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Remember how the last U.S. car company to make it to mass production was over 100 years ago? Scaling up cars is really, really hard. It is not software.
by leesec 8y ago
Remember how the last U.S. car company to make it to mass production was over 100 years ago?
Scaling up cars is really, really hard. It is not software.
- jdhn 8y agoWhile scaling up is hard, it's not like the expertise to scale up doesn't exist. The auto industry is pretty established, and I'm sure that there are companies and/or consultants that could help Tesla out.
- leesec 8y agoAny operation of this size is going to have a multitude of issues. There is literally no way to do this cleanly.
- jfoster 8y agoHad any other car company ever scaled up as rapidly as Tesla is?
- SEJeff 8y agoNo. The last "new" American car manufacturer was GM, which was founded September 16, 1908 in Flint, MI. "ha ha ha Tesla is so bad at logistics, they suck so much! Look how much better everyone else is!" Imagine how much better I'd be at literally anything if you gave me a > 100 year head start!
- philwelch 8y agoNot only do countries other than the United States exist, but many of them are considerably better at car manufacturing.
- SEJeff 8y agoSure, but the article is about a new American car company, and we are discussing problems with production ramp. People often use GM or Ford for comparison, and I'm pointing out the silliness. Most of the EU based car manufacturers are even older than GM / Ford.
- philwelch 8y agoBy volume, the largest EU car manufacturer is Volkswagen, which barely existed before WWII. The other German manufacturers also had to start from scratch.
- SEJeff 8y agoVolkswagen was founded May 28, 1937, and they were the fuhrer's favorite. That's still 66 years head start. I bet if I gave you a 66 year head start in virtually anything you could probably do a better job than I will when I start. You've not disproved the underlying meaning of my statement really. I don't see why people are downvoting it as the content is sensible.
- philwelch 8y agoVolkswagen was used for war manufacturing pretty much as soon as they started and never manufactured commercial passenger vehicles until years after the war. If you made that point about Daimler or BMW you might have a point, because they actually made cars before being turned into Nazi war manufacturers and bombed into oblivion, but Volkswagen was never anything but a Nazi war manufacturer until the end of the war. > You've not disproved the underlying meaning of my statement really. What, that learning how to manufacture large numbers of automobiles is a lost art from the 19th century? The underlying meaning of your statement is absolute garbage because there's half a dozen East Asian companies that figured it out since 1960, some of them even since the mid-1980's.
- SEJeff 8y agoUmmmmm Hitler ordered the manufacturing of the Bug in April of 1934. This was before WWII. Civilian production was stopped at the start of the war, but it was definitely being built before the war, as evidenced by many historical sources.
- philwelch 8y agoMost Americans didn't own cars until a few years after the Second World War. So that's maybe 70 years ago, but let's give the car companies some credit because they already scaled up to produce war materiel about a decade previous. Volkswagen, though, started from 12,000 cars per year in 1946, which is remarkable in itself. Between 1949 and 1969, Toyota scaled from tens of thousands to millions of cars produced per year. That's 50 years ago. Kia manufactured 26 cars in 1986 and millions of cars per year today. That's 33 years ago. Tesla isn't doing something that hasn't been done in over a century, unless you're willing to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist and you're willing to round up "less than 80 years" to "more than 100 years".
- leesec 8y ago>unless you're willing to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist Well that's why I said U.S. car company...
- philwelch 8y agoBecause you're willing to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist? There's no other point to qualifying it like that--manufacturing and logistics techniques from Japan or Korea or Germany or China still work when applied to the United States.