Model 3 production choices

businessinsider.com

14 points·RayVR··5 comments

The article mentioned that "Tesla is striving and failing to build a pretty simple vehicle. The Model 3 is basically an electric Honda Accord. And Honda without noticeable effort builds and sells over 100,000 of those every single month in the US alone.".

I've always been too afraid to ask, with all the knowledge and best practices in car making, even consider Tesla isn't willing to hire other factories to make the car, what exactly is costing so much more time than it seems to its competition in terms of making car? Is it because Tesla bet too much time and resource on a much more autonomous production line which failed to deliver?

Honda also has multiple factories and is using tried and true technology. Tesla on the other hand uses newer parts, technology, and manufacturing techniques.

On the short term sure it's painful. Long term it should give them a huge competitive advantage. So long as they can keep up demand.

When business insider mentions something that's not a quote, it's almost always wrong.

"without noticeable effort" is a strange way to describe Honda's experience that goes back at least to the early 1970s (the Civic came out in 1972). Mass manufacturing of automobiles might look like a solved problem from the outside, but that does not necessarily means that the ability transfers easily to a new manufacturer.

I don't know anything about auto manufacturing. I'm just reasoning from first principles.

If it really takes no noticeable effort to make the same vehicle, why doesn't Honda make the same vehicle? There are a lot of base assumptions in this oped that don't necessarily seem to be true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com