[Animats]

It's going to be a tough few years getting the plant running profitably. Tesla hasn't tried to be price-competitive before. They need to get good at low-cost, high-volume auto manufacturing. Trying to get "fast", "cheap" and "good" all at once is very hard. Tesla tends to get "good", but not the other two.

For comparison, see Apple's plant in Fremont, 1984-1992. This was Steve Jobs' vision of manufacturing.[1] It looks great. It's got automatic stacker cranes. It's got pick and place machines. It's got mobile robots. Everything is very tidy. But it's inefficient. Designing a factory around a storage and retrieval warehouse machine turns out to be a bad idea. Too much of the plant is material handling rather than manufacturing. Apple closed that plant and outsourced manufacturing to Foxconn.

This is the sort of problem you hit in setting up a manufacturing plant. It's easy to end up with too much work in progress spread around the plant. This is worse in automotive, where work in progress is physically large and needs storage space.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjyh2Fhnuk