
Ford paid $199,950 to tear down a Tesla Model X - jasonwen
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/ford-pays-199-950-before-taxes-for-tesla-s-64th-model-x-suv
======
CameronBanga
The CEO of Ford made over $17 million last year in compensation, but it was
worthwhile to write an article about a 200k R&D expense, with a senior
industry analyst giving a quote seriously questioning the $50k spent over
sticker price in order to get the vehicle immediately instead of waiting in
line.

Is this really a story? Or just clickbait because it has Tesla in the title?

~~~
jasonwen
The news is not about the amount indeed, it's basically pocket money for Ford.
However, they go in great lengths to acquire a Tesla through unusual channels.
The founders edition are very limited and rare and only given to close friends
& board members. They wouldn't do this with a new Honda I imagine.

What makes it interesting is to see how the car industry reacts to Tesla's
disrupting the industry, which in this case is one reaction (of many). Thats
what I think is fascinating.

~~~
yodon
> They wouldn't do this with a new Honda I imagine

I worked in an advanced vehicle design skunkworks at GM Design Staff in the
late 1980's (a time when the quality of Japanese cars was a top threat to US
car makers). While there I had access to a wide range of top of the line
Japanese-domestic-market-only vehicles imported into the US specifically for
teardowns just like this, frequently before Japanese buyers could obtain them
locally domestically. In those days, it wasn't electric power plants that were
the issue, it was (among other things) the density and efficiency and
downright beauty with which the engine compartment contents were packed. I
still remember standing around an open engine with a bunch of hotshot car
guys, all of us in awe at the look of the engine compartment in front of us.
There was nothing on the US market packed anywhere near as tightly, yet
everything was completely accessible and downright beautiful. In hindsight I
strongly suspect this was a sign they started using CAD packing tools long
before we did (laser scanning of hand-sculpted car designs was still a few
years away in the US, to say nothing of actual CAD-first designs). If the
packing was done by hand (as it might well have been) I've genuinely no idea
how they managed the complexity of that design task. Sometimes you need to see
that someone has completely outclassed you in order to break free and take
your own thinking to the next level. So yes, when there are Japanese or German
or any other cars that stand out as major design advances, you can be sure
Ford and GM and all the other major manufacturers have them in review and
teardown the day they start coming off the assembly line.

------
rocky1138
$200k USD for R&D on such a market-changing item is peanuts. I'm not sure what
the hullabaloo is all about.

~~~
Retric
It's not the total price that's a shocker rather they needed to pay $55,000
over the list price. That's way above average even if it's chump change for a
major car company.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
This is a company with a $54B market cap and a 2015 pre-tax net income of $10B
out of $150B in revenue. Yeah, I think they can spare an extra $55,000 now and
again.

~~~
Retric
Can spare sure, but this looks more like how a middle manager can quietly hand
50k to a friend.

~~~
monkeyprojects
Given that the car was a freebie for referring 11 Model S sales I doubt it was
a friend.. See [http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/20/11466810/tesla-model-x-
for...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/20/11466810/tesla-model-x-ford-
purchase)

My guess is that this was the first one Ford was able to buy at any price....

~~~
Retric
Yea, I think this is a case of looks sketchy but is fine. Still, journalism
often focuses on the interesting even if it's not that big a deal.

------
michaelbuckbee
This makes me think of the iPhone + RIM (Blackberry) and what a shift in
thinking they had after pulling apart the first iPhone they could get hold of.

"RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all hands
meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: it couldn’t do what
they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must
have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled
an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny
logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant."

From: [http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/12/28/rim-was-in-
disbelief-f...](http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/12/28/rim-was-in-disbelief-
following-the-introduction-of-the-iphone-in-january-2007/)

~~~
wrong_variable
I remember reading that article - It was really insightful.

This is what innovation looks like - its so absurd that it might actually work
!

------
pandemicsyn
Its pretty common practice[0]. IMHO the take away is that Ford is taking Tesla
(and electrics) serious enough to do it.

[0] [http://www.wired.com/2014/07/go-inside-the-lab-where-gm-
tear...](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/go-inside-the-lab-where-gm-tears-apart-
its-competitors-cars/)

------
emdd
This seems very reasonable to me. Why not essentially try to reverse engineer
it? See what Ford can learn from Tesla.

------
tcpekin
Carmakers continually buy all sorts of competitors' models for comparison
testing and R&D purposes. From what I remember, the company I interned for
(one of the big 3 in Detroit) bought Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, etc to compare
drive quality and for R&D. Additionally, sometimes they don't want a new car,
they want one that is 10 years old and has real world wear and tear. They
essentially have a broker who will find any car they ask for. I worked on the
alloy design team, and one of the more unique stories I heard was about 10
years ago, they bought a 20 year old Mercedes to essentially cut into pieces.
Why? The model they bought was one of the first cars with a unique alloy in
the body IIRC, and they wanted to run mechanical as well as characterization
tests on it to see how it aged.

------
acomjean
In the book "Soul of a new machine" there is described a moment in 1978 when
an Data General engineer (Tom West) gets to go look at and take apart a newly
installed DEV VAX at a friends company.

Oddly VAX cost $200,000.

Very short exert [http://kottke.org/14/07/the-soul-of-a-new-
machine](http://kottke.org/14/07/the-soul-of-a-new-machine)

Long exert of the book which continues the story of the VAX disassembly was
published in the Atlantic called "flying upside-down".

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/07/flying-u...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/07/flying-
upside-down/306467/?single_page=true)

Soul of a new machine is a really good book. highly recomended.

------
cm3
Why is is that reverse engineering gets people cease and desist letters,
especially in the software and electronics community? Is the difference that
Ford keeps the findings internal and doesn't share them with the public? If
so, that's pretty bad, because someone dissected a product and now everyone
else should do the same instead of sharing the result. It's a waste of money
and work force, all in the name of trying to hide stuff even though patents
and copyrights are abused already for similar purposes.

~~~
HillRat
It's not the act of disassembling that's important, it's what you do with the
knowledge afterwards. For example, the team doing the Tesla teardown is now
poisoned; they can write up their findings from the clean room and provide
them to other engineering teams for implementation (IP issues aside), but they
are now barred from working on any derivative technologies themselves. It's a
bit cumbersome, but this is how engineering espionage is done.

~~~
ddorian43
Why can't they work themself on derivatives? As long as there aren't any
patents it should be ok? What am I missing ?

~~~
snowwrestler
> As long as there aren't any patents it should be ok? What am I missing ?

There are patents.

~~~
ghaff
Patents are public information. That's one of the main reasons they exist.
(Making information public in exchange for period of exclusivity.)

------
josh_carterPDX
The comments here are really interesting. I agree that I'm not sure why this
is news worthy since it seems like companies spend much more than this doing
the exact same thing in other verticals. I'm sure Google and Samsung have
spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, doing the same thing to Apple
products. R&D includes trying to understand how others do it. Spending nearly
$200K to tear apart a Tesla seems pretty reasonable to me.

~~~
csours
Assuming that Apple has 10 products on the market at any time, and you buy one
per month at $1,000 each, that's $10,000 dollars a month, so for $120,000 you
could fund the teardowns for a year.

------
asimuvPR
When Lexus launched the LS400 two percent of the sales that year came from
auto manufacturers. They could not believe how the car was so good. They still
haven't caught up in many ways.

*Edit:

Here is more about the history of the car itself:
[http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/lexus-
ls400/](http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/lexus-ls400/)

~~~
dsr_
OT: the letters PR have a primary association with Public Relations, i.e.
people who are paid to spin the truth on the behalf of others. I see from your
profile that those are your real-life initials... but it's not a great first
impression. You might want to open an account as Pablo-asimuv, or, really,
anything else.

(I checked because this comment sounded an awful lot like a PR exercise for
Lexus.)

~~~
asimuvPR
I thought about it when creating the account, but decided to go with it. Since
everything I post represents ASIMUV as well its kind of a weird PR kind of
thing too... I do appreciate you making the check. HN is a very important
community for me and following its rules is crucial.

The post does sound like a PR exercise for Lexus, but do a quick web search
and you will be impressed with how good the Lexus was back then. They still
are great cars. I have never nor do I have any future projects or connections
with Toyota/Lexus or any of its affiliates. I just think they build good
stuff. :)

------
mc32
Good for Ford. They'd be negligent to not try their hardest to get some
competitive advantage any above board way possible. I don't see what the fuss
is about. OMG AMD buys Intel chips and checks them out!!! Sometimes they pay
over market price.

------
EA
Seems like a good deal for Ford. I know some entities that would pay millions
to get a hold of a rival entity's competitive materiel.

~~~
IE6
Yeah - this type of stuff is what I would expect Ford to be doing. It might be
different if they bought a gasoline Subaru but this is a Tesla which is a
brand that is supposed to be revolutionizing the automotive market. If they
paid twice or three times the price to get something as early as possible I
still wouldn't be surprised.

------
alexc05
How much did the engineers who took it apart cost?

Strikes me that a reasonable sized team would cost that per-day.

------
ck2
Everyone thinks it is for R&D ?

What if it is to try to find patents they can sue over?

------
shogun21
Tesla already makes all its patents public.

~~~
reitanqild
As well as licensing them to competitors I think.

Making them public is part of patenting anythong I think.

------
dajohnson89
Why not poach an engineer?

~~~
brianwawok
Legally - you can do some things you figure out in reverse engineering that
you could not do if you had the engineer.

Plus, does 1 engineer really know all parts of the Tesla? Can he tell you
about the types of lugs used on the wheels? Can he also tell you about the
type of glass used in the windows, or the type of leather used in the seats?
If cars are anything like software, each engineer knows like 5% of the total
product..

~~~
findthewords
Musk surely does...

~~~
mikeash
There's no way any one person understands every aspect of a car that takes
hundreds or thousands of people years to develop.

~~~
varjag
Most students are able to understand calculus without reproducing the work of
Abel, Cauchy or Lagrange..

~~~
mikeash
Are you trying to say that there is _no_ human endeavor which cannot fit
within a single person's mind, or is there some relationship between calculus
and a car here?

~~~
varjag
I'm saying that understanding things thought up and formulated by others is
orders of magnitude easier than doing them from scratch. This simple property
gets most of us through the schools and to the workplaces.

It is certainly possible to fully understand a car down to minute detail. It's
even easier if you get briefed on design decisions.

~~~
mikeash
Do you think it's possible to, say, understand the entire Linux kernel?
Because these cars have that, and other kernels besides, just as one example
of complexity.

Sure, a single human can have a decent understanding of everything in it, but
not down to the deep details. There just isn't enough time to learn all of
that.

~~~
varjag
Since the topic here is the teardown, thought we were discussing the
mechanical side of it. As of the Linux kernel there are actually a few people
who have very, very thorough understanding of near every design aspect there,
even if they didn't memorize every line of code. Linus Torvalds is certainly
one.

That's excessive for automotive software, however; you do some device drivers
here and there but ain't going to modify the memory allocator or process
scheduler. How much detail Musk keeps on to here is open to speculation. On my
part, I can say the industrial products I developed I understand really well.
Starting from where and why ejector pins on diecasting molds go, the
particular conductor plate used for spot welding, wire gage in the cable
bundles, through kernel drivers, FPGA programming, EMC compliance issues in
PCB layout to how many units fit on a euro pallet.. and am no Elon Musk. Don't
sell your ability short.

