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A shouting Elon Musk, changing rules: Inside Tesla's Model 3 sprint


jpd80

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A shouting Elon Musk, changing rules: Inside Tesla's Model 3 sprint

July 3, 2018 @ 6:54 am

Alexandria Sage and Salvador Rodriguez

Reuters......http://www.autonews.com/article/20180703/OEM05/180709923/tesla-model-3-elon-musk

 

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- A tense and short-tempered CEO Elon Musk barked at engineers on the Fremont, Calif.,

assembly line. Tesla Inc. pulled workers from other departments to keep pumping out the Model 3 electric sedans,

disrupting production of the Model S and X lines. And weekend shifts were mandatory.

 

Tesla pulled out all the stops in the final week of June to meet its goal of making 5,000 Model 3s in a week, according

to employees who spoke to Reuters.

 

Whether Tesla can do it week in and week out -- and without relying on overtime and extra hands -- is another question,

and one that weighed on investors Monday, as shares slumped 2.3 percent.

 

Leading up to Sunday morning's production milestone, Musk paced the Model 3 line, snapping at his engineers when

the around-the-clock production slowed or stopped due to problems with robots, one worker said. Tesla built a new line

in just two weeks in a huge tent outside the main factory, an unprecedented move in an industry that takes years to plan

out its assembly lines, and said the tented production area accounted for 20 percent of the Model 3s produced last week.

 

"They were borrowing people from our line all day to cover their [Model 3] breaks so the line would continue to move,"

said a Model S worker on Sunday.

 

Because of the focus on the Model 3, the S line is about 800 cars behind, the worker said.

"They've been throwing Model 3s ahead of the S to get painted to try to assure that they make their goal of 5,000,"

the worker said. "The paint department can't handle the volume."

Edited by jpd80
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Whether Tesla can do it week in and week out -- and without relying on overtime and extra hands -- is another question,

 

It's not a question at all - they absolutely can't do it. And doing it for one week by delaying other vehicles and doing other unsustainable things is just plain stupid.

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I usually don't give a crap about things like this but I am really starting to have a genuine hate for Tesla, Musk, and the cult like following. I am sick of seeing them in the news everyday. I am sick of Musk being ridiculous on twitter. I am sick of this shell game. Just get bought or go bankrupt already. Unless God (not Musk who thinks he's God) decides to come in with divine intervention, they are going to fail. They are not going to fail because they can't engineer great cars. They are going to fail because their leader is such an arrogant distruptor that he insists he needs to reinvent the wheel and processes because he is the smartest guy in the room. He has played Wall Street and VC like a violin, to which I tip my hat. However, the fat lady is warming up and I feel like the end is near.

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I wonder what this tent will do to Tesla's already shoddy assembly quality?

 

It's such a shame that Musk didn't listen to any of the manufacturing experts he hired (and then fired). The cars are well designed and engineered but this clown show of trial by error assembly process is going to produce a lot of lemons.

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Stock price down 7.23% today. Looks like people are starting to look at his claims a little more closely. Would you want to pay for a 45K car that was made in a makeshift line and tent structure? My bet is that Musk will make some grandiose claim on twitter Sunday night so investors get amnesia and the stock will jump back up on Monday.

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Now Remember, Musk was doing all this shouting and switching around personnel behind the scenes

while calling Ford out for being a morgue......

 

I mean seriously, contorting production that badly just to save face on an almost impossible production target,

yes Tesla did it but at what cost to quality and delivery of more valuable Tesla vehicles.

 

Elon's ego is getting in the way of proper production expansion, we're being told that paint can't handle the

volume of cars being thrown at it.....

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