Speaking as someone that was SCUBA-certified a few years back, the risks and realities involved in cave diving scare the utter bejeezus out of me.  All of the nope. I could not trust myself to remain unaffected by claustrophobia, hyperventilation, and wetsuit-filling terror.

Well... maybe, maybe not.  Depends on the aliens really. We always assume that aliens will be these benevolent saviors, but if they are some hivemind racist super evolved horror, they might just see this as weakness and manufacture catastrophes such as this to distract us while they come down and steal all the Quinoa. 

It will be the Germans that ultimately end this circus that Elon calls Tesla.    I won’t shed a tear for him either as his gargantuan ego got him into this and ultimately won’t be able to save him.

To be fair, we have a VP of Ops and Engineering of sorts...but that role exists to make sure the organizations are aligned because they’re so dependent on each other, not to make working-level decisions.

The harm in the extra welds and things like that was a $710mn loss last quarter.

I’ve got money on all the guys they poached yelling at Musk, “Are you stupid? We need to be buying this line today and setting it up tomorrow!” and other similar stuff, and him just saying, “We’re not making anything for 6 months, what’s the rush?”

That line is played out man. There are consistent, proven manufacturing principles that apply to any industry (and especially the 4 wheeled vehicle industry) they are completely ignoring or are finding out the hard way.

Of course Tesla has different challenges. However, any production engineer worth their salt doesn’t…

Don’t think it’s quite that simple. They’re trying new things with their cars that others don’t, and they also have goals for production itself, that others don’t.

All of this! When I read the weld issue (I believe it’s 300 they reduced) I thought to myself how the hell did that get past design review? Is there a design review? They stated it like it was some great achievement and all I’m thinking is they look like complete morons for being this far into production and realizing …

I am an Aerospace guy (and R&D at that) but I do deal with the production side of things every now and then.

Off the top of my head:

- Why was the head of design also in charge of production? That’s either a figurehead position or something that would overwhelm even the most capable engineer. Two very different…

What are some of the mistakes? Not trying to be annoying, I’m genuinely curious (I am not in any engineering circles, apart from Computer Science)

*pipes up quietly from the corner*

Hey engineers! How can we pass those diesel emission tests... any ideas?

“It’s astonishing what those engineers can accomplish if they’re given a loose enough tether.”

It does have regenerative braking! Some 20 percent of the energy powering the car was captured from braking energy. But yeah, it had just enough energy to get up the hill and not any more. They’d have to have more battery weight on board to get more energy storage, so...meeeehhhh if it doesn’t have to make the return…

Hear me out: Instead of paying the numerous billions of dollars and euros in fines for Dieselgate, what if VW would build a street legal version of the ID-R and sell it at the price of a Passat. Of course they’d lose a ton of money because building a Passat is probably way, way cheaper than building a Pikes Peak…

It’s because dealerships have no idea what to do with people that come in looking for something unique. All they want to do is pump out the high volume cars, to people who don’t care about anything and will sign up for any payment, if you vary from their very strict box, they have no idea what to do with you. So they…

Yeah, this whole thing doesn’t really come as a shocker. GM has had a pretty good record in the last few decades of make pretty solid “neat” cars that don’t get marketed AT ALL. Remember the SS? How about the Solstice Coupe (the one with the hard top, 3 pedals, and a TURBO!)? Or the CTS (V or not) wagons? They were…

The problem is, GM keeps telling consumers what they want instead of listening to what consumers want. New flash GM, we didn’t want this thing, we wanted this one:

I was looking at the Outback but I saw this was coming out and I wanted to see it as well as the Regal Sportback. When I called the local dealer to ask about test driving both I was told that the TourX was out as a loaner car.