Takaoka Line 2, when Category Theory meets auto manufacturing. Love the carts they move cars on. Curious if Tesla attempts such a line next.
When we were theorizing about a gifted car plant, the example may have vaguely sounded like Toyota’s NUMMI plant, that was, for practical purposes, given to Tesla in 2010 in exchange for shares. A year later, Toyota opened its first simple, slim and flexible plant as a pilot north of Sendai, Japan, and a few years thereafter, Toyota sold its shares in Tesla. If the relationship would have lasted a little longer, and if Elon Musk’s hubris would have been a little less pronounced, Tesla could have learned something.
Before landing in production hell, and pitching a tent to make his Model 3, Musk promised that he would out-Toyota Toyota when it comes to lean manufacturing. He had a catchy name for Tesla’s non-existent miracle plant. He called it the Alien Dreadnought. I ask Akahane what Toyota calls its super-flexible line.
“We don’t really have a name for it,” Akahane says, and he doesn’t seem to think it needs one.
I completely agree with you, I'm just surprised how often I see people try to do this. As someone with lots of experience in advanced robotics, people ask for my advice on automating things quite a bit. I always tell them they're approaching the problem wrong, and they never listen until it's too late and usually (because it's often a startup) the company just outright fails.
You are not the first company in the world to try to automate <insert blank>, it just turns out it's roughly 2 orders of magnitude harder than you think it is. No, I will not build a production ready system that involves an unsolved robotics problem with a ~$100k budget.
He didn't have a third rule that says "If there's no process, automating a new will expose your hubris" but it's implicit.
and how exactly would they do that? their non-automated lines barely work.
citation?
Heck, their line was catching fire on a weekly basis a few months ago. Academic citations hardly necessary.
the point of my comment, which i thought was clear, was a counter to the continual tesla hype in that "can't wait until tesla addresses <this> problem" as if they've conquered all problems that have come before. toyota has it together and has a significant amount of r&d that goes into their advanced assembly lines. it's a bit laughable to think of tesla suddenly taking them on in automation given their historical troubles. or am i wrong?
also, those numbers are fine, but tesla isn't even the largest electric car manufacturer in the world, by sales numbers. and they don't approach traditional car makers. for example, kia sells around 600,000 cars in a single year, and that is including say three times as many models as tesla has available. tesla isn't some manufacturing darling story as far as i can tell. they have no ability to yearly iterate like other car companies. or do they? how do they update their models?
i think the point remains: it is flippant to suggest they can just suddenly innovate on an automated line.