cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/542998
“It does suck, because everybody kind of makes fun of the Cybertruck. To the outside person, it’s kind of weird, it’s ugly, whatever. Once you actually get in it, drive it, you realize it’s pretty frickin’ cool,” he says. “It’s kind of been sad, because I’ve been trying to prove to people that it’s a really awesome truck that’s not falling apart, and then mine starts to fall apart, so it’s just… Yeah, it’s kind of unfortunate and sad.”
I worked at the Tesla plant in Fremont for a bit and most of every car is held together with adhesive. They claim it’s super strong and once heated, it’s stronger than welding… But, I mean… They are still falling apart and I don’t know if that’s because the adhesive sucks or if it’s because every single day, they had to have someone remind everyone that the glue pattern posted at every station where it’s applied isn’t just a suggestion, it’s an engineering requirement for the structural integrity of the part. People were just slapping the adhesive onto shit in any old way they pleased a lot of the time.
Essentially every car has a windshield and trim attached only by adhesive, and has for decades. This ought to be a solved problem.
Is that trim piece steel? Maybe something about the material, usually they’re gluing on plastic trim pieces. They’re relying on heated adhesive but it’s a long skinny piece made of a material that conducts heat?
(X) to doubt
In other words, the things were being designed by underqualified engineers who didn’t understand factors of safety, design for manufacturability, or that precision comes at a cost.
I suspect the real issue is the workers aren’t given enough time on the line to do this correctly so they just churn them out to hit the needed metric knowing it will fail after being delivered to the owner.