21 August 2020 due to Zachary Shahan
After discussions with Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the breadth, depth and size of Tesla’s Autopilot team, we slipped into another issue, “the machine that builds the machine.” I think this may be Elon’s favorite Tesla-related sentence. (Although, those who look like a horse on a non-autonomous car should be there as well.)
It’s not just that this sis sounds cool. This is the essence of what Elon considers Tesla’s # 1 long-term competitive advantage *. Immediately after calling it “the machine that builds the machine”, he said: “Tesla’s long-term competitive advantage will be manufacturing.”
This is an interesting statement for several reasons.
First of all, Tesla’s relative inexperience in manufacturing is what many critics focus on. For years, critics have said, “Sure, Tesla has made very cool and exciting electric cars, but it’s addicted to manufacturing.” Panel gaps have basically turned into a widespread “joke inside”, both from how many critics have become obsessed (which has been a bit ridiculous in the grand scheme of things) and because, in fact, many Tesla cars (especially early ones) building new models) have had important panel gaps. (Although, the term “panel gap” was not coined in 2012 and exists because problems with panel holes Tesla had long beforehand.)
Another noteworthy remark about Tesla manufacturing – in particular Tesla’s manufacturing growing pain – came in a recent CleanTechnica interview Alex Voigt conducted with Peter Mertens, the former head of R&D for Audi and former board member of Audi, Volkswagen, Volvo, and Jaguar Land Rover. Alex asked him about Tesla’s difficulty with ‘production hell’ and how they in Volkswagen Group thought about it at the time. Peter shrugged it off, saying that they knew exactly what Tesla was going through from personal experience going through such phases, that the executives at Volkswagen Group knew that Tesla would go through with it, and that they did not see it as a big deal. In other words, although some critics treat Tesla’s growing pain as if they were leading the company towards the end of the world, Peter states that executives at one of the largest motorists in the world simply saw everything as a natural part of production evolution.
Another reason Elon remarks that “Tesla’s competitive advantage will produce in the long run” is interesting, however, is that Tesla has previously tried to move a little too hard on “the machine that builds the machine,” and some of its biggest cravings by production hell stem from that early dive. Because of these mistakes, many people assume that Tesla is hitting the target “the machine that builds the machine” and it completely kills it. Tesla had learned that some of the things it has tried to automate are being done even better by humans, but the company has automated even more processes than it had automated before, and Tesla is constantly looking for ways to do this. to do.
When I toured with a few others in Tesla’s Fremont factory last year CleanTechnica employees, Kyle Field and Chanan Bos, and we interviewed Automotive President Jerome Guillen and other top production engineers, we learned that Elon wanted the top production line engineers to find at least a few improvements per week to make the production process more efficient – cheaper and rapper. There is no stopping when it comes to innovation on the production line. In fact, it seems that one of Tesla’s best traits from a business perspective is his obsession with improving capital efficiency.
Many of those improvements mean improvement software systems in the factories. And this is what comes to a third interesting point about Elon’s assertion that “Tesla’s will produce competitive advantage in the long run.” It’s in the software, stupid! (I’m not calling you stupid – this is an excerpt from a famous political statement coined by James Carville in 1992.)
The brief conversation that Elon and I had recently about the machine that builds the machine originated with a line about software. We talked about Tesla’s Autopilot team, which I learned included a little over 100 hardware engineers and nearly 200 software engineers. At the end of our discussion on Tesla’s autopilot engineers, Elon said, “The factory system already has more software than the car and will probably have a sequel in the long run.”
Hmm. That came as a surprise. However, that’s something I’ve never had much thought of before. How many software engineers does it take to run a giant car factory, like a giant battery factory? A lot. In the age of the “Internet of Things” software had to be a big deal in a giant factory, especially in factories built and operated by a Silicon Valley company.
“People have no idea, especially in the US. It’s counter-intuitive, “Elon added.
It’s true – when you think of a factory, you think of people and big machines building things in a simple, repetitive way. We have had factories much longer than we have internet. Of course, one does not think: ‘Oh, I bet there is one tons of software that makes that factory run efficiently. However, that is apparently the case.
How much software is involved in a Tesla factory versus a competing automaker factory? Who knows? I did not receive any specific ratios or figures from Elon. It was simply implied that Tesla’s software focus and software advantages extend far beyond the cars, and perhaps perhaps more importantly when it comes to building and running factories – the machines that build the machines.
Elon has previously talked about the factory being the real product. He has used this metaphor at least a few times. One thing that statement has led people to believe is that Tesla can join produce factories for other companies. In other words, apart from building their own gigafactors to build their own cars, trucks and batteries, many have questioned whether Tesla would not also become a ‘factory construction company’ and take care of building gigafactors for others. (Of course, there would be a limit here, as the factory would have to produce non-Tesla products.) I wanted to get some conclusion on this theory / speculation, so I asked Musk about it. ‘I know you also mentioned that the factory is the’ product ‘. Some people have asked themselves if that means you will build factories for others at some point. ”
Musk replied, “I just mean we produce the factory as a giant machine that we design ourselves and improve every version, vs just copying from other car companies that contractors and suppliers do all the work (that is to say, catalog engineering ). “
Returning back to one of his core philosophical foundations in engineering, he added, “using first principles of physics to design the car and the factory together.”
Elon’s deep practical background is with engineering. He gave the relay that it expands back to his childhood, and not in a small way. This is a historical and personal matter that we may get to another time, but the most important point for today is that Elon is primarily working on Tesla’s technical problems. He is strongly averse to focusing on marketing. (Although, he is nevertheless a phenomenal natural marketer.) He is clearly prudent when it comes to finance, but he is much more interested in helping to find technical solutions than spending his time on comprehensive financing wizardry. (Another Zach is now responsible for that.)
“Yes, the vast majority of what I do every day is hardcore engineering across many disciplines. I am chief engineer at both SpaceX and Tesla. That would be a more accurate title than CEO. ”
That we will immediately refer to Elon Musk as Tesla Chief Engineer and CEO. And, either discuss Tesla’s 100+ Autopilot hardware engineers, ~ 200 Autopilot software engineers, 500-1000 Autopilot labels, Tesla’s battery engineers, Tesla’s solar branch engineers, or the software innovators who work every day to improve the machine that makes the machines, it might be worth considering that Elon can get into the weeds with them all and usually spends his time trying to pick up technical bottlenecks or riddles in these different fields.
That might help explain why so many top engineering students want to work for Tesla and SpaceX. It will certainly be fun to work for an enthusiastic engineer then to work for a large corporation where “The Man” will step on their neck and not respect or understand the technical mindset and workflow.
* There are actually several things you could consider Tesla’s top competitive advantage, and Elon Musk has used superlatives on a number of issues. For example, in response to a 2019 CleanTechnica article, he responded on Twitter, “Pace of innovation is all that matters.” That innovation is in Tesla’s factories, in their cars and batteries, in the software you find in the company’s factories and products, and in the way Tesla approaches problems of all kinds.
Riding innovation is all that matters in the long run
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2018
Today, however, the story revolves around the idea that “Tesla’s competitive advantage will be produced in the long run.”
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About the Author
Zachary Shahan tries to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here CleanTechnica as its director, editor-in-chief, and CEO. Zach is recognized worldwide as an electric car, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented on cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the US, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA] – after years of covering sun and EVs, he just has a lot of confidence in this company and feels it is a good cleantech company to invest in. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any kind on Tesla or any other company.
