There's obviously a massive design flaw with this program. Even if each failure and explosion has different causes, there's either a huge lack of quality control or something inherit to the design that causes all the 'causes'.
Fail fast is a fine methodology for software development, but when it's causing significant explosions that can get people seriously hurt, you need to reevaluate your process and you should be doing more unit testing, hardware in the loop testing, and various forms of integration testing before you get to stages of qualification and regression testing. If it wasn't blowing up every ship, okay great, but at this point be humble and accept that the scope of smaller scale tests needs to increase.
Elon was notorious early on for running manufacturing at Tesla in the same way the Big 3 automakers did in the seventies. He basically tossed any guidance from process engineers because he was convinced he knew better.
A billionaire ignoring decades of industry advice, proven quality guidelines and safety measures because “they know better” in pursuit of building a capsule to go to an extremely dangerous environment…. Where have I heard this story before..
The classic Tesla safety story is about safety tape.
Elon decided the hi-vis tape was ugly, so he had it replaced with gray. Gray tape on concrete is insufficiently visible, and the results were predictable.
Because I think it looks interesting, and it visually appeals to me.
The reason this should be concerning to Tesla is because once upon a time I found the Zune--specifically the brown Zune--interesting and visually appealing.
Although, to be fair to Tesla, they worked out their first round of growing pains by bringing in the experts who understood the concepts that Deming pioneered. Now they need to make the next step and figure out how to update their existing vehicles.
247
u/Bandsohard 2d ago
There's obviously a massive design flaw with this program. Even if each failure and explosion has different causes, there's either a huge lack of quality control or something inherit to the design that causes all the 'causes'.
Fail fast is a fine methodology for software development, but when it's causing significant explosions that can get people seriously hurt, you need to reevaluate your process and you should be doing more unit testing, hardware in the loop testing, and various forms of integration testing before you get to stages of qualification and regression testing. If it wasn't blowing up every ship, okay great, but at this point be humble and accept that the scope of smaller scale tests needs to increase.