I did a little math and made an inaccurate, but ballpark assumption.
He said their harness was 1.6 km too long (1 mile) and that it cost them 70 pounds in extra weight.
I assumed that the extra harness used 14 gauge copper wire (pretty common automotive gauge) and based on a weight of 11.7 lbs/MFT (5.3 kg/304.8m) where MFT is 1000 feet.
This gives an excess harness weight of 62 lbs (his number was 70 lbs). It is likely that the actual excess harness is a mix of wire gauges since some of it would be battery power distribution using a smaller gauge (larger diameter) and others would be accessory power using a larger gauge (smaller diameter).
I have a Ford Explorer engine harness a few feet away from me right now. That part of the vehicle harness weighs under 20 pounds in the factory box with the pigtail connectors. There are other harnesses on the vehicle but I would be surprised to find that the entire vehicle harness for that model weighed more than 60 pounds. These electric vehicles are using a lot of copper.
I have no idea how long the harness wire is but a mile seems like it could be an exaggeration. The car is only 15.5 feet long. That's 340 extra wires that run the length of the vehicle front to back if there is a mile of excess harness.
They certainly haven't made this mistake in any late-model F-x50 Super Duties. The amount that has to be unplugged and shuffled to do even minor work is amazing, not to mention the entire front end has to be disassembled to replace the headlight bulbs.
Hopefully this will usher in some 'common sense' engineering at Ford and other manufacturers and get them back to sane and serviceable designs.
I mean that's a dumb metric... raw number of recalls? Ford's commercial line does enough volume to be its own manufacturer, and recalls aren't fungible, and different numbers of vehicles are affected...
Where is this extra mile of wire going? Surely they didn't just put a bunch of extra wires in the harness for no reason. Were the extra wires a relic of an earlier stage in the design process?
The article says that the wiring harness is longer than it needs to be. My guess would be that there are several hundred wires in the harness, each signal paired with a ground, so an extra few feet (an extra fraction of an inch per mounting point?) would really add up. That extra length might make it easier for the installers to wrangle; efficient design often comes at cost.
Edit: and, come to think of it, this is a Steiner Tree problem with some very interesting constraints. Optimizing very large instances like this is a Hard Problem. Even if everything is locally optimal (unlike my hypothesis above), it can still be far from globally optimal. Recomputing a solution, spending longer on the computation, can make a big difference!
To add to the other replies - the networking configuration of the car plays a huge role as well! Is it CAN bus? Is it Ethernet? Is it a mix? How many computers are in it? How are they connected? Have you centralized the microcontrollers to some degree? What about connections between microcontrollers?
Just like microservice oriented architectures and monoliths, you may choose the form of your destroyer, and an extraordinarily well-connected topology with no centralized points to bounce between can lead to ass loads of wires :)
I'm convinced of the quality of Tesla's internal networking - I don't have concrete data on this but the capabilities they showed in 2018 such as over-the-air updates told me they had to be more sane than their competitors. To be able to update any part of the car like that I'd imagine they centralized a TON of the random bits and bobs into a few Ethernet connected machines even back then. On top of that, the rumors of the telemetry they collect is the stuff of legend!
The problem with a lot of these car companies is that they're a little behind the tech curve. I left automotive in 2018 so I may be old news here but in-house out-sourced was still a large debate when it came to the design of such systems. It will take a while for them to bubble up leadership with relevant experience to make the right calls - maybe with the layoffs at big tech co's it'll happen sooner than later? Automotive companies I interacted with in 2018 definitely knew then what they wanted, the hard part was finding the right people to deliver and manage.
I understand that there's gonna be a lot of wiring, having done a lot of vehicle wiring myself. What I don't understand is how they ended up with so much more wire than necessary. Is it from putting wires in the harness that didn't actually need to be there, or is it from routing the harness in a suboptimal way?
Wiring is a very hard problem in vehicles. It’s why you see physical switches being switched out for a touchscreen, and some of the tech the big automakers are most excited for are, at the end of the day, just to reduce the amount of wiring required for each car.
It's important to note that Ford made the decision to bring the F150 and Mach E to market ASAP as opposed to taking the time to develop a separate EV platform (like GM and Hyundai), probably why their design isn't optimized. IIRC they started from their ICE based platforms.
I believe Tesla is ahead in terms of cost optimization of their EV manufacturing process. They have quite a bit of margin to work with.
If you're interested, you can watch Sandy Munro's YouTube channel where they open up vehicles and discuss their designs and how things are made.
You will notice pretty big improvements in how Tesla manufacture their EVs over different iterations of the Model 3 and Model Y. Reduced wiring, entire front and rear subframe cast as a single part (giga cast) etc.
How did an anti-Ford, pro-Tesla article make it onto CNN? I thought Musk Hate (and, by proxy, Tesla hate) was The Current Thing? And there’s no media outlet more tuned into establishment narratives than CNN.
Readit News
He said their harness was 1.6 km too long (1 mile) and that it cost them 70 pounds in extra weight.
I assumed that the extra harness used 14 gauge copper wire (pretty common automotive gauge) and based on a weight of 11.7 lbs/MFT (5.3 kg/304.8m) where MFT is 1000 feet.
This gives an excess harness weight of 62 lbs (his number was 70 lbs). It is likely that the actual excess harness is a mix of wire gauges since some of it would be battery power distribution using a smaller gauge (larger diameter) and others would be accessory power using a larger gauge (smaller diameter).
I have a Ford Explorer engine harness a few feet away from me right now. That part of the vehicle harness weighs under 20 pounds in the factory box with the pigtail connectors. There are other harnesses on the vehicle but I would be surprised to find that the entire vehicle harness for that model weighed more than 60 pounds. These electric vehicles are using a lot of copper.
I have no idea how long the harness wire is but a mile seems like it could be an exaggeration. The car is only 15.5 feet long. That's 340 extra wires that run the length of the vehicle front to back if there is a mile of excess harness.
Hopefully this will usher in some 'common sense' engineering at Ford and other manufacturers and get them back to sane and serviceable designs.
Maybe to save money having only one part number for more than one car. Pretty common in the industry.
> “Ford has been the #1 in recalls in the US for the last 2 years. Clearly, that’s not acceptable.”
I think that is a much bigger issue than the "extra mile of wires".
I'm pretty sure someone literally opened the NHSTA site, did zero normalization, and took their headline: https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...
-
Taking 3 examples (note recalls affect cars older than the current year):
- Ford, 68 recalls affecting 8.7 million units, 1.8 million vehicles sold in the US in 2022
- VAG, 46 recalls affecting 1 million units, ~300k vehicles sold in the US in 2022
- Tesla, 20 recalls affecting 3.7 million units, ~500k vehicles vehicles sold in the US in 2022
VAG has significantly more recalls compared to their sales, but few vehicles affected per recall.
Tesla has one of the highest vehicles affected per recall of all manufacturers despite the lowest number of recalls.
All in all this is way too complex to reduce to a catchy headline.
Edit: and, come to think of it, this is a Steiner Tree problem with some very interesting constraints. Optimizing very large instances like this is a Hard Problem. Even if everything is locally optimal (unlike my hypothesis above), it can still be far from globally optimal. Recomputing a solution, spending longer on the computation, can make a big difference!
When they talk about "length" they are adding up the length of all the individual wires inside the harness. So it can be any combination of:
• a bundle is too long
• a bundle contains more wires than necessary (eg switch to a shared power and data bus)
• a bundle is completely unnecessary (sometimes separate modules can be combined/eliminated)
• in some rare instances, wireless data transmission can be used
• ultimately, switching from 12 V to medium-voltage (48-54 V) can eliminate multiple wires needed for high power modules.
[0] https://youtu.be/XDtE-Stzol8
Just like microservice oriented architectures and monoliths, you may choose the form of your destroyer, and an extraordinarily well-connected topology with no centralized points to bounce between can lead to ass loads of wires :)
I'm convinced of the quality of Tesla's internal networking - I don't have concrete data on this but the capabilities they showed in 2018 such as over-the-air updates told me they had to be more sane than their competitors. To be able to update any part of the car like that I'd imagine they centralized a TON of the random bits and bobs into a few Ethernet connected machines even back then. On top of that, the rumors of the telemetry they collect is the stuff of legend!
The problem with a lot of these car companies is that they're a little behind the tech curve. I left automotive in 2018 so I may be old news here but in-house out-sourced was still a large debate when it came to the design of such systems. It will take a while for them to bubble up leadership with relevant experience to make the right calls - maybe with the layoffs at big tech co's it'll happen sooner than later? Automotive companies I interacted with in 2018 definitely knew then what they wanted, the hard part was finding the right people to deliver and manage.
The connector of a touchscreen and a unit full of switches can be exactly the same.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus
I believe Tesla is ahead in terms of cost optimization of their EV manufacturing process. They have quite a bit of margin to work with.
If you're interested, you can watch Sandy Munro's YouTube channel where they open up vehicles and discuss their designs and how things are made.
You will notice pretty big improvements in how Tesla manufacture their EVs over different iterations of the Model 3 and Model Y. Reduced wiring, entire front and rear subframe cast as a single part (giga cast) etc.