Comments on: Tesla Birth Watch 44: Tesla Talks Transmission Troubles to TTAC

By: shaker

shaker — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:09:57 +0000

Did Tesla consider using motor braking to match the rotor speed to the tranny for shifting? You could push the juice into the battery, using some advanced control logic.

By: mittelhauser

mittelhauser — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:02:15 +0000

So I am just curious what you cynics will consider success? It is now mid-april. If in 6 months, there are 50 cars in customer hands do you conceed that you might have been wrong?

Tesla was specific that they were starting the production line at 1 car per week. It started on 3/17 (a month ago) and they have cranked out 4+ cars. Gee, that sounds a lot like what they said they were going to do.

Of course they don’t ship them over instantly. They calculate some logical number for a batch size and then throw them on a boat for 6 weeks. Then they need to do the PEM install and final testing before handing them to a customer.

IT’s why it’s called a PIPELINE. It takes a while to get going and then stuff starts coming out of the other end at a steady rate…

-Jon

By: rtz

rtz — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:17:56 +0000

I can’t wait to see some performance numbers on the direct drive with the bigger motor and inverter. Any specs on either? Voltage or amps?

By: BuckD

BuckD — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Tesla demonstrates why folks don’t go out and start mass production car companies based on exotic and unproven technologies every day. Because it’s effing hard to do. I’ll give them props–they managed to crank out four cars and it looks like more will trickle out, which is pretty impressive given the company’s well-documented troubles.

By: guyincognito

guyincognito — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:46:09 +0000

Siry’s timeline sounds a little funny to me. My interpretation is that cars 2 and 3 are still several weeks from completion and then 6 weeks from delivery to their US operations for fitment of the drivetrain. Add in the batching and custom work and we could be talking several months before a customer delivery. I wonder if this timeline isn’t being driven by some other issue rather than their claimed deliberate approach.

In any case, it is interesting that they would choose to use the first completed unit (#”4″) to raise funds in Europe rather than using it to finally declare victory on delivering a production unit to a paying customer.

By: jthorner

jthorner — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:37:39 +0000

“The reason we moved away from that design was that we had originally tried to design the gearbox to have clutchless shifting and to accomplish the shifts entirely through motor control but this proved difficult on our end due in part to the time it takes to spin down a heavy rotor that is rotating very quickly.”

This makes me think that the people doing the initial design work were not first class mechanical engineers experienced in propulsion systems.

By: Mirko Reinhardt

Mirko Reinhardt — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:29:41 +0000

What are they in Monaco for? To piss off Venturi on their home turf?

By: alex_rashev

alex_rashev — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:26:17 +0000

Why use just the motor? Why not use a combination of electronic rev-matching and a giant, fat synchro ring? That way you still don’t have a real clutch, and the entire transmission consits of one shaft, two gears with synchro rings, one selector fork with “dogtooth” engagement gear and a differential with two FWD-style ring gears instead of one. Simple, easy, lightweight, and you can actually feel the shifter through your hand since you have a real linkage.

As for slowing down the rotor, I can’t believe that a 200kwt+ engine can’t slow its own self down in time, given that it can use those 200kwt both ways.

By: AKM

AKM — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:12:25 +0000

Kudos for Tesla for actually talking to TTAC.

This said, is it a car company or a lawsuit company?

By: AGR

AGR — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:58:29 +0000

The cars are shipped to the US as gliders (no powertrain/no batteries) the powertrain and batteries is installed in San Carlos.

Its probably the reason that it takes 6 weeks to ship since the car does not move with its own power.

Car #2 was originally destined for Martin Eberhard.

By: dean

dean — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:51:14 +0000

While I also applaud their willingness to “talk” to TTAC, the amount of double-speak and obfuscation that comes out of their keyboards would do George Orwell proud.

Did I miss something? I know the chassis is built by Lotus, but are they building the entire car as well? I thought assembly was to take place in the U.S.?

By: kericf

kericf — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:41:18 +0000

I can understand court litigation over what is owed under the contract. Since we do not have the details of the contract between Tesla and Magna, it is pointless to think Tesla just stiffed them. This happens a lot of times in the engineering field. If client X agrees to pay Y amount for each milestone reached as outlined in the contract. If the milestones are not reached in a timely manner or if they do not meet the specifications of the contract then the client does not have to pay the full amount (or at all depending on how bad they screwed up). Either way it usually ends up in court. This is not unusual and is actually pretty common.

As a skeptic of the reliability and performance claims of the Tesla, I do have to applaud their willingness to talk with TTAC and be somewhat open about the problems and concerns the public has with their product. The Big 3 need to learn from this.

By: Robert Farago

Robert Farago — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:40:56 +0000

Siry:

The second and third cars are in Hethel and will shortly be sent stateside for delivery, which will start in the coming weeks.

Can you be any more vague? Seriously, how about a specific delivery date?

By: siry

siry — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:37:41 +0000

The second and third cars are in Hethel and will shortly be sent stateside for delivery, which will start in the coming weeks.

Some of the cars have custom work specified which adds a little to the process.

While the production schedule is regular, the deliveries in the states will occur more in batches because in the long term we will be shipping cars over in batches, not one at a time.

When they come over by ship the Journey is 6 weeks. We will choose to fly some cars over for various reasons.