Tesla Cybertruck Lead Engineer Wes Morrill lately shared some insights on the electrical car maker’s deep integration and distinctive strategy to automobile design in a current put up on social media platform X. As may very well be seen within the engineer’s put up, it’s Tesla’s intense consideration to element that in the end makes the corporate’s automobiles as disruptive as they’re right this moment.
Anybody knowledgeable who appears on the Tesla Cybertruck would know that the car is a symphony of automotive engineering. Tesla, nevertheless, took a while earlier than it reached this level. As per Morrill in his put up, Tesla in its early days utilized totally different groups with collaborative objectives in car design. Adopting this technique allowed the corporate to make nice automobiles, however the designs of the automobiles themselves weren’t optimum.
“A well-known instance – early days of Tesla there was a battery workforce and individually a car buildings workforce. Constructions workforce designed their car physique to fulfill given necessities of energy, crashworthiness, torsional stiffness, and so forth. Likewise, the battery workforce designed their half to be self contained, it might survive sturdiness, by accident being dropped, being hit in a crash, and so forth.
Good evaluation – that is what occurs when groups work collectively to make the very best product. https://t.co/XAXf70k3jc
— Wes (@wmorrill3) September 14, 2024
“Consequently, we ended up with was an excellent dense battery in a robust field like construction, which was then Put in into the car which had a pleasant house for it to mate into. There have been no points with integration, every part match collectively completely and met all product objectives. It achieved one of many highest crash security scores measured on the time.
“However we had a field stuffed with battery cells that was put in into one other empty field formed receptacle on the physique. A field in a field. If you simplify it down that far it sounds clearly fallacious. The 2 organizations had achieved their objectives, labored collectively with out friction, and the product met its total objectives. But the product ended up with a transparent lack of optimization on account of the organizational boundaries of the 2 groups working in isolation. Nothing was fallacious, but it surely wasn’t optimum,” Morrill wrote.
The Cybertruck Lead Engineer famous that Tesla realized from these experiences, and the corporate tailored. That is how improvements such because the structural battery pack—which is now being simulated by electrical automobile makers in China—took place. Morrill acknowledged, nevertheless, that such adjustments could require giant organizational adjustments, and there must be a drive to make the very best product no matter ego.
Have you ever heard of Conway’s Legislation? It is an fascinating commentary in regards to the root explanation for why giant organizations often make merchandise worse.
In 1967 Melvin Conway wrote “Organizations which design techniques are constrained to provide designs that are copies of the communication… pic.twitter.com/SetWd6OfTe
— Wes (@wmorrill3) September 14, 2024
“Earlier than the subsequent product was designed, the battery workforce gave duty of the battery buildings additionally to the car buildings workforce. On this iteration, we ended up with the structural battery, which is an integral a part of the physique and crash construction. With out it, the car physique won’t work. It’s the literal ground for the car. However the redundancy is gone and the design is extra environment friendly because of this. This car additionally achieved one of many highest crash security scores measured on the time.
“This can be a tremendous apparent instance (on reflection) and solved with a pretty big organizational change however you can too see this occur in small technical selections and doesn’t require structural change to repair. Somebody simply must query if there’s a higher resolution in a workforce open to criticism. This mindset to work collectively to make the very best product no matter ego is the place you find yourself with probably the most revolutionary merchandise.
“Some smaller examples have been seen when inspecting Cybertruck design. The chassis air suspension which is used to pressurize the battery pack to stop water ingress. The subwoofer which makes use of the air quantity of the physique facet as a substitute of constructing the enclosure bigger. Centralized zonal car controllers as a substitute of many small distributed controllers. Doorways which use the outside floor as a crash intrusion beam. The pedestrian warning system used as a horn. The listing goes on. The thrill and motivation by everybody concerned to work throughout boundaries and actively break down Conway’s Legislation is among the many causes I really like working at Tesla,” Morrill wrote.
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