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?
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.
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...
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himself to think that since automakers couldn’t see the obvious opportunity in electric cars, they were hopelessly outdated in everything.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, 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.
Obviously I'm being slightly facetious, but surely nobody can be impressed with the innovation of car companies over the past 30 years.