10 microns = .01 mm = .0004 inch
If your’re such a fucken genius why don’t you just make the cars out of lego and beer cans then? Ever think of that ya fucken knob?
british curses are always fun. cursing in my native language feels like crimes against humanity compared to this.
The worst swear word in my second language is pōkokohua. It means boiled head. Your head is sacred, so turning it into poop is the worst thing you could do to someone. Basically take all their mana (authority, public standing, it’s hard to explain fully in English) and turn it into shit.
Given that teslas have notoriously bad tolerances, like gaps on the order of millimeters, ya might want to fix the cause of that first lol.
This is how “entrepreneurs” “innovate”. They just say they want something and everybody else tries to work around the roadblocks the CEO probably put in place that make achieving the goal way harder than necessary.
I like how he explains what a micron is as if the people who actually build things at Tesla don’t know
and honestly a little jankiness will just contribute to the PS1 aesthetic, he should want to lean into it for meme marketing purposes
It really does take a genius and visionary to sit back and say “Hey, guys, let’s make this, but with as small an error as I can imagine. Don’t like, assess how precise stuff needs to be or consider any of that. Just make it all like really, unreasonably well, okay?”
I’m sure the engineers are blown away by that big mind, what a privilege. It reads like an excuse to blame the engineers when the truck inevitably sucks because they didn’t follow his perfect design.
Yeah I hate those fake appeals to “genius”. To the extent that someone like Musk provides “guidance” at all, it is to merely hop on his email and say some Captain Obvious shit to thousands of people who are too busy doing real work to read that shit.
Bourgeois apologists always deny the theft of surplus values from the workers and insist that profit is merely the boss’s “wages” for his “unique labor” of “training, guidance, and planning”.
But most of the actual training, guidance, and planning is not done by the actual owners, but by managers, who are employees that are paid a high salary, but are not usually board members or share holders or other bourgeoisie who live primarily off of surplus value.
He’s known for flipping the fuck out on anyone at anytime for any reason. I worked with a number of people who came from Tesla and they had endless horror stories about him. Basically you just pray never to run into him and if you do, try your best not to get noticed or you might end up losing your job that day just because he likes to instill fear and make himself feel big by firing people for any or no real reason.
I used to work for a company that made stamping dies for aluminum cans, and some of those dies had tolerances close to .0004", because the aluminum is very thin and could crack and tear if the dies were not made precisely. The cans themselves are not that precise, they just need to hold beer without exploding. I can’t speak to Legos, but cars absolutely do not need this kind of precision, not even in the bearings. And especially not in the sheet metal body panels.
Tolerances depend on the function of the part and are selected to balance various tradeoffs in production costs and assembly. A well engineered design does not require tight tolerances for the vast majority of features (reducing scrap, tooling, and labor costs), but some specific mechanism components like gears and driveshafts demand very tight tolerances for profile and runout in order to function reliably.
Tolerances will often influence which type of machine tool is used to produce a feature. A tight tolerances on an outside diameter might make the difference between a part being made on a lathe in one/two operations, or requiring additional operations on a cyllendrical grinder. Overzealous requirements for surface finish will require slower feedrates, sharper tools (which wear more quickly) and extend cycle times significantly, or require extensive manual hand-finishing.
Commercial bearings routinely have tolerances of 0.0004" or less & performance bearings designed for specific aerospace use/applications can have substantially tighter tolerances.
I can’t speak to Legos
Legos famously have a weirdly high tolerance for injected molded plastic*, it’s part of the branding they use to justify their high price. It does make them snap together more reliably than Mega Blocks or whatever, but Mega Blocks or whatever usually snap together anyway, so I don’t know whether that extra precision counts as necessary.
* People quote all sorts of tolerances for this, but the most credible-looking one I found was 0.04 mm.
