Elon Musk announces plan to revolutionize factories | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk announces plan to revolutionize factories

latimes.com

34 pointsthesumofall17 comments

What's interesting about Musk is that he doesn't at all seem to be doing any of this for the money. It doesn't seem like it's greed that motivates him, the way you might think of other top CEOs. He's all about vision. He's an idealist with competence and resources and for better or for worse, he will probably have an impact on all of our lives. I would hope for the better, but idealism and egocentrism can create a toxic mix. So far I love everything his companies have done. I love watching the spacex videos. But we should judge him and his companies based on their accomplishments and their actions and not on the PR and media spectacles that surround him.

To be fair I doubt any top CEO does it for the money, greed is a very poor motivator.

Replace any top CEO with any top founder CEO and you may be more correct- however I doubt that all CEOs, founders of their own vision or not, do not do what they do for the money. Greed perhaps is not a great motivator, but money alone is.

Greed may be the wrong word to use. Certainly many successful CEOs view money as the metric for success, and those people obviously are in it for the money (success).

What about the financial CEOs who, after the US government rescued their firms with bailout, prompty paid themselves multimillion dollar bonuses with the bailout money?

I think people change during the course of their life. While greed will not probably motivate you enough to rise to the top (you need other drivers such as ambition), if you've already made it to the top (and there's nowhere else to go, you're already #1 by your own metrics), you can slowly morph into a greedy bastard.

I personally would pay to do what Musk gets to do.

To be entirely fair, it is very easy to not be motivated by money when you have enough to last a lifetime. Sure, there are certainly many CEOs who use money as a measure of success, but its not like Mr. Musk is living in project housing and eating microwave pizza every night.

This is not to detract at all from what Mr. Musk is doing, its admirable and the world could use more people like him. However, it is important to maintain a perspective that grants that there could be a million Elon's, if only they had the resources to behave as he does.

As a student ~ 7 years ago i had a summer job at an Audi assembly line. At the first place I worked there you had roughly one person every 10 or 15 meters or so appart, mainly restacking the supplies for welding robots. So there was really not that much left to automate. The other place I worked however was more manual. My job was to connect the fuel lines, which took me about 2 days to learn since it required some serious coordination effort with a weired tool. I can see that they didn't automate this, because the location was at that point hard to reach and they had about five different versions depending on engine type. Maybe in the case of Tesla things are also easier to automate since they are less customized then traditional cars (where you have a plentora of options just for the engine alone).

Maybe one of the factors is "automating the automation" in that automation is possible for many(most) of the processes, but there is a high cost to this automation. Streamlining this into better building blocks might make it easier to adapt than ever before. I have experience with car software and there are many, many, maany ways things that could be improved over here.

In terms of your comment about "automating the automation" being not done due to a high cost of the automation, in Economics we have something called competitive advantage which gives explanation as to why we may use humans rather than robots for tasks like these.

The question here is: does he want to revolutionize his factories, which makes a lot of sense? Or does he mean in general?

I mean, when I see his production, I see a lot of cars, which are moved around on a robot to get in position to be able to work on them. That takes time. That is not a series production. https://youtu.be/TuC8drQmXjg?t=5m33s

Versus a real series production: https://youtu.be/dy3R4K5jHYc?t=7m59s or here: https://youtu.be/tNQmXw_vX-g?t=3m4s

The "real series production" presented in the last video-clips seems to include a lot of intensive manual labor in those assembly lines. That in itself should let you assume room for improvement. In the first video (@8:25) there is a part involving two mechanical arms and a press, all moving pretty slowly, i.e. with a lot of waiting. Why is that if the only possible occurrences in there are known and controlled? I tend to assume that the machine-only chambers were set up because of hazardous factors (making human involvement risky) than from efficiency reasons. If that is what factories today are, and considering that Musk is time-pressed to swell the number of assembled cars, it's no wonder he has hard time tolerating it.

That was lackluster: Nothing specific, just generalities.

TL;DR: "I'm convinced we can make factories better."

No shit.

I wonder if he's considering the limits of the impact and the ROI of whatever he's ready to throw at the factory inefficiency problem.

From another comment here, and his own words to describe how he arrived at his vision, it sounds like he's walking around his own factory and realizing it's set up very inefficiently.

I mean, maybe he just figured this out, but it does sound a lot like "shoot first, ask questions later" being spun into a positive.

Or, in less polite terms, "Not everybody's factory processes are as messed up as Tesla's."

I'm pretty curious as to what plans he has.

It must be something along the lines of: - Figure out everything that is needed to be built for the product - Think of an optimal factory for each component that doesn't waste any volume. Additionally, allow for things to change in size,etc using some type physics metadata. - Connect all these together and use physics first metadata to continually optimize.

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