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Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I'm really perplexed about is the general criticism of Elon Musk over really candid statements. It's really refreshing to see someone just say something like this with honesty.

He gets flak for when he posts things like this on twitter because "omg, the stonks!?" but I find the criticism more indicative of systemic problems with the fiduciary duties of publicly traded companies than something Elon is doing wrong.

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Musk comes in for criticism because he spends a lot time on condescending shit-talk about older competitors, and then part of the time talking about how hard it is to do things that those older competitors spent decades laboriously working out.

Like, yeah, who knew mass-producing quality cars was way harder than it looks at first? How about the millions of people who’ve been doing it for a century?

Amazing how Musk getting something wrong, he is never hearing the end of it.

With many things, Musk was right. Both in automotive and in space, people 'insiders' have many believes and many of them turned out to be wrong.

SpaceX and Tesla got where they are by breaking conventional wisdom and if they had not done so, they wouldn't exist any more.

It so happens reinventing mass manufacturing was not as easy as other things. Tesla is still working on it, and they are making improvements that other car companies have not thought about. With each factory and each now Model of car they are interdicting improvements.

The very guy who does the interview with Elon that this information is built on was the former lead engineer at Ford and he believes Tesla is improving faster then anybody. He is incredibly impressed with the engineering and manufacturing at Tesla and how fast it is improving.

SpaceX and Tesla are both doing amazing things, no doubt. But there is a difference in how they got off the ground.

SpaceX did everything it could to collect and leverage what was known about making rockets. They climbed as high as they could onto the shoulders of previous efforts before they started inventing. Remember, Musk started out trying to buy rockets. It was only after he had done all that research that he started to realize that he could make them instead.

With Tesla, Musk did less of that. He allowed himself to think that since automakers couldn’t see the obvious opportunity in electric cars, they were hopelessly outdated in everything. Turns out that was wrong; carmakers do actually know how to make cars. This is evident in Tesla mistakes like buying a production line and not proving it before trying to use it in production.

Musk is extremely smart and Tesla is full of smart people. They are making huge strides and maybe their manufacturing ops will pass existing automakers someday. But they haven’t yet (despite the hype), and I think they would be in even better shape today if they had been a bit more humble and done a more thorough job of tapping what was already known about automaking.

What improvements are they making that other car companies haven’t thought about?

- Mega Castings, casting have been used before, but never at the size Tesla does. Tesla has costume co-designed machines and they developed their own alloy to make it work.

See: https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?t=273

- Structural Battery Cell (Packs are structural in some cars, not cells)

Eventually these two things together will basically be the main part of the car. This is nothing like anybody else does it:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0173/8204/7844/articles/1_...

- Fully integrated heating/cooling system 'Octovalve' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGffUODWWSE)

- Unifying chips to central computer

- Stainless Steel Exoskeleton

You can see a full breakdown of a last year Model Y here (same guy that did this interview with Elon, was very critical during Model 3 and impressed now): https://www.youtube.com/c/MunroLive/videos

That is of course only for cars, the improvement in battery production that Tesla has made are arguably more interesting. A whole video series on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZQ5OmYf-Vg&list=PLyvdbTy3v1...

But they built their moat and got lazy behind it. It should be even easier for the legacy manufacturers to innovate because they figured out the hard stuff in scaling already.

This is the sort of condescending stuff Musk likes to say.

What, specifically, is the moat that they are behind? Auto manufacturing is one of the leanest and most competitive industries in the world.

If they “got lazy” how come many manufacturers are still better than Tesla at basic fit and finish and hardware reliability? Do we suppose that Tesla is even lazier? (I don’t think that Tesla is lazy at all; I’m pointing out the flaw in using “laziness” as a metric.)

A car is a collection of many things. Musk properly understands the impact of Tesla’s electric drivetrain. He underestimated the sustained difficulty of manufacturing the rest of the physical car at scale, just like you are.

It’s tempting to look around the world at things as they are, and think that they must be easy since they’re already happening. People have been building cars for 100 years! How hard can it be? The truth is, a lot of what we take for granted in life is delivered through continuous effort against sustained difficulties.

Tesla is certainly not the only carmaker who struggles with automation and quality. Musk does seem like the only carmaker CEO who is regularly surprised that those things are hard.

One part of the moat has to be the dealership laws, where the incumbent manufacturers created a false barrier to entry. There is nothing lean or optimal about legislating that competitors have an arbitrary number of brick and mortar locations. There are probably others in such an established and complex market.

The moat is a few things, but most relevant to this conversation is manufacturing consistent quality vehicles at scale. Tesla has spent a ton of time trying to solve that, but people look past it because Tesla builds cars people want that aren’t being built by the legacy automotive industry. Weird, people want an electric car that doesn’t look like a dork-mobile who could have guessed. These companies are being dragged kicking and screaming into the future, and the best retort is inconsistent panel gaps.

The "laziness" clearly is not referring to manufacture quality. Obviously they are great at that. It's referring to the fact that a brand new ICE vehicle from 2021 looks exactly like a brand new ICE vehicle from 1990, with the addition of a backup camera, volume control on the steering wheel, and Carplay/Android Auto (which the car people didn't even invent).

Obviously I'm being slightly facetious, but surely nobody can be impressed with the innovation of car companies over the past 30 years.

You forgot the innovation of a $1700 GPS that is less usable than a $200 garmin, much less google maps.

Innovators dilemma, it’s hard to be innovative as well as optimized.

He said on an earnings call just a couple years ago that when he did the Toyota factory tour things were moving like granny on a walker slow and you would need a strobe light to see how fast the Tesla machines were moving and they were needing to account for air friction. He deserves more than the criticism he gets but he is surrounded by people enabling him and journalists have been uncritically reporting the things he says.

The majority of articles about the Nevada factory still use the fake render of that factory rather than any actual images as just one example of the enablement of the lies and fantasy around the company.

This is despite Tesla selling 21 times less cars per year, and only making not making all that much more (definitely more, but potentially not what you would expect for a company much smaller) per car sold? Consider also that Toyota's best selling car is cheaper than the cheapest Tesla, and their range extends significantly cheaper than that.

Tesla never claimed their manufacturing would be that fast in just a few years, that was a long term goal. Its totally disingenuous to claim this is what they believed they could do for the Model 3. Its still the long term vision.

The argument that everybody around Elon is a Yes men is also just nonsense, Tesla tries to do difficult things and sometimes they manage it and sometimes they hit delays. Tesla did actually hit their manufacturing goals eventually. Maybe a half a year later then Elon hoped but it did happen. And if you look at Model 3 in Shanghai, its much better. Model Y in Fremont was better and Model Y in Shanghai is better again. These program hit their goals pretty consistently. Tesla is clearly improving in their ability to execute mass manufacturing.

Nevada equally worked out perfectly. Its literally being cooped by everybody. Your criticism has literally nothing to do with Tesla, but rather with the media. The factory targeted 35GWh capacity in 2019, and it managed that in 2020. Its beyond that now. The building is only supposed to be complete, once its producing 150GWh.

Nevada hit both cell production targets and meet all state contracts in terms of employment numbers.

He gets flak because he says a lot of things that are quite shitty.

I must admit his current tweets about Dogecoin seem weird. He's literally shitposting, and some people will take it seriously and buy Dogecoins with real money instead of mining them.

To offer a counterpoint, I agree I like the honestly, but I will ask (I genuinely don't know): what does Tesla do about it?

So say I buy a Tesla, and I have some sort of manufacturing issue. Can I go to a Tesla service station to have it fixed? (Once again, I genuinely don't know, and I am curious actually).

If they are taking steps to fix it, I would applaud them as well, but I would not be happy to spend money on a Tesla, have an issue, and have these sorts of issues awknowledged, but then be stuck with said issue.

Generally, it depends on the level of the issue and how long you've owned the car. The car comes with warranties that last between 4 and 10 years, depending on the part. They should cover this sort of thing. Issues that can compromise passenger safety are subject to recalls, and do not have a time limit.

Tesla runs service centers and dealerships across their sales area.

In my experience there were two manufacturing issues with my car and they came to my location and fixed them for free. Obviously, it would better to not have them in the first place and I can't speak to the full set of issues people have had.

That's comforting to hear that they do address the issues.

All of the flaws Munro talks about in his videos and with Musk here are visible really from moment you pickup the car at mile zero. I believe Tesla do have some kind of no questions asked return of the car at pickup time (my Model 3 did in CA anyway).

More shocking to me is that some people will accept (new!!) from Tesla cars with paint and panel fit this bad. Some of the Model Y examples in my neighborhood are truly shocking - several of them the rear hatch door just does not sit flush at all when closed, yet the buyer still drove it home?

If a dealer sells you a brand new car with paint and panel fit issues, it's probably a good idea to refuse and request one free of defects. Sadly there are now some online checklists for buying Teslas that walk you through the most common cosmetic defects so you can spot them at pickup time (sad because this should not be necessary).

I wonder how many people even realize that’s an option. After all, there is no other major car company where you would have these kind of issues. It’s not normal to have to give back your car at mile zero because of massive quality issues.

Yes, though the service experience varies about as much as if you were dealing with car dealers.

I agree. He is pretty honest which is a good thing.

I think the problem is that the general trend is to put people either into the "good" or "bad" category in total. This doesn't allow to recognize that people are flawed and do some good and some bad things. Instead people want to perceive them as always good or always bad.

You see the same in politics. A politician does 10 things of which you make like some and not like others. But a lot of partisans bend their minds to like everything a certain politician does or hate everything he does.

  > He is pretty honest

"funding secured"

"pedo guy"

I feel like the folks who have a reputation along the lines for "just tells it like it is" are just as likely to make some horrible / wrong statements as well.

It seems like the impulse to just speak some blunt truth is as likely to be off the target as on.

He gets flak for his occasional cavalier statements and mocking tone, which is just a realistic reaction to expect from humans. Sure, there are those who dislike him in the typical shallow context where people take on team-sports attitudes about business and society, and we may argue about which source of criticism is more prevalent, but it's too easy to say that it's because he's "candid", "honest", etc. Those are common fallacious defenses for antagonistic behavior (and fits into the team-sports portion of attitudes).

I agree, we need to encourage people in power to be honest! Too many aren't, especially public company CEO's. I know lots of these guys and what they say on the golf course is totally different than what they say publicly.

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