"But Musk is said to want to start construction extremely soon and aims to have Model Y vehicles coming out of the plant by the end of the year."
That is just delusional.
That is just delusional.
But I'm sure it serves a purpose in giving his employees an aggressive target to aim at. Even if they miss it, at least they probably got there sooner.
I'm looking for his most ambitious and oldest targets and so far, most of them have been reached/exceeded. The most important one being the 500,000 production vehicles run rate for 2020 and 35 GWh battery production for Gigafactory Nevaga. Multiplying that duration by 2 or 3 would bring us to 2027 or 2034... If you can find an even bigger and older target, please share so we can re-evaluate.
[0] https://qz.com/1268647/elon-musk-says-a-fluff-bot-showed-him...
Though, I guess in this case it's to put some pressure on Texan government burocracy to hurry up with permits etc.
Over here at Giga Berlin, the local government issued temporary permits extremely quickly (for German standards) but it takes still longer to get all the paperwork done than it took to actually built Giga Shanghai.
That only works until the employees quickly realize the estimates are impossible bullshit, and stop taking them seriously.
That's the kind of management that would go whip the sea for disobedience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I#Invasion_of_the_Greek...
> According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes's first attempt to bridge the Hellespont ended in failure when a storm destroyed the flax and papyrus cables of the bridges. In retaliation, Xerxes ordered the Hellespont (the strait itself) whipped three hundred times, and had fetters thrown into the water.
If we can realize the goal is ridiculous, surely the engineers who work on this full time will realize it's ridiculous.
The flip side to doing things that don’t scale is that once those practices become a standard part of your operations you are forced to figure out how to scale them. This causes you to find the scalability hell or high water whereas if you didn’t do the thing in the first place you never would have invented the scalability.
I think he tries to just publicise the unpadded, best-case-scenario estimates rather than the best-guess estimates to push people to eliminate any slack in the project.
What about all the promises that have been made that never came to fruition? Do we just exclude those from this formula?
I hope they have real plans for the real work, while the CEO throws out PR bombs.
Seems to have worked
That would require an executive board entirely detached from both reality and what their own experts have to say regarding the feasibility of those plans.
They might be getting practice in building factories (what's the learning curve for car factories?).
Also, there was a thread a few days back about OSHA requirements; the Federal government sets minimum standards but each state's OSHA is free to set higher standard on top of that.
There is a line of thinking (at least, among Tesla apologists) that CalOSHA is "the reason" that Tesla has the "most reported safety incidents" of auto mfgrs.
I think a lot of workplace safety rolls up to the feds anyway, so it wouldn't matter which state you choose.
> States with Non-Fatal Workplace Illness and Injury Rates Above the National Average:
> California
> States with Non-Fatal Workplace Illness and Injury Rates Below the National Average:
> Texas
It's completely possible that Texas is less adversarial/bureaucratic or similar than California, but whatever they're doing is working.
Though it could be cultural differences. Government regulations are often half good best practices and half harmful backwards nonsense. A culture that only calls OSHA for not following best practices even after having it pointed out and not for not implementing backwards nonsense could pretty easily end up with a better safety record than one that prioritizes strict compliance over actual safety.
For starters, it's measuring non-fatal illnesses. If your regulatory regime is converting otherwise fatal accidents to non-fatal ones, then you're going to have higher rates despite being safer. (Historically, this has happened: the introduction of helmets in WW1 caused head injury rates to go up... because people who otherwise died now lived with a head injury instead).
Another point is that states have quite different workplace characteristics, so the baseline risks are going to be quite different. Working in a coal mine is going to be an inherently more dangerous job than being a paper-pusher in an office tower. Unsurprisingly, West Virginia (which has a lot more of the former than the latter) is in the above-average list and New York (which has the reverse) is in the below-average list.
Finally... there's no mention of the degree of difference at all.
This actually helps to mitigate your other point, because all types of industries can have non-fatal injuries from things like overexertion or slips on wet floors but fatal injuries are dominated by dangerous industries like mining, transportation and agriculture that differ by state.
The fatal injury rate between states is quite incomparable in particular because motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death among working-aged people, and the rate will be higher in states that are more spread out because workers in all industries there log more vehicle miles for work (and at higher average speeds).
> Finally... there's no mention of the degree of difference at all.
Texas can't be worse if it's better.
I don't think it's likely to happen, but delusional is a stretch.
US has permits, environmental reviews, inspections, labor laws, etc etc that all add time.
Lots of oil and gas (O&G) construction/services folks looking for work right now in Texas [3], so it's a good time for Tesla to move in. Also, Texas has an abundance of cheap wind energy they can't export due to ERCOT interconnect capacity issues. The SpaceX McGregor engine development and static fire test facility is only 90 minutes north of Austin, and Tesla already has an Autopilot R&D office there for the engineers they hired from AMD. Good pick for the next factory. Maybe a SpaceX HQ relo is in future plans.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tesla-... (Musk, Texas governor talk about potential Tesla move to Lone Star state)
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-gigafactory-4-berlin-ground-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/business/energy-environme...
Will still take a Cybertruck though.
How unreasonable must your jurisdiction be before you're permitted to take your business elsewhere and it isn't slandered as "extortion"? OSHA regulations apply in all 50 states, and both taxes and land costs are legitimately lower in Texas. Is every other company that has moved out of California extortionist?
[1] https://abc7news.com/bay-area-coronavirus-update-california-...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/california/califor...
If quarantine procedures are done correctly, the result should be nobody notices anything at all and they think it is overblown. But I don't think we are anywhere near that point right now even, it seems like denial to me to pretend like we aren't in the middle of a shit storm.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/tesla-workers-in-ga4-tent-de...
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/27/meatpacking-texas-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/opinion/sunday/coronaviru...
Edit: this is something I read on a comment here and seem totally unsubstantiated. However Bloomberg reports some of the conditions here. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-07-30/tesla...
It seems they have a pretty big sword hanging over there head, but I don't know how it compares to the usual conditions.
They've already exceeded that run rate on production and delivery (both batteries and vehicles) while being profitable.
They do have ~a million cars on the road but the software is neither capable of self-driving nor car sharing. They year isn't over, though, and the comment about robotaxis was that the car would be feature-complete[0], not operational.
Or how the companies we're talking about are actually performing?
I think to accept that delivering incrementally is helpful for making an L4 car you have to believe that having more data is the bottleneck, which probably isn't the case after a few million miles.
Do you really think Elon has a whole communication strategy design to 'keep the stock high' but then tweets 'the stock is to high'. How exactly does that make any sense at all?
He does the exact same thing with SpaceX and there is no stock market there. Why would he do that?
This has been his method before Tesla was a stock company as well. The same for the Boring company that only has a few investors, mostly him.
The reason he says what he says is the same as it has always been and he has explained this 100 times already, he sets targets that are very optimistic and he sets them publicaly, and even if they are off by 10% it still very fast. You can't achieve high goals unless you set them, and that is what he believes and how he has run his companies.
Elon has also said 100x that the short term stock market really doesn't matter to him, and he has proven that over and over again.
The reason for the stock price is not because what Musk says but what people believe the company can do and because Elon makes it clear what the priority is for them. It does not mean more then 1% of inverters believe Model Y will actually roll of the line in Texas by the end of they year.
Over-indexing on fancy production automation is part of what made the Model 3 launch so painful for them, as admitted by Elon himself. They probably could have had a much happier path spending less capital on a slower, more traditional production ramp-up.