Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone tell me why they are taking a long time to ramp up? This is not their first electric car and electric cars are supposed to have a lot fewer components than gasoline engine cars.

View on HN

The supply chain is hard. Supply chain optimization is even harder. And that's not even discussing manufacturing. One of the biggest issues we had in very very very early days of DigitalOcean was, how do we juggle leases/lines of credit, with their requirements for cash in bank, with being out of capacity every other day. This is months of negotiation and conversation, not just snapping the fingers. Some tangential insight: http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortun...

Although they did take over a car factory, they replaced all the internals. The 'reinventing the wheel' has led to initial mistakes (and lessons learned).

With the car industry about 100 years old, and fierce competition, the common wisdom can't be that foolish. So on the long term, structural improvements might well be possible, having ramp up problems when doing everything different is to be expected.

Producing low volume luxury cars and mass market $35,000 cars is very different. Mass manufactured cars must be designed for the manufacturing process in mind. Tesla is still constantly tweaking with the manufacturing process. The Model 3's they are delivering are still prototypes.

Tesla's knows how to make the electric 'skateboard' and it's technically far ahead of others. They are struggling with the traditional parts.

Munro Associates did completely Model 3 teardown and report for some customer. Munro said in a interview that had Tesla outsourced the manufacture and design of of the car minus the scateboard to a company like Magna they would have hit every target and even Toyota would be crapping their pants now. If the traditional mechanical parts of the car would have been even decent, Tesla would have mopped the floor with everybody.

Does anyone actually buy a $35k version? I tried to spec one recently and couldn’t get anything i felt was acceptable for under 68k

If nobody buys them, Tesla is in trouble. There is limited market for 68k cars.

The new production line is entirely devoted to the AWD and performance models. Tesla won't be producing the $35k model until next year, the market for $68k Model 3 is bigger than the market for $35k Model 3.

Literally, the answer is "not yet". The ones shipping now are about $50K. Certainly people are willing to buy $35K version, but they might turn out unsatisfied.

Producing physical things is hard. Issues crop up every step. Of the way, and any one thing can have big downstream impacts. Just think of the web of supplies chains that feeds into the components that go into a car. And in Tesla's case, throw in the fact that they are still a new company and haven't had decades to iron out all the kinks.

They've been around 15 years and they bought a modern manufacturing plant purpose built to make cars. They can buy talent. I won't cut them too much slack, supposedly they're worth more than GM. Now prove it.

Up til now they've only been doing relatively low volume production. I doubt Bently could scale up either and they know a bit about making cars.

Tesla put an awful lot of time into getting their glorious factory factory rolling. Bentley might just copy existing high volume production lines from the beginning.

Elon Musk at one point claimed they were going "school" Toyota in manufacturing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2018/02/16/tesla-th...

Gotta give him credit for trying.

I kind of deduct points for arrogantly assuming he knows anything about manufacturing cars at scale to teach a company that produces roughly 9 million vehicles a year.

The people that work for Toyota and GM aren't stupid, and those organizations have been at this game since before Elon was born.

Yet Toyota is pursuing hydrogen fool cells, GM scrapped their first EV and released the Bolt to great fanfare only to have it limited to compliance quantities.

Ford is withdrawing from the sedan market.

All US manufacturers with their decades of experience were almost destroyed by Asian manufacturers in terms of cost and build quality.

GM went bankrupt at least once in recent history.

The game has changed many times. It will keep changing, and in five years we will see that anyone not mass producing EVs as real products and not mere compliance vehicles is exiting the automotive industry.

Well, Bentley is making ~9000 cars per year with ~3000 employees. Tesla is making ~100k cars per year with ~37k employees (not counting all the subcontractors). That's exactly the same ratio, and it's bloody awful compared to large-scale car manufacturers. E.g. Toyota has 10x the number of employees as Tesla but makes 100x as many cars. Even if next year Tesla production is 5000 cars per week all year, they will still have >4x as many employees per car built compared to Toyota.

Also, Bentley is fully owned by Volkswagen. If they wanted to "scale up" to a downmarket Model 3 equivalent, they'd take the VW MQB platform, use most of the non-platform components from the Mk7 VW Jetta (probably offering the 250hp and 300hp engines with AWD), spend 2-3 years developing sufficiently distinct styling parts, and then be able to churn out 100k cars per year.

Exactly. The Bentley thing would be just a badge, in fact now there is very little of their SUV being 'made in England', it is done in some Skoda factory somewhere.

But how much of a Tesla is Tesla? Don't large parts come from suppliers, e.g. all the seats from Lear corp? Or did they re-engineer those too?

I think the Ford F150 truck is the benchmark, in the U.S. there are 3000-4000 made a week. The price starts around the price of the Model 3 and then goes up and up with options.

Plus you get a lot of truck for that compared to a car, and due to the Chicken Tax there are incentives to buy the things.

Recently there was a fire in a supplier plant that affected the F150, with JIT they had to close the lines. But then they shipped the dies to England and restarted making the vital parts so production is back on. Really Musk should not be making promises if even the mighty Ford F150 truck can be brought to a production halt due to one fire in one supplier factory.

That story is quite interesting and right now there is a 747 flying those parts back from England to make sure Ford can keep on getting their $40 billion in revenue from selling that truck.

https://eu.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/16/ford-launch...

I would be intrigued to know the numbers of vehicles per employee for the F150. Note how there is zero export potential for the F150 for a multitude of reasons whereas the Tesla products are definitely hot in international markets.

> Don't large parts come from suppliers, e.g. all the seats from Lear corp?

One of the problems for Tesla is that they make a bunch of things in-house that other manufacturers don't (e.g. seats).

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-is-still-figuring-out-the-model-3...

Yawn. You know Tesla isn’t just a car company, right? They are an energy company as well. They have people building out the supercharger network. Software engineers writing autopilot software. Employees working at Tesla sales centers. Tesla is not structured like a traditional automaker. Stop trying to compare with false metrics.

More than 90% of their revenue in 2017 came from selling or leasing cars. That makes them a car company, full stop. If they have more than 10% of their employees doing other stuff, why on earth do they have all these employees that generate basically no revenue?

They got that plant almost empty. You can see the really old videos where the thing had full empty floor only equipment was left in a few corners.

The hardest part is the long-term testing. A failure mode that appears after ten or twenty years is the hardest to detect.

Imagine the financial impact of "Tesla recalls every Model S ever made due to stress-corrosion cracking in a critical chassis component"....

Alfa had a mishap like that in the nineties and for thirty years sales dropped because “all alfa rust” even when the problem was long resolved, even when the actual model went out of production

The first reason is probably just that manufacturing stuff is hard, especially at scale like this. It takes a while to get good at it, and develop processes and talent to ensure production lines move along smoothly.

The second reason is that I think they invested heavily in an ultra-automated factory, and they weren't able to get that working quite as well as they'd hoped in the time allotted.

These are sort of the high-level reasons, maybe somebody with more specific knowledge could give a more nitty-gritty explanation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com