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Some Cybertruck Owners Say Their Trucks Are Shedding Body Panels; One Thinks He Knows Why
(www.roadandtrack.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I worked at the Tesla plant in Fremont for a bit and most of every car is held together with adhesive. They claim it's super strong and once heated, it's stronger than welding... But, I mean... They are still falling apart and I don't know if that's because the adhesive sucks or if it's because every single day, they had to have someone remind everyone that the glue pattern posted at every station where it's applied isn't just a suggestion, it's an engineering requirement for the structural integrity of the part. People were just slapping the adhesive onto shit in any old way they pleased a lot of the time.
Essentially every car has a windshield and trim attached only by adhesive, and has for decades. This ought to be a solved problem.
Is that trim piece steel? Maybe something about the material, usually they’re gluing on plastic trim pieces. They’re relying on heated adhesive but it’s a long skinny piece made of a material that conducts heat?
Yeah, used properly, adhesive can be stronger than just about any other form of fastening. Properly is the key word. Contaminates, or improperly prepped surface will drastically reduce the effectiveness.
Hell, surface coatings to protect against rust are a multi-billion industry and they often require very specific application methods and even a little deviation can fuck up the bond.
(X) to doubt
Adhesives can be incredibly strong.
But never a weld.
MEK welds styrene. Cynocrylate forms a mechanical bond. MEK will be stronger in tension, cyno stronger in shear.
Good ole methyl ethyl ketone.
Dropped a rubber boot in a vat of it once to see what would happen.
No idea why, but it came out much larger/expanded.
Fun fact, you can shrink barbie doll heads in acetone.
I don't even know the name of the adhesive they used. I do know that it was made by 3M and that it's orange.
Well, OK. So maybe that adhesive is stronger than a weld on that particular plastic. Of course, if you're talking about adhering a plastic to a metal you cannot weld it so Elmer's would be "stronger than a weld". But whatever's going on it's not adequate.
E: and actually welding plastic together typically isn't that strong, a mechanical bond can easily be stronger than melting the plastic to weld it.
Epoxy bonding on body panels is super common on many cars now. And it’s the only way to bond incompatible materials like aluminum and high strength steel.
Even steel body panels can’t be welded to high strength steel because the heat affected zone will be weakened by the weld and will crack just outside the weld.
Adhesives to create a mechanical bond, and the 3M body adhesives include glass microbeads that prevent you from squishing the joint too tightly, which makes the bind more effective.
Now using it in dirty or coated stainless steel clearly isn’t working, and the design of thin strips of shiny steel that will grow and shrink a lot, mostly in one direction on a design that was done by a 7 year old in a hurry to draw a truck is another issue.
In other words, the things were being designed by underqualified engineers who didn't understand factors of safety, design for manufacturability, or that precision comes at a cost.
I suspect the real issue is the workers aren't given enough time on the line to do this correctly so they just churn them out to hit the needed metric knowing it will fail after being delivered to the owner.
Hence,
That cost could be needing to use precision robot arms instead of humans, needing to pay higher salaries to find really skilled and diligent humans, or as you suggested, slowing down the assembly line so the workers have time to be more careful.