Comment by gopalv
2 days ago
> what glued panels fall off
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
Lotus did this on their chassis not because it was cheap, but because it allowed them to use lighter, thinner aluminum which would have been ruined by welding. It was almost certainly not cheaper than welding, they had to add little protrusions that kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart, which is what made for the best bonding. They went to a lot of trouble to make this process work, and it resulted in one of the best sports cars of all time in terms of pure driving experience.
Tesla has very different reasons for doing what they did on the cybertruck. It's very much a form over function. Lotus has always been function over form (to a fault, in terms of their financial position).
> kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart
You can add glass microspheres to adhesives to guarantee bondline thickness. It's often done nowadays whenever you have different metals meeting with a glue bond because it keeps them electrically isolated, preventing galvanic corrosion.
So? My Silverado had wheel flairs attached with adhesive. This is extremely common.
My point is that there's nothing wrong with glue, but comparing the pile of shit that is the cybertruck to one of the GOATs and saying "look they both use glue" is a little disingenuous. They are completely different processes, do it in different places for different reasons. The only similarity is that there is glue involved, somewhere.
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> Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
It's also way more expensive to issue a recall on a million cars than to do it on a thousand cars.
Christian von Königsegg mentioned in a radioshow (Sommar i P1, Swedish) a while back that the reason he got into luxury cars is that it was what he could afford having the mechanic skills and time but not a heap of research or automation money.
That is the norm in all "sporty" stuff. Expensive car/motorbikes/bicycles use light alloys that wear out much faster than heavier, cheaper materials
Most cars have glued joints and body panels these days.
The issue isn't glue, its that parts are falling off.