Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibero | Hacker News Reader

It is comments like these that exasperate me.

As one Tesla executive involved in its design told me, the goal here was not only to minimize the movement of materials like lithium and cobalt but also to shorten the path of every molecule that moves through the plant. “Because the further a molecule needs to travel,” he said, “the more cost gets added into it. We actually think of it in terms of molecular distance.”

It's things like these, where obvious truths are packaged as some sort of insight that really get my goat.

View on HN

I was cutting wood with my kids the other day and showing them how you have to pick the wood up as little as possible so you could get more done with less effort.

No talk about molecules necessary - just don't do stuff you don't need to do. Sure it takes a lot of planning to achieve but its been a standard concept around getting the job done for, I would say, millennia...

"Don't move it twice" was a common saying when I had a summer job contracting. Don't move the wood off the truck, cut it in the bed of the truck, bring cut pieces in. Save all the dinky, random cuts for last, do them all in one go, instead of running back and forth to the truck every time. Clean from the top down, from the back to the front, so you don't have to clean something twice.

There's a lot of wisdom in the trades! I guess you care more for efficiency when it's your own energy you're spending, instead of some random computer's.

Learned that bailing hay forty years ago. ‘course we didn’t use no book-learnin’ words like “molecular”, so I guess that’s why no one quoted us in the newspaper. Or maybe it was so friggin’ obvious that it wasn’t worth quoting.

Then why one giga-factory instead of thousands of small local ones? What would be the cost if all world’s yoghurt was made in a single giant factory? And you’d be moving milk between continents to get the yoghurt to the small shop at the corner? Now think about moving all these molecules again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

Blame TED.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO0TUI9r-So

It’s a bit of a flamboyant way to say we want to move our parts as little as possible.

But that is a massive difference from traditional manufacturing and many assembly plants.

So it is an insight in terms of Tesla manufacturing philosophy.

>But that is a massive difference from traditional manufacturing and many assembly plants.

Where do people get this stuff from? Have you ever been in a modern manufacturing facility?

Seriously. The Toyota “lean” approach has been advocating for this - and reconfiguring factories around this - for decades. Hell, hospital execs have been taking tours of Toyota plants to import those ideas into HC for a good 20 years or more.

And they are still advocating lean manufacturing, and giving tours - indicating this approach is not the "obvious truths" the OP indicates, even if the ideas are 20 years old.

Yep. They talk “lean” and want to implement. But talking and wanting is not doing.

Working at an American car manufacturer and a major parts manufacturer.

They think they are lean but they are not. Many inefficiencies and waste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com