Comment by 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.
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.
> 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.
It's almost like a system that selects only for the best marketers (the elevator pitch and pitch deck) is terrible at finding people with a grounded worldview and an understanding of the market.
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.
You can suffer from both - arrogance and ignorance - and I think Musk truly does.
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.
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.
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"...
It is panning out, it's just not all robots, gigapress is a thing.