[gamblor956]

If you think Tesla's factory is amazing, you need to check out Toyota's factories. It's like the difference between a Fisher Price playset and Disneyland.

Tesla talks big about automating...but Toyota actually did it, without fanfare, and managed to do so in a manner consistent with the kanban manufacturing philosophy that has defined their productivity and quality achievements of the past several decades

[_ea1k]

Toyota used to produce ~440k cars out of that plant. Tesla does ~360k. I'm not sure that "fisher price playset" vs disneyland is the analogy that I'd use for that difference.

[gamblor956]

NUMMI was Toyota's oldest and least productive US factory, and the cars were produced on contract for GM, which sold them under a GM brand. This is one of the reasons Toyota closed the plant and sold it to Tesla.

NUMMI is also not the factory that Toyota shows off in its videos demonstrating the awesomeness of its manufacturing processes.

[c0vfefe]

There's more to plant quality than output alone. I'd expect a "disneyland" factory to have other metrics, like low rework, safety, worker satisfaction/retention, responsible procurement & disposal of raw materials, etc.

[m463]

Are there decent videos of both factories to compare them? It might be interesting to see the state of the practice for an established player like Toyota.

I also remember way back when steve jobs tried to automate the production of NeXT cubes and broke his company doing it. I think a lot of folks do this sort of "follow one philosophy" into ruin. They want to be amazing and lose sight of what's doable/affordable/realistic.