Elon Musk, from the Tesla earnings call:
We had these fiberglass mats on the top of the battery pack. They’re basically fluff. So we tried to automate the placement and bonding of fluff to the top of the battery pack. Which is ridiculous.
So we had this weird flufferbot. Which was really an incredibly difficult machine to make work. Machines are not good at picking up pieces of fluff. Human hands are way better at doing that. So we had a super-complicated machine. Using a vision system to try to put a piece of fluff on a battery pack. …
The line kept breaking down because Flufferbot would frequently just fail to pick up the fluff. Or put it in a random location.
Over-automation with a delightful name. Good article.
[H/T John Kordyback]
“While it looks like Tesla will come nowhere close to Musk’s initial goal of building 500,000 cars this year…”
I severely doubt a flufferbot is the reason why.
The problem illustrated.
https://youtu.be/8NPzLBSBzPI
I think this is the downside of Musk’s brilliance, he can get lost in the weeds. In a recent interview he was saying the tolerances on Teslas were already several time ahead of other cars and he wanted to make them orders of magnitude better still. That’s an odd and expensive goal given that I don’t believe customers notice tolerance issues in current cars and that cars have a relatively limited useable life.
If only…
Musk is somehow still a media darling despite the disaster that is the Model 3, his treatment of his employees, and the totally dickish way in which he deals with the media. His act on the financial conference the other day was appalling. Refusing to take very legitimate questions from reporters, while gabbing for a half hour with an enthusiastic fan/blogger who was somehow allowed on the call by Musk.
As a car, the Model 3 is horrible. A little YouTube sleuthing will net you many videos showing how poorly made the vehicle is, with problems unheard of in the industry since the early 90s. Tesla may have some great battery tech, but they simply can’t mass produce vehicles. This should be a damning inditement of an auto manufacturer CEO, but tech bloggers (see Gruber) are so busy fawning over him he gets a free pass.
The problem illustrated.
https://youtu.be/8NPzLBSBzPI
but he has a really cool name. and likes space.