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Comment by sho_hn

3 years ago

> I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose

You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were already available off-the-shelf.

I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and making the market believe it's going well.

This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.

36 comments

sho_hn

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cheschire  3 years ago

I seem to remember automated manufacturing was supposed to be his big thing. The other companies were bogged down with union labor and he saw an opportunity. Then the first gigafactory failed to fully automate the process and so he put all his chips on "cheap" autopilot that didn't require expensive vision hardware and could instead all run on video.

Now that isn't panning out either. I don't know if there are any other places to fundamentally disrupt in the automotive space, but if there are, that's where Tesla will focus next I suspect.

  • mikeyouse  3 years ago

    This never really made sense either -- labor is manufacturing's largest "avoidable" cost by far, so all manufacturers want to reduce the amount of labor to an absolute minimum. The machines Tesla were buying to automate their plants only existed because other auto manufacturers were already using them for the same purpose. Tesla thought they could extend their use to places where traditional manufacturers had decided against it -- for instance shaping/fitting body panels, but quickly learned why the GMs and Toyotas of the world had human input in those areas.

    Trying to "out automate" companies who make literal millions of cars per year was never a recipe for enduring margins. There are plenty of videos from even economy car assembly plants 15 years ago where robots did the entirety of the welding and humans were only involved for little bits of final assembly.

    • BaseballPhysics  3 years ago

      > Trying to "out automate" companies who make literal millions of cars per year was never a recipe for enduring margins

      Unless of course you've bought into your own marketing and think yourself a disruptive genius.

      To me this is just a wonderful object lesson in the naivete of so many SV "disruptors" who fail to understand Chesterton's Fence.

      1 reply →

    • unshavedyak  3 years ago

      Pretty funny considering even people who don't pay attention to him (like myself) are seeing repeated patterns of him walking into areas he doesn't know and thinking he knows better than all the existing industry/insider knowledge.

      Now i'm just trying to figure out of it's arrogance or ignorance at the root of his problems in this space.

      1 reply →

  • bluSCALE4  3 years ago

    On of the next big things will be the next GPS, internet and other services that Starlink will make possible. Who knows how long it will take but I get the notion that Tesla can fix a lot of their problems in a production cycle or two and still have killer features to set it apart.

  • SyzygistSix  3 years ago

    That's odd considering VW's impression of the Berlin factory was that it is the new standard to beat regarding automation and build time.

    • FireBeyond  3 years ago

      What's interesting about that is that VW thinks that even if they improve their processes, it should still take VW about 50% longer than Tesla to manufacture their cars.

      But then again VW has a lot higher consistency and less QC issues coming off their lines...

      Tesla just wants to crack the whip on quarterly deliveries. God help you if you take delivery of a vehicle manufactured at the end of the quarter - you're going to spend a lot of time arguing at a Service Center for them to fix manufacturing defects.

      I wonder if there's a correlation between that and "time on the line"...

clouddrover  3 years ago

> I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this

Musk said, "The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero":

https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin...

cma  3 years ago

At Battery investment day (a few years after Autonomy investor day) he said the opposite: that self driving wasn't worth much because competitors would follow in 2-4 years, and that their advantage was all about their new battery tech. The new Tesla-made batteries have come out now and are 20% worse energy density than Panasonic's.

  • gamblor956  3 years ago

    I hate defending Tesla/Musk, but the reason the new batteries have worse energy density is because they switched chemistries to much cheaper, longer-lived, and safer lithium-iron-phosphate batteries.

    The downside to LFP batteries is that they are less energy dense than the old NMC chemistry, though modern LFP batteries now have the same energy density as NMC batteries from about 10-15 years ago (due to the fact that individual cells can be placed more closely together than in NMC batteries due to the lack of thermal runaway risks).

  • sho_hn  3 years ago

    'Tesla founder Elon Musk said the key to his electric automaker's value is whether it can achieve self-driving technology, adding that the firm would be "worth basically zero" without it.' (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-worth-basica...)

    I guess it's a trope he trots out in different contexts.

    As for batteries, you hear much the same content at a variety of different OEM "battery days", which usually get much less coverage on places like HN however.

    • MDWolinski  3 years ago

      Musk is a marketer. The keystone of any good Marketing is: "Sell What You Have." So it's Electrification. Then it's self driving. Then it's GigaPress. Then improved batteries. If Tesla ends up nailing level-5 autonomous driving, it'll be self driving again.

      Steve Jobs was very good at this as well. Here's the all-new iPod! Video? Who'd want to watch video on such a small screen? Next year, the all new video iPod.

    • jonfw  3 years ago

      X is the key to success in the automotive industry, where X equals the trait in which Tesla has the best market position right now

  • fallingknife  3 years ago

    Who cares about power density? They are designed to lower $/kwh not kg/kwh.

    • maximus-decimus  3 years ago

      Well, you need to drive the extra weight around so it's gonna affect your mileage. Ultimately, what you should care about is $/miles of range

Joeri  3 years ago

I don’t get why tesla can’t just do the thing that originally made them successful: build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.

Why do they need a competitive mote when they can just outcompete by doing things as they already were?

AFAICT teslas are becoming worse instead of better, because of this obsession with gimmicks instead of excellence and customer satisfaction.

  • n0tth3dro1ds  3 years ago

    >build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.

    From the perspective of an employee at another OEM, I’d say they already do that. They have several moats outside of autonomous gimmicks:

    1) Charging network. Nobody comes close. 2) Infotainment software (combined with underlying architecture and in-house silicon). They have the best experience in the industry. Their architecture is streamlined unlike disjoint legacy OEM 15 ECU hell. The broad market doesn’t really understand how far ahead they are in terms of architecture. Any new OEM has a huge advantage of starting fresh. 3)Packaging and battery density. They have the best range. They have the best packaging (tons of trunk and frunk space), where as many other manufacturers end up with weird raised trunk floors and no frunks in their competitor products that also somehow get worse range.

    So yeah, I think Musk definitely undersells their lead in these areas. With no redesigns of the main models yet, they really could have focused a lot of effort on improving quality, interior materials, etc, but they instead poured money into the quagmire of autonomy.

ChuckNorris89  3 years ago

> "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless"

There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping that by the time people wise up about the false promises, Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.

The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the other manufacturers are catching up.

Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock, basically putting their life savings into it, and when I asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete". Now they're pissed at him.