[systemvoltage]

You've left out manufacturing. Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge.

Tesla had the best and the brightest - I've worked with them before they were acquired by Tesla on a daily basis: https://teslagrohmannautomation.de/en/

and still had trouble scaling. Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about building cars - electric or not.

Edit: What's with the downvotes? Disagree? Comment below then.

[itsoktocry]

>Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge

And yet Elon announced to the world he was going to have the most automated factory in the world, the machine that builds machines, and that the factory was the actual product. People lapped this up. 2 years later they were hand-assembling cars in a tent.

Now do you see the problem?

>Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about building cars

Again, you say this as if it's some kind of revelation. It's obvious. The only shock is that Musk and the people he was surrounded with didn't realize it.

[nickik]

They tried to do something quite crazy with manufacturing and it didn't work. Musk has often ignored industry standard and often it works. In this case it didn't and people will now use this forever to show how stupid he is.

However what happened then is that they effectively corrected their mistake, fixed their production, reached their production targets with excellent unit margins.

They learned from the episode and realized they need to reduce part count and made a whole series of innovation and if you look at how their new Model Y are going to be developed in the new factories you see a huge improvements. They developed a new alloy for casting, worked to put largest casting process into production, totally redesigned the battery for manufacturing and massively simplified the battery pack.

To the point where Tesla are quite competitive in terms of weight and ease of manufacturing. They already have industry leading unit margins and some of these innovations will only hit next year.

That part of the story somehow is never mentioned when people say 'hahahahha build cars in a tent'.

They are not doing so bad it seems:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E9FARebWUAYd5NI?format=jpg&name=...

[itsoktocry]

>They tried to do something quite crazy with manufacturing and it didn't work.

What did they try to do that's "crazy with manufacturing" that hasn't been done by every other car company on the planet?

>fixed their production, reached their production targets

Have their plants ever reached production capacity?

>To the point where Tesla are quite competitive in terms of weight and ease of manufacturing.

And here we have the point. Tesla are competitive, fantastic. That's a long way from all of the early claims about upending the entire manufacturing industry through factory automation the likes of which the world has never seen. Funny how that part of the narrative disappeared.

>They are not doing so bad it seems

Looks to me like legacy car makers are catching up, no?

[systemvoltage]

I was responding to the comment above mine that didn’t mention manufacturing but pretty much everything else. It might be obvious to you but general populace have no idea about difficulty of manufacturing. Some engineers haven’t got a clue on what goes into building things by millions.

[Joeri]

According to musk manufacturing is the hardest part of rocketry as well.

[sterlind]

that makes sense. rockets are big dumb objects with incredibly tight engineering tolerances. humanoid robots are anything but big and dumb, and there's no incremental path to success between a bunch of servos wired to a mannequin and having it do the dishes.