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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

Which is good since other manufacturers are making 200,000 or so.

It's almost as if scaling an operation > 100% YOY poses different challenges than continuing to run a stable and mature enterprise.

Except they set this goal for themselves.

And they couldn’t don’t without an 85% defect rate.

That doesn’t look good.

Tesla is 15 years old, and operates out the NUMMI plant, that that was building 428,633 cars a year.[0]

Auto manufacturers changes models, every year. They either tweak them, completely redesign them, or launch new models. Ford even changed the entire frame and welding setup when they transitioned from steel to aluminum for the F150. None of them has these problems.

I'm sorry, but Tesla's growing pains should be over. And if they shouldn't be over, when should they? Does it take 20 years to figure out how to mass produce an item that has been mass produced by many different companies, from around the world, for about 100 years now?

At some point, you've got a man that has no previous experience running a manufacturing plant, repeating the same mistakes the industry made 40 years ago. Including most damningly trying to automate final assembly[1], because he thinks he's being clever.

Let's be honest here. Building a car with zero defects is possible. It's done every day at scale, at every Toyota plant in the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

[1] https://qz.com/1261214/how-exactly-tesla-shot-itself-in-the-...

To be fair, a tesla car has little in common with an "item that has been mass produced by many different companies, from around the world, for about 100 years now". Almost all of the internals are as different as a computer is to a typewriter (please don't argue on the analogy, it's bad but gets the point)

If the problems were limited to the drive train, then I might concede the point, but we'd still be talking about 15 years of experience. From what I understand, the batteries aren't blowing up, and electric motors work, so I guess the drive train is fine.

The damning part is that these not the problems that people are talking about. People are reporting not being able to put a piece of metal on straight. We're talking about gluing a rubber gasket on to a piece of glass. This is 100 years old, and this is what they're fucking up.

Could you explain this more? A Tesla car is largely the same as any other modern car in how it functions and is manufactured. The major difference is the battery + electric motor. So besides the production of the battery and motor, how are the internals so different? Certainly nothing on the scale of computer vs. typewriter.

I would suggest mechanical vs. electric typewriter as a better analogy.

Electric cars are generally simpler than their ICE counterparts. There are way less total working pieces in an electric vehicle than a ICE one.

Also, a huge part of the manufacturing process doesn't even deal with the real guts of the car, it is making sure that the seats are installed, or there aren't panel gaps, or that the paint has been applied properly. All of those are exactly the same for Tesla as they would be for any other automaker.

Electric motor is indeed like a typewriter. And BMW’s B58 engine is a computer. That’s why Chinese guys failed develop their own internal combustion engines, but can do great cheap electric cars. Tesla never had a chance if they needed to build something like B58.

There's an important part of the Tesla story about what they've gotten wrong. Musk has admitted, and perhaps downplayed, the mistakes made in attempting to overly automate the factory and becoming distracted by the "art" of the Model X.

I would be curious to know more about the impact producing so many of their own parts, to custom specs, has had on Tesla's successes or failures. This is another area where Tesla has diverged from the norms in automotive manufacturing.

Generally, it is unclear to me why Musk has taken Tesla on a course so different from how cars are typically produced and assembled, besides where it really count: electric power.

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