I like my KLR650 because it’s got tons of torque and very easy to ride. It also is a big bike and you can see over traffic when sitting on it. It also has long suspension travel and a big soft seat.
I never got the sport bike thing. The riding position looks uncomfortable, and if you try to use even 1/2 of its power on the street you will be going felonious speeds before you know what happened.
And yet, some of them really suck tooling around the city because they trade low end torque for high end horsepower. I had a friend with one, and he complained that it was a dog commuting on city streets. Kind of like high end sports cars that don’t come alive until they are going over 100. If you have to drive legally, a BRZ or WRX is probably more fun than a Bugatti Veyron.
There’s a couple of guys with sport bikes somewhere in my neighborhood that race them in the middle of the night. Just by hearing the RPM and dopplet shift you can tell these idiots are going WAY over the speed limit. Probably hiting over 100mph on a city street.
Every time I hear them racing I mentally flinch, waiting for the large bang that is likely to occur one of these times.
Not a fan of sportbike ergonomics as I prefer standard foot peg placement and more upright seating (I’m getting to be an old man though). And, I can do plenty fine breaking the speed limits on both my DR as well as my “sport touring” bike (Buell) through the twisties.
OK. I’m a dirt bike rider from long ago. The best I had was a Yamaha 490 IT. Ya had to be quite tall (and brave) to get on it and start it. It had that suspension though for sure.
I was a Yamaha guy when I was young. When I was 12, I got a YZ80 and it was a rocket (I was a tiny kid) and then I moved to a YZ125 (again, still very small person) and it could be terrifying if you hit the powerband without being ready. I couldn’t imagine a 490 on the dirt. My DR650 is an air-cooled 4-stroke that is fairly gentle. I wouldn’t mind something with a bit more bite now.
He’s saying it’s not a ‘fit and finish’ problem, it’s a hardware issue that occurred after it left the factory. This is absolutely normal stuff for any vehicle. I had a Ford Windstar that I had to take back multiple times as I discovered production issues - including a door that didn’t work properly.
Even aside from that, I really can’t understand what causes this kind of deliberate lack of reading comprehension (referring to evan, not Maserschmidt). Musk didn’t say there was no problem. He said there was a problem that requires a 5-minute fix, and that it wasn’t a door fit issue. I mean, you can easily see from the picture that it’s a door-not-closing-all-the-way problem, not anything to do with fit. What causes people to say things that you can see are false in the very post they’re quoting?
Since that’s on Xitter I can’t see any of it so have zero idea what the underlying issue really is.
But if e.g. the latch is misaligned because it shifted after delivery and now he door doesn’t latch properly, the laymen term for that is “the door doesn’t fit.” The mechanic’s or engineer’s description might be “the latch became misaligned after delivery for reasons unknown and the strike no longer engages the receptacle within tolerance.”
Because saying it’s “not a door fit issue” is such a narrow semantic reading. The door clearly has not been fitted into the place it is supposed to go; that’s not to say the door isn’t the right shape and size, but it’s not fitting into place. Which is why I keep referencing Magritte.
That aside, when he says “about 15”, I read 150; when he says about five minutes, I assume he’s not including the amount of time necessary to get an actual Tesla technician to look at it.
It’s clearly something that could be handled by mobile service, so it’s <5 min to schedule an appt. via the app. Had an issue with my 12v battery and it really was a 5-minute thing in terms of my time spent. I had them come into my garage, but they could have fixed it in my workplace parking lot if required. They wouldn’t even need me to be present since they can find the vehicle and unlock it themselves.
In comparison, the numerous early issues I had with my BMW all took multiple hours to fix due to their stupid service center. For stupid shit like the speakers buzzing because they weren’t properly secured.
I care less about the semantics of that vs. the snark about “That’s actually not a problem.” That was in no way said or implied. It’s just a problem with a quick and easy fix.
Drop both of them out of plane and see which one lands first.
I can’t help but think someone drew it on a napkin while bored at a meeting. There was a disconnect between “great idea” and "when can the design teem sketch some examples to look at.
In production, when we are talking about ‘fit and finish’ it means final perceived quality as measured by things like paint defects uneven panel gaps, plastic panel clips not engaged causing a panel to stick out or rattle, that sort of thing. It also applies to quality of materials.
Fit and finish issues are dealt with after production by inspection. Shit happens during production and paint gets nicked, panel holes get slightly oval and cause misalignment, etc. Maybe your assembly robots are out of tolerance and causing slight differences between parts, or you are running your milling bits too long and causing chatter and other issues, as sometimes happens in cheap Chinese plants. High fit and finish is a proxy for production quality of the things you can’t see.
Many factories now have robots with cameras that look over the final product. One of the last projects I worked on involved a paint inspection robot and new spftware that allowed it to detect numerous types of paint flaws.
In the case of the Tesla door, it would have looked fine coming out of the factory. So it’s not really ‘fit and finish’, but a mechanical issue. This is important because if the door looked like that and was still shipped, it would have called into queation a number of aspects of Tesla’s quality control. A misalignment that bad should never, ever leave the factory.
But this is a case of the wrong torque put on a bolt, causing it to work its way out over time and cause the door stop to stick out. That’s a much easier problem to understand and forgive, and if they caught it within 15 vehicles as Musk said it speaks well of their attention to potential problems and rapid addressing of them.
Well I had a brand new Ford Maverick that also had a door that didn’t close properly, an engine that didn’t work, and a body that started visibly rusting after just six months. Those were also “hardware issues”. I got rid of the piece of shit a few months later. I’ve owned real cars ever since, none of them made by either Ford or Elmo.
Has Tesla never heard of a product called Loctite? And I say this as an owner of a Tesla. I was a former owner of a Harley and a current owner of a Buell and it doesn’t matter if they torqued everything correctly, that shit is backing out. Same for lots of vehicles on lot of parts. Same on my bicycles. Red or blue, pick the correct application. This isn’t SpaceX rocket science.
No doubt. I was merely describing the difference between these issues. Panel gaps are a proxy for attention to detail and inspection quality. This was not that, but it was a defect.
Tesla’s fit and finish isn’t that great. Or at least it wasn’t as of the Model 3 I looked at a few years ago. Uneven panel gaps everywhere, visible paint lines, etc. I was not impressed, and wrote about it here.
