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There's two parts to engineering: Making something good, and making something you can manufacture inexpensively. These two are in complete contradiction most of
by astrodust 8y ago
There's two parts to engineering: Making something good, and making something you can manufacture inexpensively. These two are in complete contradiction most of the time.
You can "engineer" the hell out of something and still do a terrible job as an engineer. Tesla's infatuation with novel, clever things often gets in the way of shipping. Their fiasco with the model X gull-wing doors is just one example of a billion.
It's easy to make your car better when you can charge vastly more and you've got tons of VC money you can blow through in pursuit of some distant goal. Established car companies have no such luxury.
This is not to say Tesla hasn't had some wins, but on the whole they're losing.
Arguably Tesla is the Juicero of cars.
- freehunter 8y ago>It's easy to make your car better when you can charge vastly more and you've got tons of VC money you can blow through in pursuit of some distant goal. Established car companies have no such luxury. Isn't that called "disruption" and is the entire reason Silicon Valley exists?
- astrodust 8y agoYou can "disrupt" without being in the Valley, plus a lot of companies that claim they're disrupting are just cherry-picking customers and barely moving the needle in terms of net-new technology. It's easy to make a billion dollar start-up if you get two billion in cash you can blow on acquisitions. It's hard to make that company survive more than ten years. When Tesla runs out of VC money, which they will, things are going to turn ugly in a hurry. All this money they've blown on door hinges and sending cars into space will be gone and they'll have to turn a profit. I'm not sure they can without massively cutting back and radically simplifying their product.