Tesla produces its millionth car

That's a pretty impressive milestone. Cheers for the hard work from Tesla employees!

Tesla should now focus on a mass market electric vehicle to take the climate crisis- something like a closed two-wheeler with broad tyres. Good for traffic and temperature controlled too. Chinese people would buy it in droves.

The Model 3 is a mass market electric vehicle with broad market appeal. Tesla doesn't make toy cars, they've left that up to Nissan, BMW, and the like.

It's remarkable how simple it appears to build lots of cars, but its one of those things that is completely and utterly counter-intuitive.

Logic says - get all these parts together, assemble them and off a car comes out. Forget about engineering - assume all R&D work is done/frozen, the supply-chain complexity alone is staggering. 2000+ suppliers, with multiple redundancies. Keeping the assembly line moving without a hiccup is a compounding a chain of all problems - all probabilities of things going wrong at each station/module/step.

Another beast of an industry(which I am intimately familiar with) is semiconductor manufacturing. But, it actually appears to be hard unlike car manufacturing. Making 4 million chips a day, containing 2 billion transistors sounds hard af and it is.

Manufacturing is a very interesting field to get into (even as software engineers). Ever heard of this game - Factorio? You get to play that in real life (with some pain and big rewards). If you can master manufacturing, you're unbeatable because the entry point is so steep, learning curve is steeper and scaling up is nothing like spinning up Kubernetes clusters and instances (no offense meant).

Hey, kudos to all the people that burned midnight oil, persevered through tough times at Tesla, congratulations. If you work at Tesla plant, please share your story!