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Takaoka Line 2, when Category Theory meets auto manufacturing. Love the carts they move cars on. Curious if Tesla attempts such a line next.

• protomyth 8y ago
  The article spends its last three paragraphs talking about Tesla: When we were theorizing about a gifted car plant, the example may have vaguely sounded like Toyota’s NUMMI plant, that was, for practical purposes, given to Tesla in 2010 in exchange for shares. A year later, Toyota opened its first simple, slim and flexible plant as a pilot north of Sendai, Japan, and a few years thereafter, Toyota sold its shares in Tesla. If the relationship would have lasted a little longer, and if Elon Musk’s hubris would have been a little less pronounced, Tesla could have learned something. Before landing in production hell, and pitching a tent to make his Model 3, Musk promised that he would out-Toyota Toyota when it comes to lean manufacturing. He had a catchy name for Tesla’s non-existent miracle plant. He called it the Alien Dreadnought. I ask Akahane what Toyota calls its super-flexible line. “We don’t really have a name for it,” Akahane says, and he doesn’t seem to think it needs one.
  • Judgmentality 8y ago
    You should never try to automate something before that something is already working. You can't optimize something that doesn't exist. It's the equivalent of scaling a company before you even have a product, let alone product-market fit. I completely agree with you, I'm just surprised how often I see people try to do this. As someone with lots of experience in advanced robotics, people ask for my advice on automating things quite a bit. I always tell them they're approaching the problem wrong, and they never listen until it's too late and usually (because it's often a startup) the company just outright fails. You are not the first company in the world to try to automate <insert blank>, it just turns out it's roughly 2 orders of magnitude harder than you think it is. No, I will not build a production ready system that involves an unsolved robotics problem with a ~$100k budget.
    • bryanlarsen 8y ago
      Elon just claimed that designing a rocket manufacturing process is 10X as difficult as designing a rocket, and that designing a car's manufacturing line is 100X as difficult as designing the car. I'm fairly certain he didn't believe that 10 years ago. :)
    • rangersanger 8y ago
      “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates. He didn't have a third rule that says "If there's no process, automating a new will expose your hubris" but it's implicit.
• nikofeyn 8y ago
  > Curious if Tesla attempts such a line next. and how exactly would they do that? their non-automated lines barely work.
  • colordrops 8y ago
    > their non-automated lines barely work. citation?
    • zemvpferreira 8y ago
      Tesla production problems are well documented: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tesla-model-3-production-stock-problems-engineering https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tesla-model-3-production-sto... Heck, their line was catching fire on a weekly basis a few months ago. Academic citations hardly necessary.
      • jsight 8y ago
        Now you are just making things up. Citations are really necessary when you start claiming things are catching fire on a weekly basis.
        • nikofeyn 8y ago
          i think they must be referring to tesla factory fires happening in fall of 2018, which is easily searchable (how i found it). apparently there were reports of frequent fires before a big one.
          • jsight 8y ago
            I am aware of fires both last year and this year. I am not aware of fires on a production line on a weekly basis. That claim is simply an absurdity.
  • nkoren 8y ago
    That's FUD BS. You don't produce nearly a quarter of a million cars if your production line "barely works". The truth is that they're now routinely exceeding a thousand Model 3 cars per day. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/