Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? C…
> 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 build…
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=...