
Tesla Model Y Owners Find Cooling System Made with Home Depot-Grade Fake Wood - dmd
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/36274/tesla-model-y-owners-find-cooling-system-cobbled-together-with-home-depot-grade-fake-wood
======
slg
Stories like this are a Rorschach test for how one views Tesla. This can be a
lazy and dangerous design process that shows the company's unprofessionalism
or it can be a smart hack to get the job done while minimizing costs and
supply chain restraints.

~~~
dleslie
Where's the evidence of danger?

~~~
happytoexplain
Surely the burden of proof is opposite for manufacturers of big consumer
machines? I'm not sure how regulation works here.

~~~
sokoloff
This seems like a perfectly good solution to me. You're trying to stabilize
the cooler, spread the clamping force, and avoid sharp edges and wear. The
part chosen seems perfectly suitable for that, albeit slightly unconventional
looking.

(I say this as someone who is short $TSLA right now [and a non-practicing Mech
E]; this looks perfectly reasonable to me.)

~~~
jeffbee
I agree that if you dug into the engineering the math probably works[1]. It's
just a weird culture to be out on the floor substituting random materials in a
load-bearing, if perhaps not life-safety-critical, part.

1: Compressive strength of wood perpendicular to the grain varies but you can
estimate with a healthy safety margin about 200 PSI. 100x - 1000x weaker than
metals, but still not zero.

~~~
hcknwscommenter
"Compressive strength of wood . . ."

I guarantee you that the materiel is not "wood" and is indeed much weaker in
all relevant parameters. And I suspect that no one at TESLA has any real
handle on the compressive strength of this material.

~~~
jeffbee
You think so? MDF is stronger than wood in compression and isotropic which is
nice.

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maxharris
I think this is cool! It reminds me of how Ferrari did a very similar thing
with the dabs of yellow paint they used to mark bolts that had to withstand
intense vibration:

[http://www.tomyang.net/cars/story1.htm](http://www.tomyang.net/cars/story1.htm)

~~~
sedatk
Ferraris aren’t mass produced though.

~~~
greedo
It could be argued that neither are Teslas...

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temp0826
>> so it's possible that the part is simply cheap and is working for the job

Well, yah. Is it that big of an ego-blemish to have "something so cheap" in
your space-chariot?

~~~
xeromal
Yeah, if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

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jeffbee
Rarely do you see such a literal take on cutting corners.

~~~
msoad
Hold my beer
[https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/evlkdv/shrin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/evlkdv/shrinkflation_used_by_cadbury_to_literally_cut/)

------
cbhl
Sometimes parts from China get stuck in customs or are otherwise delayed, and
this affects Tesla as much as the rest of us.

Here's an interview Elon did with Sal Khan back in 2013. He literally had
employees running around to buy as many USB cables as he could.

[https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=31](https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=31)

------
stunt
There is a lot of room for cutting corner in manufacturing and it all
translates to quality and consistency.

My brother in law has a law firm and he happen to work with two different car
manufacturing brands. He was explaining how two brands choose the glue
differently to build the same part of their products. While for the Chinese
brand it was only important that the glue has the minimum standard to be used
in their production line, the Japanese brand was very specific about which
exact glue from two particular brands can be used there. Which both happen to
be more expensive than similar products with same standard on paper. But
Japanese would only use that particular product because they did all their
quality and durability tests with that.

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legitster
This is something you saw all the time back in the day from normal car
manufacturers (heck, some GM cars were famous for coming off of the production
lines with bottles and trash inside of panels).

This only seems so chintzy to us today because of how much we take for granted
from manufacturing today. Modern automakers are running lean operations that
are insanely optimized (being able to keep consistent production with barely
any inventory). Tesla has famously had problems achieving lean production
(keeping huge inventories of other parts, and consistently running out of
others).

This wouldn't be so embarrassing if Musk had not spent so much time throwing
shade on other car manufacturers.

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nabla9
These can be from the same Chinese supplier that supplies home depot and
Tesla: "Ok send the fake wood ones instead."

Or it can be sign that Tesla still runs their supply chain management in a
style that works for small volume luxury sports cars.

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happytoexplain
This looks and sounds bad, but is it actually bad? Regardless, beyond the
simple perception of "cheapness", the humor value lent by the specific choice
of material certainly doesn't help the optics.

~~~
jlarocco
Besides looking like a kid's go-cart, I think it's bad in the sense that cars
go through safety testing and are governed by a ton of rules and regulations,
and it's unlikely they've tested the cars with parts scrounged from Home
Depot.

Assuming it's safe, then the worst part, for Tesla, is probably just the
terrible optics. It's one thing for a do-it-yourselfer to hack their own car,
but I suspect nobody really wants to drop $60k on a new car that's hacked
together.

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msoad
I was on a call with Tesla salesperson to purchase a Model Y. After watching a
few Youtube videos on quality and now this I'm 100% backing off from it. A BMW
is cheaper and much better built

~~~
et2o
What comparable BMW is cheaper?

~~~
msoad
Model Y vs. X1

~~~
awad
Depending on options etc, you could go up to X5...

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dawnerd
This title is so bad. 'Home Depot-Grade' is just editorializing to make it
more clickbaity.

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winrid
Imagine if GM did this...

Anyway it looks like poor supply chain management. They ran out of the plastic
corner pieces.

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AlliedEnvy
His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when
you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the
tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust
spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed
that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the
collars were pinched shut.

"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.

"What’s shim?"

"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under
the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it
again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."

"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"

"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my
hand.

He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"

"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to
get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got
noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and
filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real
attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he
was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of
his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German
mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance.
None, now that I think of it.

You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.

I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as
metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet
weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that
prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.

In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical
finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this
particular technical problem was perfect.

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench,
cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell
him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from
Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of
Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would
have gone gaga over it.

That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore
off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling
I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved
than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long
enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a
feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to
take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of
trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could
possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and
my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit
and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and
come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the
explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual,
rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were
all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving
on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in
terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing
what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see
what the shim is, in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a
beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?

\-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

------
Tarragon
From Jalopnik, Munro is quoted as saying: “The metal bad routes through the
Plastic housing for the Thermal system and the band cracked a portion of it.”

[https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-
de...](https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-y-owners-have-found-home-depot-shit-
used-to-1844999285)

------
GaryNumanVevo
I’m still kind of in shock that Tesla still sells software upgrades for things
like disabling traction control “Drift Mode” or for turning on the rear seat
heaters. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but if I’m purchasing a vehicle I can be
allowed to wrench on it without being banned from supercharger stations

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stiray
I would expext this on Yugo. I dont mind the fix if it works, but I would
expect this from someone doing it at home not from a $50k car. If I would find
this in my car I would just return it to the factory and the linked article is
right. What else can be found?

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rasz
>ROB STUMPF: so it's possible that the part is simply cheap and is working for
the job.

Rob, I hope you never look at the welds on Ferrari Testarossa, F40, Dino, or
any Maserati from the <=80s for that matter.

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Grustaf
That looks like real wood to me, not just the grain but the way it flaked from
sawing. Who would use fake wood for trimmings anyway?

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werber
I'm not a car person, but doesn't a car get hot enough to burn wood?

~~~
mikeyouse
Electrics don't.. all of the intense heat from an internal combustion car
comes from the combustion process itself. There's probably some heat built up
in the drive components on the Tesla and surely by the wheels from the
braking, but not in the 'engine bay'/frunk.

~~~
legitster
This is literally attached to a cooling system.

~~~
mikeyouse
Right.. but the liquid cooled condenser that the wood is attached to isn't
going to approach anything close to the ignition temperature of wood...
whereas the temp inside the cylinder of an ICE car can reach 2,500ºC. I think
the Tesla hack in the article is ridiculous but 100x safer than a similar hack
in an ICE engine bay would be.

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mikelyons
If safety and longevity weren't concerns I would say: If it's stupid and works
it's not stupid. There's a difference between quality, and the perception of
quality.

~~~
happytoexplain
How do you know it works? If it is indeed a cut corner that has a negative
impact, it wouldn't present itself immediately or in all cases. I couldn't
even begin to guess.

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fred_is_fred
What's interesting is going to be just how polarizing the discussion below
plays out. Discussing Tesla has become so Balkanized that it quickly moves
beyond rational. Musk/Tesla is either a low quality sham of a company with
inflated stock price or a genius undervalued company sticking it to big oil
and stodgy old car companies.

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happytoexplain
I can understand the perception that this is an unreasonable cut corner with
potential consequences, or that it's unknowable if it's reasonable or not
without knowing more, but it's hard to wrap my mind around the 3rd option I
keep seeing: That this is obviously a harmless example of scrappy ingenuity.
Where do people get that kind of confidence in something with so many
variables, both physical and financial?

~~~
Grustaf
In what scenario wouldn't you just 3d-print it instead?

~~~
xeromal
You can buy a bazillion feet of this trim in the time it takes to print like a
1000 of these.

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extremeMath
"The original poster of the thread had reportedly spent more than ten hours
disassembling their Model Y to correct poor panel fitment when they came
across a large chunk of metal secured with green tape and a small strap."

Bad quality followed up by bad quality.

When I benchmarked Tesla years ago, the exterior(and interior) panels were
awful in their Autoshow build. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't fixed it
yet.

I gave them a pass at the time because everything was new and in low runs. Now
with 500k/yr, there's really no excuse.

Tesla is the Apple of Automotive.

