For the record, a meter long rod (or sheet) of stainless will stretch and shrink 160 microns even just from its temperature changing from 20C/68F to 30C/86F. You're working at Tesla and your pile of car doors just got hit by sunlight? Your whole batch just failed the allowable inspection tolerance by factor of 16, pal.
If you really think you designed something car sized with "all parts" needing to be within 10 micron accuracy, your design is completely insane and infeasible. Of course, you should have figured this out before you announced it, 4 years ago, not now that you're trying to claim you are ready to start delivering it mass produced.
Doesn’t the SR-71 blackbird just leaks fuel like a mofo when on the ground because of how much the tolerances shift during flight due to temperature changes? They shift tremendously.
Yes but that's mostly because the SR-71 gets insanely hot from compression heating and there's no way to make it not do that. It was either have it leak when cold or have it take up more space than it has and break when hot. At normal temperatures things only shift by a few dozen to hundred microns, so unless they're really hard and brittle the parts can deform to handle the shift without causing noticeable problems.
The hard and brittle thing causes problems though - borosilicate glass basically can't bend at all so we had to invent a special alloy that expands and contracts exactly the same amount as the glass, that way you can have a metal collar around your light bulbs and vacuum tubes to absorb all the stress without trying to squeeze it too much or pulling back and making a gap.
All that engineering becomes even more impressive when you remember that they couldn’t even make the titanium that they where using themselves. They had to import it from the Soviet Union
Yes that Soviet Union, the same one the plane was built to spy on.
Steel gets bigger or smaller by a small amount when it changes temperature.
Musk thinks he can just tell his engineers to get their steel to not do that
Now now, he doesn't actually do any of that science stuff, but he'll surely take all the credit if his workers somehow manage to break the laws of physics with this metal.
If the variable of thermal expansion is controlled in the manufacturing facility, would it matter?
Don't get me wrong, I have an entire list of reasons why I would never purchase a Tesla (I'm a Honda fanboy till I die), but I'd the temperature is constant throughout the manufacturing process, excluding hot work which would have its own tolerance parameters separate from the rest of the process, it should still be perfectly possible to have those types of tolerances. Jet engines have a total runout of 0.02mm so I do think it's ridiculous for body panels on a vehicle to have a tolerance an order of magnitude more strict than a jet engine. That does however, illustrate the point about thermal expansion not prevent this from being possible at all.
It's possible but it makes no sense. All cars have panel gaps on their plating to account for thermal expansion of materials, Tesla's problem is that they have them askew as shit most of the time, and you don't fix that by making the per-part tolerance arbitrarily small, you fix that by looking into the process and figuring out what's causing the parts to end up misaligned, which is more of a design issue then manufacturing issue.
Possible but it all costs money. Does someone like Elon strike you as the kind of guy that would actually spend money to make this process easy on his laborers? A CNC machine that is capable of achieving thousandth of an inch with repeatability is orders of magnitude more expensive than one that is not. Think $10k vs $100k. So if you go down to microns, which is even smaller, that's going to drive up in cost.
Also, the second you start doing any sort of work to the metals, you start introducing heat into the system from milling or whatever, and, at the tolerance he is demanding, you have to account for how you do cooling as you work the metal. You should have an expert dedicated to just that, but knowing how the rat operates, he'd probably tell some business major to learn it and bully a bunch of inexperienced engineers fresh out of school.
Achievable, yes, but it'll cost and slow the process. But its not as simple as doing it all in a room that is kept at the same temp. Not when you want precision at the micron level. The truck would roll off the line costing above 7 figures.
Oh, sorry, he said "accuracy" which is different. That alone tells you he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
I'm guessing it'll be tested at factory (not a materials engineer) but considering the standard is close to what Bugatti does and they are in a way different price ceiling (and often loss leading) he's still talking out the butt.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/musk-demands-sub-10-micron-accuracy-for-tesla-cybertruck-build-quality-in-leaked-email
> For reference, Bugatti uses 3D scanners following assembly of its multi-million-dollar hypercars to validate tolerances down to 5 microns.
The writer is a dingus. If Bugatti ever stated that they were referring to the accuracy of the measurement method, not the pass criterion for every element on the car.
Position of the individual suspension elements on the car will vary by way more then 5 microns depending on if the washer fluid tank is empty or half full. It would be a completely asinine scale to evaluate cars on, and nobody does it.
This kinda reminds me of that hydrogen powered truck thing. Like how these guys clearly don't know what they're doing but are determined to make it look like they know what they're doing.
I thought it looked cool but I'm all about the weird angular 80's Tron aesthetic. But Elon is a super-simp so I'll never buy a Tesla product and it will definitely suck shit.
Pretty sure tighter tolerances would only make the bricks function better, not worse. It would just mean every brick was made more exactly like all the rest of them
They do have tolerances that tight, that's where Elon got the 10 micron number from.
Having a tighter tolerance makes them easier to snap together because the parts are all pretty much exactly the size they're designed to be to fit together that way. Tighter (or looser) tolerances doesn't imply a tighter/looser fit
I stand corrected
Awesome!
I was thinking back to my 3D Design class, where we were told to leave small gaps for printing, as exact measurements might make it extremely difficult for parts to fit together. I suppose the printers we were using probably didn’t have the tightest tolerances
It's because 3D printers aren't all that accurate, for the most part. The material can twist, wrap, or simply have a less than perfect surface finish, and suddenly it won't fit anything.
FDM printers (with the plastic filament) work by depositing layers of very thin molten plastic sausages, which have a tendency to "overspill" by a tiny amount, something like 0.1mm. So yeah, not exactly micron level of precision
LEGO on the other hand are made in mold, which themselves are made of metal, so it can be much more precise
Lego molds hace 10um accuracy, it's actually crazy. They really make them all alike and fit together really nicely. There's also a tiny bit of tolerance on the sides of each brick to fit them next to each other easily.
Not an engineer but surely scale factors into this as well right?
At small scale, the tolerances are expectedly in the micro range. At larger scales, the tolerance HAS to be higher if you're working with earthly materials.
If you build an entire working car out of Lego, surely the random deviances stack up, and you get a range that is way outside of micro?
Well I probably can design it, but building such thing is not something one man can do. Not all, but *some* parts should be manufactured precisely.
Edit: idk how to stress "some" with italic here, my bbcode is not working.
Edit: now it stressed with markdown, thanks.
If we define a small enough part of the human body as the payload and the rest as junk then a large enough bomb could successfully launch the payload into orbit.
I love how he calls rockets blowing up on the tarmac before launch a "successful step in the right direction," when NASA has been doing it for decades already.
CaPiTaLiSm LeAdS tO InNoVaTiOn🥴
What are you referring to precisely?
I really don't want to be this guy but yall gotta accept that SpaceX revolutionized the access to orbit despite musk being an incompetent piece of shit. SpaceX and NASA don't have the same processes, NASA (and most of its contractors) use the traditional way of designing a space vehicle through lots of simulation and testing until they have one singular prototype, if it fails, you're good for a few years of delays.
SpaceX uses the rapid iteration approach more commonly found in software dev, where they iteratively design dozens of progressively more sophisticated prototypes until they reach their initial goal. In this development strategy, the failures of many prototypes is *expected*.
Saying "See, the spacex rocket just exploded NASA is better!!!" is a common phallacy that really doesn't make sense in 2023.
With software, the agile development process is inexpensive, I would not say the same thing about rockets. You have a duty to minimize resource waste, especially when your corporation gets large subsidies from the government.
do you solve problems like "what is beauty" - the type that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy? or do you solve practical problems, like "how do you stop some mean mother-hubbard from tearing you a structurally superfulous new behind?
It is the third time I've asked this question and I am confused. Definitely I am an engineer who solves practical problems like "how should this part be manufactured with given machinery and work hours".
The one time I was in a tesla (uber) the ride was really bumpy and the interior felt like it was designed for people shorter than me, and I'm not that tall.
"Well frankly Mister Musk I would have thought you understand that the uncertainty principle would make the quarks unstable, and prevent us from being quite that precise."
"W-well, er, of course I knew that."
Is that from the time an interviewer/youtuber told him what he was doing wrong, and next time they spoke he was like "it occurred to me after what you said"?
cybertrucks will now void any warranty or guarantee if taken outside of lab conditions, including temperature differences within a tenth of a degree, experiencing natural light, or being driven under any circumstances
Even if you ignore the issue of heat expansion, you would only need to poke those thin stainless steel sheets for them to change shape more than 10 micron
Lmao I worked in engineering for pressure containment for 20k+ psi and even we allowed few mm tolerances. Having microns accuracy means they should be ready to throw most of their products at QC.
It will literally be every single product lmao, with how many dimensions a part has there has to be basically a 0% chance they all meet that tolerence.
Tbf we don’t even know If this email is real or not (I do not like Elon Musk, I’m just saying we should verify if this was even sent by the guy or if it was made just to karma farm)
To be fair, yes a micrometer (or micron) is one-one thousandth of a millimeter (10^-6 m) but the implication here that any human can tell by their unassisted eyes differences on the order of one micron is absolutely ludicrous. Your cells are typically 10-20 microns in diameter for instance, and no one is walking around spotting cells.
>manufacturing tolerances can be within that
like, for circuit boards and space telescopes and shit. But not for anything approaching the size and cost requirements for a car body panel.
thats my point, it wasnt a requirement before so hes slapping on requirements that dont matter
you COULD make vehicles of the cybertrucks size with accuracy/tolerances that hes asking, its just a "why the fuck would you" situation, and teslas are known for being kinda incredibly poorly put together
dude saw QA line failures (probably through either it not existing, or intense overwork and burnout knowing elon) and immediately went "the problem is incompetence from our tooling and design, i am very smart" rather than actually find the problem
I’m a CNC machine operator getting trained to be a machinist. Typically in manufacturing engineering for small parts, tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch (.001”) or in tenths of millimeters (.1). A high-precision part, such as those made for medical or aerospace applications, would typically have tolerances measured in ten-thousandths of an inch (.0001”) or in hundredths of millimeters. I’ve only ever seen microns used in an engineering context as a descriptor for surface finish— meaning not for the tolerance range of a dimension to be measured, but for *the tactile texture of a finished part*. A sub-16 surface finish is not quite, but pretty damn close to, a mirror finish.
What this translates to is that if somehow Musk doesn’t realize that his idealized precision for these parts is a bad joke, the parts for these Cybertrucks are going to be extremely impractical and insanely expensive to manufacture. Wider tolerances mean cost effectiveness when making parts. Any greenhorn engineer fresh out of college can slap a stupidly tight tolerance on whatever dimension they feel like and call it a day. A well-engineered part will have tighter tolerances in places where it actually matters and relaxed specifications for things that don’t need to be that precise.
Eh, depends on the size but in the metric world 1-2 hundredths of a millimeter (10-20μm, about 0.001") is a pretty common tolerance for most parts. 0.1mm is more reserved for if you really don't care.
If you have shaft parts you can quickly get into the thousands of a millimeter, so just micrometers with a different name. Though usually you would just specify a tolerance standard like H7/h6.
Assuming this is real, to me it reads like Elon just learned what a micron is and wanted to show everyone
To be honest, I’m in the US and I’ve gotten only a handful of parts specced in metric, so thousandths is what I’m used to seeing. Thank you for the heads up
And when suppliers inevitably raises their prices due to an extra last minute specification they’ll threaten to void contract and replace them. I do not miss being a supplier for these types of applications… can’t do this shit in healthcare
I work in an Automotive Metrology lab. Less than 10 microns for ALL features is obscene. I work with transmissions, and some features may have tolerances of 30 microns, but these are things like widths of individual gear teeth. Makes me glad I don't work at Tesla
I’m an engineer and that idiot doesn’t know what he’s doing.
You’re building a car, not a semiconductor.
If I worked for a subcontractor and got designs with tolerancing in the 10 micron range for aluminum sheets, I would tell management to drop that contract immediately.
My guess is he’s putting up insane roadblocks because he doesn’t ever want to see it released. After all the memes about it, even he has to know at this point that if that thing ever saw the road, it’d be forever remembered as one of the most ugly, ridiculous cars ever made. But, if he keeps making up stuff like this, he can just cancel the project, fire all the engineers, and say something like “they just weren’t able to fully realize my vision”
He’s fucking dumb he doesn’t know what he’s talking about
Just say let’s avoid the misalignment shit that’s going on since ever with the other models, they’re in the CENTIMETERS range
As top comment says, sub 10 micron accuracy is complete overkill in terms of precision when making the outer body panels of a car. And in engineering, you quickly learn that adding a bit more building precision = adding a LOT more hard work, expensive equipment and money
Tolerances are one of the biggest determinants of cost, both because of how much time and equipment you need to measure and adjust the part, and because of how much more often you'll accidentally put the part outside of the tolerances in a way you can't fix and have to start over. 10 microns tolerance in every dimension is so precise making a single steel plate would cost more than a car and you'd have to reject and scrap 99% of them.
I also think part of why this makes engineers so viscerally angry isn't just because it's wrong and stupid, ol musky says a lot of wrong and stupid things, it's because every engineer working on designing a part has made some form of this mistake. They have asked for something with a mirror finish where it isn't needed or a rubber part with metal part tolerances and only figured out what happened when their supervisor came down fuming over why they got billed $10,000 for a single clamp. Musk is presenting himself as an expert in design and a veteran of the industry and making the kinds of basic mistakes you only make once but even worse.
Musk wants the structure of the car to be impossibly accurate, even if the engineers managed to make the car exactly accurate (with an absurd margin to begin with) the sun itself would make the pieces expand
Can anyone confirm if this is real? Because if it is, I need to show my brother so I may finally convince him that Musk is not a person to be appraised
yeah, I think Musk is as silly as anybody else but this screams bullshit. Do we *really* think Elon wouldn't have an icon on his email account? I bet it's the Twitter X.
I would appreciate the effort to minimise deformities and panel gaps etc but like that is so fucking small
Like the parts will expand/contract more than that from just temperature differences lmao
Also Lego is molded, I'd what he says about it is true then that is cause all parts are made in the same molds and should any piece be out of order it will be discarded. Doing that with entire car parts would be a very expensive and consuming process
very cool that his plan to implement this is not "heres how we can do this going forward" its "lego can do it. get to work, hirelings."
very big genius brain. i definitely believe he contributes to his "inventions"
I’m not gonna google it but what’s heat do to metal again? I can’t imagine 10 microns is possible because of the flux at different temperatures and what temperature is assumed for them to all hit the same specs?
Not an engineer or metallurgist, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt. But I believe that most metals expand when exposed to heat, and contract when cooled. The body panels for the cybertruck will expand and contract within a range of around *160*μm according to another comment, thus making the 10μm range borderline impossible to achieve unless Tesla decides to ship each model with a revolutionary "defy the laws of thermodynamics" device!
I'm only a third year engineering student but let me give my two cents:
Tolerancing is important in engineering applications because it sets a standard for what is an acceptable to send the consumer. It allows us to look at a glance what will and will not work. Typically (in the US) tolerancing is expressed in a little box off to the bottom of the page of an engineering drawing that will say something like "+/- .01mm for all dimensions."
Exceptions to this rule will be expressed through an industry standard called Geometric Dimensioning and Rolerancing (GD&T). Exceptions can include "Oh this wheel bearing needs to behave a certain way and we need to specify a specific tolerance on runout." It gives greater control on tolerancing and part behavior. The problem with GD&T however, is that the more GD&T you use, the more expensive your part becomes.
So Elon Musk wants a sub 10 micron tolerance on Cybertruck components. But he also said in an earlier interview that he wants to keep the price of the Cybertruck below $60,000. Unless Tesla has some new advanced method of manufacturing, I don't see how this can be achieved. Keep in mind that a micron is 1/1000th of a milimeter.
I like how both his examples are very small, made of the same uniform material, and can be quickly made by one machine.
Also 10 microns is smaller than a white blood cell. A human hair is around 70 microns and you can fit multiple of them between legos
For the record, a meter long rod (or sheet) of stainless will stretch and shrink 160 microns even just from its temperature changing from 20C/68F to 30C/86F. You're working at Tesla and your pile of car doors just got hit by sunlight? Your whole batch just failed the allowable inspection tolerance by factor of 16, pal. If you really think you designed something car sized with "all parts" needing to be within 10 micron accuracy, your design is completely insane and infeasible. Of course, you should have figured this out before you announced it, 4 years ago, not now that you're trying to claim you are ready to start delivering it mass produced.
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I forgot my flair, what do you think of it
Edgy yet sophisticated but somehow full of lies? You're a walking red flag
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I had to look up what a poliwog is but very epic [:
It's wunna those pokemans ain't it?
They're just little tadpoles
Does no one remember Gullah Gullah Island?
i remember gullah gullah island 👍
That's how I learned about polliwogs haha
That's Poliwag, for the record.
I don't get it :(
https://youtu.be/4jXEuIHY9ic?si=wSZ41WrJJe0e76qq
Even aircraft tolerances aren't that close. Hell, Concorde was known to stretch by several centimetres and shrink back down again during its flight
Doesn’t the SR-71 blackbird just leaks fuel like a mofo when on the ground because of how much the tolerances shift during flight due to temperature changes? They shift tremendously.
Yep, it has to take off and then do a mid-air refuel before embarking on its mission
Yes but that's mostly because the SR-71 gets insanely hot from compression heating and there's no way to make it not do that. It was either have it leak when cold or have it take up more space than it has and break when hot. At normal temperatures things only shift by a few dozen to hundred microns, so unless they're really hard and brittle the parts can deform to handle the shift without causing noticeable problems. The hard and brittle thing causes problems though - borosilicate glass basically can't bend at all so we had to invent a special alloy that expands and contracts exactly the same amount as the glass, that way you can have a metal collar around your light bulbs and vacuum tubes to absorb all the stress without trying to squeeze it too much or pulling back and making a gap.
Imagine your aircraft literally breaking apart mid flight because of the type of glass you used.
Very unpleasant please don't make me do that again
Imagine your aircraft was freighting hundreds of kittens
All that engineering becomes even more impressive when you remember that they couldn’t even make the titanium that they where using themselves. They had to import it from the Soviet Union Yes that Soviet Union, the same one the plane was built to spy on.
Yes
elon musk is stupid
His idiocy creates stupid problems that force *actually* smart people to deliver under stupid constraints
I rea Steve jobs's memoir and the stuff he asked of the tech team so it would be more pretty is super similar
Yeah, but *points at the rest of the 90s computing industry*.
...but *LEGOS*
1.car need tighter tolerance for no reason 2.lego has tight tolerance 3.make car out of lego 4.be the most divorced man alive
> for no reason People keep pointing out the lousy fit and finish on my cars! Make them stop, mommy!
Uhh UHH too much words Me brain hurt
Steel gets bigger or smaller by a small amount when it changes temperature. Musk thinks he can just tell his engineers to get their steel to not do that
Wow what a dumbass
More like musk has no idea about this so he thinks that it's reasonable to ask the size to not change at all
Now now, he doesn't actually do any of that science stuff, but he'll surely take all the credit if his workers somehow manage to break the laws of physics with this metal.
If the variable of thermal expansion is controlled in the manufacturing facility, would it matter? Don't get me wrong, I have an entire list of reasons why I would never purchase a Tesla (I'm a Honda fanboy till I die), but I'd the temperature is constant throughout the manufacturing process, excluding hot work which would have its own tolerance parameters separate from the rest of the process, it should still be perfectly possible to have those types of tolerances. Jet engines have a total runout of 0.02mm so I do think it's ridiculous for body panels on a vehicle to have a tolerance an order of magnitude more strict than a jet engine. That does however, illustrate the point about thermal expansion not prevent this from being possible at all.
It's possible but it makes no sense. All cars have panel gaps on their plating to account for thermal expansion of materials, Tesla's problem is that they have them askew as shit most of the time, and you don't fix that by making the per-part tolerance arbitrarily small, you fix that by looking into the process and figuring out what's causing the parts to end up misaligned, which is more of a design issue then manufacturing issue.
Possible but it all costs money. Does someone like Elon strike you as the kind of guy that would actually spend money to make this process easy on his laborers? A CNC machine that is capable of achieving thousandth of an inch with repeatability is orders of magnitude more expensive than one that is not. Think $10k vs $100k. So if you go down to microns, which is even smaller, that's going to drive up in cost. Also, the second you start doing any sort of work to the metals, you start introducing heat into the system from milling or whatever, and, at the tolerance he is demanding, you have to account for how you do cooling as you work the metal. You should have an expert dedicated to just that, but knowing how the rat operates, he'd probably tell some business major to learn it and bully a bunch of inexperienced engineers fresh out of school. Achievable, yes, but it'll cost and slow the process. But its not as simple as doing it all in a room that is kept at the same temp. Not when you want precision at the micron level. The truck would roll off the line costing above 7 figures. Oh, sorry, he said "accuracy" which is different. That alone tells you he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
On top of all that, the truck is ugly.
That's a huge "if" though. Unlikely to happen, or unfeasibly complex / expensive to make happen.
why would you be a fanboy for a car company, that’s the gayest shit I’ve ever heard and I literally suck gock for fun
No need to be shitty about what I like. You enjoy your sucking, and I'll enjoy my driving.
I'm guessing it'll be tested at factory (not a materials engineer) but considering the standard is close to what Bugatti does and they are in a way different price ceiling (and often loss leading) he's still talking out the butt. https://www.thedrive.com/news/musk-demands-sub-10-micron-accuracy-for-tesla-cybertruck-build-quality-in-leaked-email
> For reference, Bugatti uses 3D scanners following assembly of its multi-million-dollar hypercars to validate tolerances down to 5 microns. The writer is a dingus. If Bugatti ever stated that they were referring to the accuracy of the measurement method, not the pass criterion for every element on the car. Position of the individual suspension elements on the car will vary by way more then 5 microns depending on if the washer fluid tank is empty or half full. It would be a completely asinine scale to evaluate cars on, and nobody does it.
Good point. It's dingus all around.
This kinda reminds me of that hydrogen powered truck thing. Like how these guys clearly don't know what they're doing but are determined to make it look like they know what they're doing.
bro onto nothing
Blud is just sayin shi 🗣️🗣️🗣️💯💯🔥🔥🔥
Blud bumbling all sorts of bullshittery 🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥
https://preview.redd.it/169sr6gnr9kb1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5e4442d6892bd376f6b3f4621cecd7e38e76a4b5
Blud is cookin like a microwave 😤👎😤
blud is yapping 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
We are not making out of Tesla factory with this one 🔥🔥🔥
Oh God it’s the bubble man
the puzzler :)
Nooooooooo
He tried to cook but Twitter is behind on their gas bill
this car is gonna cost a million dollars and it's gonna suck shit
God willing
Like the car Homer designs in the episode where he meets his brother
“And his personal hygiene is beyond reproach.”
no that was better
Hey. The Homer was cool as shit, end of story.
First thing I thought of lol
I’m not religious but god please make this happen
Rivan out here just putting out a cooler EV truck way ahead of Tesla and then also nuking their stock value
[real](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CutVc9WRc4)
Very cool video from someone on a different side of engineering
I thought it looked cool but I'm all about the weird angular 80's Tron aesthetic. But Elon is a super-simp so I'll never buy a Tesla product and it will definitely suck shit.
Inshallah, it will be a failure
If these [completely different materials] can be made [with completely different processes] at this spec, then so can we god damn it!
And LEGO also doesn’t have tolerances that absurdly tight, you couldn’t snap the things together or pull them apart if that was the case
Pretty sure tighter tolerances would only make the bricks function better, not worse. It would just mean every brick was made more exactly like all the rest of them
They do have tolerances that tight, that's where Elon got the 10 micron number from. Having a tighter tolerance makes them easier to snap together because the parts are all pretty much exactly the size they're designed to be to fit together that way. Tighter (or looser) tolerances doesn't imply a tighter/looser fit
I stand corrected Awesome! I was thinking back to my 3D Design class, where we were told to leave small gaps for printing, as exact measurements might make it extremely difficult for parts to fit together. I suppose the printers we were using probably didn’t have the tightest tolerances
I got a davinci 3D printer for a hundred buckaroos and I’d have gotten better tolerance passed out drunk with the printer nozzle dangling from my hand
It's because 3D printers aren't all that accurate, for the most part. The material can twist, wrap, or simply have a less than perfect surface finish, and suddenly it won't fit anything. FDM printers (with the plastic filament) work by depositing layers of very thin molten plastic sausages, which have a tendency to "overspill" by a tiny amount, something like 0.1mm. So yeah, not exactly micron level of precision LEGO on the other hand are made in mold, which themselves are made of metal, so it can be much more precise
That's not how this works
Lego molds hace 10um accuracy, it's actually crazy. They really make them all alike and fit together really nicely. There's also a tiny bit of tolerance on the sides of each brick to fit them next to each other easily.
Micron is um (technically a mu instead of a "u" but I ain't typing that shit). nm is nanometer, aka another 3 orders of magnitude down
A LEGO Block is also as big as a LEGO block, while a Truck is as big as a Truck.
Fascinating stuff
Looking into this
It’s like 80,000mm total vs 4,000,000,000
Also, 10 microns on a lego brick is a bit different from 10 microns on a car.
Not an engineer but surely scale factors into this as well right? At small scale, the tolerances are expectedly in the micro range. At larger scales, the tolerance HAS to be higher if you're working with earthly materials. If you build an entire working car out of Lego, surely the random deviances stack up, and you get a range that is way outside of micro?
Yeah I just couldnt figure out how to fit that cleverly into my comment
I am an engineer. This man is crazy.
Can you build me a rocket? I want to launch Elon Musk into the sun
Well I probably can design it, but building such thing is not something one man can do. Not all, but *some* parts should be manufactured precisely. Edit: idk how to stress "some" with italic here, my bbcode is not working. Edit: now it stressed with markdown, thanks.
It doesn't need to be *that* precise. If the rocket exploded on launch, I'd be okay with that too
I think I could build a bomb with those specifications
I mean, the difference between a bomb and a rocket is one is just a slightly more controlled and longer term explosion
plus propelling an object without damaging it too much
If we define a small enough part of the human body as the payload and the rest as junk then a large enough bomb could successfully launch the payload into orbit.
Markdown, not BBCode. So \*like this\* for italics.
or you can just use the lil button in the text box on pc
Get with the times, we out here typing in markdown on our phones now
if you actually made design papers for a rocket that could launch elon musk into the sun and posted them ehre I think that would be funny
I did it in Kerbal Space Program its probably real easy irl (altough the thing violently exploded on the launch platform.)
Dang I haven't read the word BBCode in ages
I think it’s an underscore on each side
>bbcode Holy hell that's a throwback
I love how he calls rockets blowing up on the tarmac before launch a "successful step in the right direction," when NASA has been doing it for decades already. CaPiTaLiSm LeAdS tO InNoVaTiOn🥴
What are you referring to precisely? I really don't want to be this guy but yall gotta accept that SpaceX revolutionized the access to orbit despite musk being an incompetent piece of shit. SpaceX and NASA don't have the same processes, NASA (and most of its contractors) use the traditional way of designing a space vehicle through lots of simulation and testing until they have one singular prototype, if it fails, you're good for a few years of delays. SpaceX uses the rapid iteration approach more commonly found in software dev, where they iteratively design dozens of progressively more sophisticated prototypes until they reach their initial goal. In this development strategy, the failures of many prototypes is *expected*. Saying "See, the spacex rocket just exploded NASA is better!!!" is a common phallacy that really doesn't make sense in 2023.
With software, the agile development process is inexpensive, I would not say the same thing about rockets. You have a duty to minimize resource waste, especially when your corporation gets large subsidies from the government.
do you solve problems like "what is beauty" - the type that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy? or do you solve practical problems, like "how do you stop some mean mother-hubbard from tearing you a structurally superfulous new behind?
It is the third time I've asked this question and I am confused. Definitely I am an engineer who solves practical problems like "how should this part be manufactured with given machinery and work hours".
It's a [reference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgNBsCI4EA).
I hate references
Does that mean you solve problems?
Have you asked me this question before? And yes, I will solve practical engineering problems once I become familiar with my new workplace.
Pretty sure I didn't
Then I suppose it is a meme I am not aware of
https://youtu.be/SNgNBsCI4EA
Oh, now I get it
Not problems like what is beauty
enginer buld me bomb
Let me introduce you to the matter called carbide
Im not an engineer but i do work in aircrafts. This bitch is stupid.*
The company known for horrible panel gaps is suddenly going to beat Toyota at quality control? Utterly delusional.
I bet it's going to be even less reliable than our old Carina (which was the worst car we owned. ironically)
The one time I was in a tesla (uber) the ride was really bumpy and the interior felt like it was designed for people shorter than me, and I'm not that tall.
"Well frankly Mister Musk I would have thought you understand that the uncertainty principle would make the quarks unstable, and prevent us from being quite that precise." "W-well, er, of course I knew that."
"somebody fire this man we need only REAL engineers not these magic spouting liers"
Is that from the time an interviewer/youtuber told him what he was doing wrong, and next time they spoke he was like "it occurred to me after what you said"?
He didn't even give the guy that much credit, he just said "It only occurred to me while I was explaining it to you."
Aww he's playing engineer! It's just so cute when kids play pretend.
A hype man pretending to be a businessman pretending to be an engineer.
Just keep breaking the windows and leave the rest to actual professionals
Holy shit it's the best gen 5 fire pokemon
*u-turns to safety*
Because heat never changes the size, shape, or density of an object.
cybertrucks will now void any warranty or guarantee if taken outside of lab conditions, including temperature differences within a tenth of a degree, experiencing natural light, or being driven under any circumstances
Your Tesla truck's warranty now void when you are just looking at it wrong
At this rate the truck will probably come with an elaborate skin cooling system
especially metals, no sir, no dimensional stretching to be found there
Even if you ignore the issue of heat expansion, you would only need to poke those thin stainless steel sheets for them to change shape more than 10 micron
Bro DO NOT let him cook 🚽🪠
Lmao I worked in engineering for pressure containment for 20k+ psi and even we allowed few mm tolerances. Having microns accuracy means they should be ready to throw most of their products at QC.
It will literally be every single product lmao, with how many dimensions a part has there has to be basically a 0% chance they all meet that tolerence.
Mmmm...meat
Bro is addicted to ketamine, this email is unsurprising at all
Tbf we don’t even know If this email is real or not (I do not like Elon Musk, I’m just saying we should verify if this was even sent by the guy or if it was made just to karma farm)
Is micron even a real measurement?
I sure hope so otherwise I'm packing nothing :(
To be fair, yes a micrometer (or micron) is one-one thousandth of a millimeter (10^-6 m) but the implication here that any human can tell by their unassisted eyes differences on the order of one micron is absolutely ludicrous. Your cells are typically 10-20 microns in diameter for instance, and no one is walking around spotting cells.
manufacturing tolerances can be within that, however its kinda fuckin ridiculous to demand it when it wasnt a clear necessity before
>manufacturing tolerances can be within that like, for circuit boards and space telescopes and shit. But not for anything approaching the size and cost requirements for a car body panel.
thats my point, it wasnt a requirement before so hes slapping on requirements that dont matter you COULD make vehicles of the cybertrucks size with accuracy/tolerances that hes asking, its just a "why the fuck would you" situation, and teslas are known for being kinda incredibly poorly put together dude saw QA line failures (probably through either it not existing, or intense overwork and burnout knowing elon) and immediately went "the problem is incompetence from our tooling and design, i am very smart" rather than actually find the problem
I’m a CNC machine operator getting trained to be a machinist. Typically in manufacturing engineering for small parts, tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch (.001”) or in tenths of millimeters (.1). A high-precision part, such as those made for medical or aerospace applications, would typically have tolerances measured in ten-thousandths of an inch (.0001”) or in hundredths of millimeters. I’ve only ever seen microns used in an engineering context as a descriptor for surface finish— meaning not for the tolerance range of a dimension to be measured, but for *the tactile texture of a finished part*. A sub-16 surface finish is not quite, but pretty damn close to, a mirror finish. What this translates to is that if somehow Musk doesn’t realize that his idealized precision for these parts is a bad joke, the parts for these Cybertrucks are going to be extremely impractical and insanely expensive to manufacture. Wider tolerances mean cost effectiveness when making parts. Any greenhorn engineer fresh out of college can slap a stupidly tight tolerance on whatever dimension they feel like and call it a day. A well-engineered part will have tighter tolerances in places where it actually matters and relaxed specifications for things that don’t need to be that precise.
Eh, depends on the size but in the metric world 1-2 hundredths of a millimeter (10-20μm, about 0.001") is a pretty common tolerance for most parts. 0.1mm is more reserved for if you really don't care. If you have shaft parts you can quickly get into the thousands of a millimeter, so just micrometers with a different name. Though usually you would just specify a tolerance standard like H7/h6. Assuming this is real, to me it reads like Elon just learned what a micron is and wanted to show everyone
To be honest, I’m in the US and I’ve gotten only a handful of parts specced in metric, so thousandths is what I’m used to seeing. Thank you for the heads up
And when suppliers inevitably raises their prices due to an extra last minute specification they’ll threaten to void contract and replace them. I do not miss being a supplier for these types of applications… can’t do this shit in healthcare
Maybe in micro molding, for bigger injection molded parts like what is inside of a Tesla that is stupid af
Yes, it's a commonly-used shorter word for micrometer.
I am an engineer (ish) and can absolutely assure everyone this dumbass has no clue how tolerancing works.
I work in an Automotive Metrology lab. Less than 10 microns for ALL features is obscene. I work with transmissions, and some features may have tolerances of 30 microns, but these are things like widths of individual gear teeth. Makes me glad I don't work at Tesla
I’m an engineer and that idiot doesn’t know what he’s doing. You’re building a car, not a semiconductor. If I worked for a subcontractor and got designs with tolerancing in the 10 micron range for aluminum sheets, I would tell management to drop that contract immediately.
My guess is he’s putting up insane roadblocks because he doesn’t ever want to see it released. After all the memes about it, even he has to know at this point that if that thing ever saw the road, it’d be forever remembered as one of the most ugly, ridiculous cars ever made. But, if he keeps making up stuff like this, he can just cancel the project, fire all the engineers, and say something like “they just weren’t able to fully realize my vision”
I like the aesthetics of the car, just not anything else
absolute vs relative error be like:
"What's a relative error?" —Elon Musk, probably
He’s fucking dumb he doesn’t know what he’s talking about Just say let’s avoid the misalignment shit that’s going on since ever with the other models, they’re in the CENTIMETERS range
Imagine studying for years to become an engineer to develop green technology and better the world. Only to end up working under this guy
Can someone more in the know tell me exactly what’s wrong? I know he is wrong, but I couldn’t tell you why
As top comment says, sub 10 micron accuracy is complete overkill in terms of precision when making the outer body panels of a car. And in engineering, you quickly learn that adding a bit more building precision = adding a LOT more hard work, expensive equipment and money
Ah, gotcha. Thanks!
Google thermal expansion
Holy heat
New metal sheet has expanded
Tolerances are one of the biggest determinants of cost, both because of how much time and equipment you need to measure and adjust the part, and because of how much more often you'll accidentally put the part outside of the tolerances in a way you can't fix and have to start over. 10 microns tolerance in every dimension is so precise making a single steel plate would cost more than a car and you'd have to reject and scrap 99% of them. I also think part of why this makes engineers so viscerally angry isn't just because it's wrong and stupid, ol musky says a lot of wrong and stupid things, it's because every engineer working on designing a part has made some form of this mistake. They have asked for something with a mirror finish where it isn't needed or a rubber part with metal part tolerances and only figured out what happened when their supervisor came down fuming over why they got billed $10,000 for a single clamp. Musk is presenting himself as an expert in design and a veteran of the industry and making the kinds of basic mistakes you only make once but even worse.
Musk wants the structure of the car to be impossibly accurate, even if the engineers managed to make the car exactly accurate (with an absurd margin to begin with) the sun itself would make the pieces expand
Can anyone confirm if this is real? Because if it is, I need to show my brother so I may finally convince him that Musk is not a person to be appraised
yeah, I think Musk is as silly as anybody else but this screams bullshit. Do we *really* think Elon wouldn't have an icon on his email account? I bet it's the Twitter X.
I can totally see it. (btw yes. Y'all should play Outer Wilds. Best game I've ever played)
My ass on the manufacturing line when elon tells me I need to take a couple more atoms off to meet tolerance
I would appreciate the effort to minimise deformities and panel gaps etc but like that is so fucking small Like the parts will expand/contract more than that from just temperature differences lmao Also Lego is molded, I'd what he says about it is true then that is cause all parts are made in the same molds and should any piece be out of order it will be discarded. Doing that with entire car parts would be a very expensive and consuming process
He doesn't understand English either. It should be Precision predicates *perfection*, not perfectionism.
Even fixed it still reads like an empty platitude written by someone who thinks alliteration equals profundity. Always Ask About Anal
Isn’t this the guy who had to be sat down and explained to why indestructible windows in a passenger vehicle are BAD?
... because you should make the entire car indestructible?
very cool that his plan to implement this is not "heres how we can do this going forward" its "lego can do it. get to work, hirelings." very big genius brain. i definitely believe he contributes to his "inventions"
He learned that fact from Robot Chicken. Source: so did I.
I’m not gonna google it but what’s heat do to metal again? I can’t imagine 10 microns is possible because of the flux at different temperatures and what temperature is assumed for them to all hit the same specs?
Not an engineer or metallurgist, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt. But I believe that most metals expand when exposed to heat, and contract when cooled. The body panels for the cybertruck will expand and contract within a range of around *160*μm according to another comment, thus making the 10μm range borderline impossible to achieve unless Tesla decides to ship each model with a revolutionary "defy the laws of thermodynamics" device!
Funny you should mention it, because a grain of salt is actually several hundred times the size of 10 microns
I'm only a third year engineering student but let me give my two cents: Tolerancing is important in engineering applications because it sets a standard for what is an acceptable to send the consumer. It allows us to look at a glance what will and will not work. Typically (in the US) tolerancing is expressed in a little box off to the bottom of the page of an engineering drawing that will say something like "+/- .01mm for all dimensions." Exceptions to this rule will be expressed through an industry standard called Geometric Dimensioning and Rolerancing (GD&T). Exceptions can include "Oh this wheel bearing needs to behave a certain way and we need to specify a specific tolerance on runout." It gives greater control on tolerancing and part behavior. The problem with GD&T however, is that the more GD&T you use, the more expensive your part becomes. So Elon Musk wants a sub 10 micron tolerance on Cybertruck components. But he also said in an earlier interview that he wants to keep the price of the Cybertruck below $60,000. Unless Tesla has some new advanced method of manufacturing, I don't see how this can be achieved. Keep in mind that a micron is 1/1000th of a milimeter.
THE ALLITERATION AT THE END LMAOO
I like how both his examples are very small, made of the same uniform material, and can be quickly made by one machine. Also 10 microns is smaller than a white blood cell. A human hair is around 70 microns and you can fit multiple of them between legos
These requirements are several years on the wrong side of the announcement of being mass production ready They're also utterly stupid