[grey-area]

100% automation was a gamble that didn't pay off

For now.

When they have a solid product, and a lot more money in the bank, I'd expect them to be at the forefront of automation, and then it will pay dividends, they just tried to do it too soon.

[hef19898]

There are plenty of car companies out there with solid products and very deep pockets. Nobody is going this direction. All it will do is increasing the production issues ten fold if Tesla is facing the first facelift or model change.

[fooker]

Nobody went in the direction of seamless internet payments before PayPal, despite banking existing for centuries.

Nobody went in the direction of landing boosters, despite rocketry existing for decades.

'Nobody is doing it', is more often than not, an argument for 'it' instead of against.

[stcredzero]

It's not enough to have, 'Nobody is doing it.' If you want the full Musk analysis, you also have to do a 1st principles analysis of the true cost. Then you have to identify the factors holding things up across the entire industry. Is it that government regulation and meddling is distorting the pricing and scaring away competitors? Is it an entrenched industry with no motivation to innovate?

Often nobody's doing it, because "it" is truly stupid. What Musk is doing, is applying a formula for discovering when the majority are mistaken.

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

[dingaling]

> Nobody went in the direction of landing boosters

Of course they did, but they only wanted to do it on DoD money. When that wasn't further forthcoming they pivoted to other projects that were funded.

Landing rocket as a stalled idea wasn't due to lack of technical foresight, it wad a result of big companies lacking financial foresight. I give credit to Space X for making that business leap, even though landing their boosters was actually an ad hoc response to their initial failure to secure cheap Russian engines.

[hef19898]

I once found a study from EASA, conducted in the early 2000s if I remember well, on reusing boosters. The result was, in a nutshell, technically feasible financially not so much due the low number of launches, costs to refurbish and such.

And now Arianne Space is having a serious look at it with Arianne 6.

[hef19898]

True at first glance. But the better allogy would be a better way to process cheques in the case of PayPal. And in the case of producing cars ignoring the Toyota Production System, ignoring decades of experience in high volume car manufacturing is at best incredibly arrogant.

[grey-area]

Remember Nokia?

They had decades of experience in the industry and the software guys (Apple and Google) drove them to bankruptcy.

Also look at SpaceX - he’s not a complete novice at complex manufacturing, and knows how to assemble and motivate a good team, and is used to competing against even more entrenched incumbents.

I’ll be interested to see how this works out but I think Musk was just too early and trying to do too much at once; he’s not wrong that automation is the future.

[hef19898]

And Nokia lost because the new products were better. Not because Apple or Google were better at manufacturing. After all Apple went to Samsung for screens and sub contracted manufacturing to Foxconn. Google designed and had the likes of LG build their Pixels and Nexus phones. And that is the difference I'm arguing here, not the product.

Also, building mostly single use rockets, reused boosters are pretty new even for SpaceX, in comparatively small number is totally different from building and running factories that spit out hundreds of thousands of cars. But I can understand why Elon might have thought he knew better. But drawing lessons from an industry like aerospace and rockets which had only a hand full of defacto state subsidized players to one as competitive as automotive was, it seems, a bad idea.

Yes, I fully agree that Elon wanted too early and too fast. And having the timing wrong still means you're wrong. And in that case this mistake and the underlying culture and way of thinking can very much doom the whole company. And that would really be a shame, wouldn't it?

[grey-area]

The Model 3 is better, it just needs to get cheaper - it’s already the best-selling EV in many markets.

[craydandy]

In fact others seem to go just the opposite direction. For example Mercedes is reducing the amount of automation as it makes the change too slow [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mercedes-...