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Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

I’m not into cars, sorry if it’s a stupid question.

Does Tesla have that much valuable research ? I thought their manufacturing process came from external actors with experience in “legacy” car makers. Same with their batteries technology, didn’t big players like Panasonic intervene to bring their experience ?

Regarding AI or software they don’t seem to be ahead of the other players either.

From a distance, Tesla looks like a company that believed in bold ideas and had the chops to execute on them. Is there a “secret sauce” outside of that ?

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Tesla invented battery management technology to scale up bundles of small lithiun ion cells. This requires significant engineering to get right: cells charge and discharge at different rates, heat must be managed and failed cells taken out of the stack. Nobody was doing this commercially when they built the first roadster. IIRC they shared this tech with Toyota pretty early on.

This is all basic electrical engineering, and now reproduced by other carmakers, but Tesla did it first.

For example, when I was at National Semiconductor working on Solar tech (2010ish), another team was building systems for lithium ion battery management for cars. They did this to sell the tech to car makers.

>Tesla invented battery management technology to scale up bundles of small lithiun ion cells.

I dispute that claim. They may have created a solution for use in their vehicles but did not "invent" anything, they just upscaled existing solutions and used existing know-how.

Thats how all invention works. Scaled up versions of existing tech.

I think their advantage comes in the fact that their car IS a computer. They're the only OEM that can do meaningful OTA updates to the car. It is a massive advantage and none of the other manufacturers have close to the same infrastructure.

My understanding is that, like SpaceX, Tesla's goal is to build a large number of the required parts in house, enabling rapid design iteration. There is also a goal to automate a large proportion of the manufacturing process, although it has become clear that the limits of current technology are being tested here.

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