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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

They're better at making profit, that doesn't make them more efficient at building cars. Tesla sells a product which is differentiated based on software and brand, leading to huge margins. Tesla also uses more labor to make it's cars than traditional car companies, despite the fact that their cars are more mechanically simple. There's building a profitable company (Tesla has done this) and then there's doing good manufacturing engineering (Tesla is still working on this).

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No other automotive company is achieving this level of OpEx efficiency: https://i.imgur.com/ZroV0by.jpg

Yes, it is true that their operational efficiency of OPEX/revenue is excellent. But you can measure operational efficiency for a lot of different variables. Their headcount/unit is awful. Their OPEX/unit is not great either, about 50% higher than the average car. All that OPEX/revenue is telling you is that they charge a lot of money for their cars.

I'm not even saying they don't have great manufacturing practices objectively - if you compare them to a lot of other industries they absolutely do. But auto manufacturing has always been the cutting edge of manufacturing tech and they simply are not at the top of that highly competitive field yet.

Agree to disagree. I'm very (very) familiar with their manufacturing abilities in automotive. Tesla is absolutely bending traditional supplier capabilities. It's a fact. Ask any Tesla supplier and they'll agree.. expectations are next level (compared to traditional) in almost every aspect.

Can you elaborate on what is unique about their supplier expectations?

I'm curious, because sometimes exceptional supplier expectations come from a customer not really knowing what they need, so they ask for the world.

I learned this from an interview with Elon and some additional reading, but here is an example. Tesla makes their own seats. They asked one of the manufacturers to build them a seat that supports higher G forces than the "standard" seats since the instant torque in a Tesla is legitimately different than most other non-hypercar seats. They also wanted to integrate the heaters (and eventually the coolers)[1] for their seats directly into the whole vehicle heating / cooling system to use the lowest amount of energy possible. Expectedly, the manufacturer told Tesla no, that was silly, so they made their seats themselves. They now have seats that are rated for higher G ratings in crashes than virtually any other manufacturer that exists.

In doing something as simple as making their own seats, they were able to also improve the safety. They've put sensors directly in the seats to reprogram airbag deploy sequences, in software, on the fly. They know if there is a child sitting on the very edge of the seat vs an adult laying down across the seat and have the airbags fire differently based on this knowledge. Recently[2], they stepped this up a notch and are in the process of using millimeter wave radars to confirm this. They're industry leading in this regard and previously just used pressure sensors plus the cabin camera above the rearview mirror.

In short, Tesla is not perfect, but they are trying to rethink the problems from first principals. In doing this, they are coming up with very novel approaches that are actually big improvements over the entire industry. In other areas (fit and finish) they're towards the middle of the pack when compared against peer auto manufacturers.

[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-patent-refrigerant-seat-temp...

[2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-driver-monitoring-system-fcc...

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