not just trim, entire body panels. Any other vehicle has the body as part of the actual structure, but for some reason on this one they're just decorative cladding. Is there any good reason for this?
It was originally supposed to be an exoskeleton of folded metal.
This informed the whole design, it would lead to a lightweight, low cost truck that could be delivered with the battery tech available at the time. They highlighted not painting it as a cost saving move at the reveal.
Then they gave up on that idea as unworkable, but kept the look, so it's like designing a bit of furniture around some fancy solid wood steam bending technique then trying to fake it with wood laminate.
It was also delayed so long that other truck manufacturers just used the cheaper batteries available by then to make competitive trucks based don standard truck bodies.
I have never heard this until just now, and it explains so much!
(from 2019)
> The terminology Rickard used for this process was "to score" the sheet. Musk talked about how deep a score the Cybertruck needed for bends via Twitter. He said, “Even bending it requires a deep score on inside of bend, which is how the prototype was made.”
After the design is drawn out, the corners and edges are cut out with either a laser cutter or a water jet, while the sheet lays flat. Next, the stainless steel sheet is folded, like origami, and welded into shape.
“You basically take one or two sheets and fold them up into a truck, which is a huge cost-saving,” said Rickard. According to him, the whole process makes stamping machines unnecessary and lends itself well to robot laser assembly.
Meta; as a non-engineer I'm always fascinated by all the seemingly arbitrary, though surely well thought through design choices that go into anything mechanical.
For example, panels can be screwed in, welded, glued, riveted, snugly fitted, attached with some kind of retaining bolt... And so on. When assembling IKEA furniture, someone clearly though some bits require dowels, other screws or nails, other still those weird round spirally things that, when twisted, pull the metal bit in.
I guess car panels obviously (???) need to be removable for repairs, but still. In an alternative universe, I'd love to be an engineer and understand some of those things.
IKEA is regularly mocked for selling junk made of newspaper clippings and chewing gum; but no one would question their ability to design passable furniture made out of the cheapest materials possible, transportable in an average car, assemble-able by an illiterate, with prices that are below their competitors and often get reduced as they find new efficiencies.
Tesla probably takes a lot of inspiration from IKEA; but consumers expect a lot more from a 80K USD car expected to last hundreds of thousands of miles, than wobbly furniture that will be trashed at the first move.
They're quite clever. They achieve at least these things:
- assembly happens from the inside rather than the outside, which looks better and may be easier to assemble in place
- the cam pulls the fixing to a particular depth, and no further. Overtightening a screw would be easily done but completely destroys the chipboard from which IKEA products are made
- load spreading in the chipboard. Again a screw into the end of chipboard would be very prone to splitting it
You can order replacement spare parts for free. The US ordering system is https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/returns-claims/s..., and the cams have spare part number 103114. Obviously this is meant to be used if you break or lose a cam or two during assembly.
Think of different manufacturing techniques as software frameworks - different frameworks (manufacturing techniques) have a niche that they can do well, but they all have their impacts on development (manufacturing/assembly/shipping) and operational costs (long term reliability in the field). Sometimes developers swear by a framework and know it inside and out, but ask them to work in a different framework and they'll be slow to get up to speed and potentially make mistakes that experienced developers wouldn't.
The main breakdown in this analogy is that the differences between manufacturing techniques can be immense, so the range of "good" techniques for any specific application is much narrower. Using one manufacturing technique vs another might result in not being able to ship your product in separate parts, making your shipping costs 20% higher and reducing your profit margin into the "bankruptcy" range.
This seems like a decent analogy. Still, one product might use lots of different processes in different places. It's a bit like mixing many different web frameworks within one web app, for example.
They're called cams, the metal part it pulls in is a dowel. Older ones you had to make sure were fitted before you put the dowel in, but the newer ones you can fit afterwards - so if you have a panel that has many dowels to go through many holes you no longer have to swear many times when one falls out and you have to start the process again. Beautiful in their simplicity.
Tesla is using customer as guinea pigs. They don't care if you die, the paperwork says they are not liable for whatever happens. Rest assured they'll learn from your demise and they'll update their software with another experiment that might be less lethal this time, who knows!
It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
Teslas marketing is genius though, preventing them from being known as death traps by regular people.
> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.
> An analysis published Thursday by the auto news website FuelArc found that, in their one year of existence, the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities, giving them a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units. That’s 17 times the fatality rate of the Ford Pintos, whose famously flawed gas tank design on the car’s rear end led to 27 reported fire fatalities in its nine years on the road, resulting in a fatality rate of 0.85 per 100,000 units, according to FuelArc.
The Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred between 1970 and mid-1977 (so not the full 9-year period) in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
This is not comparable to the total number of fatalities involving fire and a Cybertruck (regardless of the impact type, or lack thereof, e.g. the Las Vegas fatality was due to the guy shooting himself in the head). Not a single one of the three Cybertruck incidents would have been included in the Ford Pinto statistic because none of them were rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So we'd expect the total fire fatality rate to be about 6.5x the fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions that resulted in fire.
And of course, saying "Teslas are more dangerous than Ford Pintos" is very different than saying "the Tesla Cybertruck has a higher rate of fire fatalities than the Ford Pinto." Even the latter statement would be incorrect but the former is simply absurd.
A single Cybertruck weighs as much as three Ford Pintos. We should be sure to include Newton's second law in our evaluations of which is the more dangerous vehicle.
This article is a great example of motivated reasoning. It's comparing two wildly different numbers: the Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire. The Cybertruck number is the total number of deaths from all incidents involving fire and a Cybertruck.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.
This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:
- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,
- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and
- three, the driver shot himself in the head
If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.
Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.
They literally added the suicide where the driver died with a self inflicted gun shot wound after loading it with explosive fireworks outside Trump tower as if that was Tesla's fault just to juice the numbers and fool people.
This non-stop propaganda misinformation attacks against Tesla and all the people that believe it is out of control and very sad to see.
It's actually not at all sad to see. Ever since the 'pedo' comment, I am personally very happy to see attacks against Tesla. There is a reason CEOs stay out of the spotlight when it comes to politics and social media. Someone wanted to be a trailblazer, so we're helping him drive it home.
There are legitimate reasons to not like Musk or Tesla, no need to resort to misinformation. If there are no such reasons then it's a bad thing to try and make things up.
Because the recalls on 95% of the cars Tesla has sold (Model 3 and Y) are basically all software updates that users never notice, and evidently don’t cause tons of car crashes.
When millions of people use a car day in and day out and don’t even notice a recall, I wouldn’t expect them to care.
As an example of why recalls are not the end all-be all either, Subaru lost a phantom power draw class action lawsuit due to faulty design of their Starlink head unit, and they didn’t even have to do a recall, even though it cost me thousands to fix.
And because I fixed it myself before the lawsuit, I’m not eligible for any compensation, even though Subaru knows every VIN with the faulty design.
Not an entirely new concept really. Many cars over the years have had what are basically adhesive attached panels and components. Saturn had vehicles with composite panels attached similarly iirc. And I believe the weird GM minivan of the early 90’s did as well.
I used to own a plane that had metal wings glued together. The Grumman Tiger literally had aluminum wing skins bonded onto the plane. No rivets or screws. They had some early issues with the glue they picked, but after picking a different glue it was a really reliable method. There are some of these planes flying still and are getting almost 50 years old.
Many modern cars use the body panels as structural members because it is weight efficient, but trucks were probably the last category of automobile to adopt this trend. It is not necessarily bad design to have a separate frame, you just pay a weight penalty. Engineers may choose to do this because they have other design priorities than weight.
Tl;dr: Glue is an okay design choice. Non-structural panels are an okay design choice. The Tesla engineers just didn’t get the details right.
>Tl;dr: Glue is an okay design choice. Non-structural panels are an okay design choice. The Tesla engineers just didn’t get the details right.
I think a lot of people commenting on this have no idea how much of their car is held together with glue. The interesting thing here is that the glue failed, not that glue was used in the first place.
I don’t think it’s inherently a bad idea. Industrial adhesives can be incredibly strong and perform better than fasteners in many use cases. They are tricky though and there’s many ways things can go wrong.
You have glue on Lotus chassis for example so glue can be structural in automotive. AFAIK it's just unrepairable. Feel free to correct me..
Edit: For non car peeps, Lotus build essentially track day cars with a light chassis and as many parts from popular manufacturers as possible to keep maintenance cheap. They see a lot of abuse.
Eh.. Kinda? There are plenty of running 25 y/o elises with over 100k km on them. Definitely with more maintenance than normal but it'd be mostly consumables and those 100k km won't be gentle. I doubt under the same conditions even a Toyota or Honda would wear better (and they don't have to).
True, I wonder if the cladding could have flanges on the backside that could be bolted/welded though, which would by invisible from the outside of the vehicle
I think the surfaces are mated on the edges, there would be a bend on the edges if you were to install a flange there. That would probably look weird. It's cold rolled steel which has nice properties but makes it difficult to install flanges. It's a hard look to achieve which makes it technically impressive but does require such compromises such as using glue.
While I don't like the Cyber Truck design aesthetically or technically the manufacturing techniques used to create it are impressive. I do wonder if the manufacturing was done this way to have an option to make cheap military vehicles at scale, like how VW factories are now considering being repurposed to produce military vehicles.
Personally the Toyota Hilux Champ 2.4L diesel is more my speed.
>It's cold rolled steel which has nice properties but makes it difficult to install flanges.
I know nothing about materials science, but I'm curious if it could then be stamped at the corners/edges to create some sort of surface that could be used to attach using rivets/weld/bolts
I think it would be hard to do that and keep the aesthetics - there would be a curve on the edge wherever the stamping is done. Glue is a workaround that has it's own tradeoffs but is not without president.
I think due to drones there will be a trend towards very lightly armored vehicles that spend most of their time loitering with short periods of shoot-and-scoot. When even tanks can be destroyed by drones it doesn't make much sense to keep pursing stronger, heavier, and more expensive armor.
The versatility of the CyberTruck manufacturing chain would make it pretty easy to pump out many variants for different roles and easily change the variants as tactics progress.
AFAIK DeLorean's are not cold rolled steel. CyperTrucks 1.4-1.8mm 1018 cold rolled versus 0.8mm 304 DeLorean. The thinner steel on the DeLorean makes is easier to work with enabling larger panels which need fewer flanges. It seems the theory as to why the panels are so thick is that they do provide some structural stiffness.
The early prototypes had 3mm thick panels so it's likely some design decisions were left over form that.
Most trucks have ‘body on frame’ construction. Not clear on Cybertruck stuff, but for normal ICE trucks, the towing and payload requirements, plus large engines just make it easier. They tend to be less sensitive to the need for optimizing strength-weight ratio like modern emission controlled cars too, or precisely engineered crumple zones, which is a large part of why modern cars are unibody construction.
This looks like a pretty standard recall, no? I see it referenced as a "trim piece", in which case gluing or taping is pretty standard. But I don't know what a "cant rail" is.
What I find funny is that, historically, the Tesla fans would laugh at every other car company's recalls, when Tesla only had a relatively small number of cars on the road. Now they recall just like everyone else.
The "cant rail" in question here is the exterior cladding of the A pillar and along the panoramic roof, adjacent to the windshield.
Noting that sharp-edged, robust stainless steel trim pieces falling of cars can be a pretty significant safety risk to the traffic around the affected car.
Only "monocoque" designs use the panels as part of the structure. But normally they're bolted on.
If you look at, say, https://www.paintedcarpanels.co.uk/ford%2Dfocus%2D2008%2D201... - left of photo you can see a "tab" extending from the panel with bolt holes, and top you can see a semi-circular pair of prongs. The panels are bolted on, and the bolts hide inside the engine bay or under other bits of trim.
The Cybertruck deliberately uses flat panels for its "aesthetic", and I believe their material is harder to bend for purposes of making these little fixing points. Combine that with the polygonal structure and there's probably no other way to do it other than welding mounts to the back.
Still a bizarre decision, though: what happens when you need to change a panel? How do you get them unglued only at the right time? How heat-sensitive is it?
Just remember, your Model 3, Y and X could have been significantly better for the same price had Tesla not built this piece of trash due to a ketamine addicted CEO, that streams playing video games for hours at a time.
Also lol @ this post instantly being forced off the front page.
... on a "boosted" account. Which means you pay a good player to play on your account to it gets better stats, and then he pulled an Elon ... in other words, he lied about someone else's performance really being his own.
But downvoting without comment would not have helped get my point across in any way. I also hope of making other people scrutinise their own voting behavior, and be more mindful/conscious in those interactions and their outcome.
I personally love HN for the fact that you often have interesting insights in comments from the people actually involved; meme-like comments like the above drown those out, and I would rather try and prevent that.
Stock is overvalued to hell. Leadership continues to sell (AI, self driving vehicles, tesla pays for itself via taxi service, …) investors on new projects but ultimately failing to deliver to market.
The “Cybertruck” flop is just the most recent example.
Did you also catch the gaudy sales pitch Elon and Orange Man had on the _White House_ lawn? This company is a failure. Its leadership is clueless. It’s all built on a house of cards.
Ignoring its engineering faults (and those of its current CEO), I appreciate that a car company went way off script and designed something that's really out there, design-wise.
It’s very functional! Where else can you get a self driving truck that protects its occupants extremely well and automatically powers the house during an outage? It has been a great vehicle for family ski trips and camping.
Don’t just listen to the haters, there are a bunch of us that actually enjoy our cybertrucks :)
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many were given away at deep discounts or for free to help grow "awareness" and make it look more popular than it is.
I'm very curious as to what the remedy will be. Other panels seem to be detaching, as well. Will they have to remove and reattach all panels from every vehicle? Also, does the 46000 include every Cybertruck sold to-date?
I think it's weird to dismiss an article without engaging with it at all and not making any arguments as to why it should be dismissed beyond "it's CNN".
