4 ms·

When you look at it, it's truly astonishing (well, maybe not) what economies of scale one can achieve going from ~10k EAU to ~1M EAU (with up to 5M across other

When you look at it, it's truly astonishing (well, maybe not) what economies of scale one can achieve going from ~10k EAU to ~1M EAU (with up to 5M across other models to amortize engineering and common parts).

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Yes, but thought the electric car part market should have scaled by now. That leaves a smaller job of building the chassis. By how boxy it is should be easy pretty shortly. Hopefully price will come down quickly, because a simple no-telemetry e-vehicle is what I'm interested it.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  It isn't the electric car parts that are necessarily the bit that need to scale, though. The custom-manufactured sheet metal goes from being made out of house to owning your own metal-pressing facilities. The screws, fittings and hardware goes from "what we can buy off the shelf or pay to make custom" to "what's on the shelf was made initially for us". Same story for electronics. It's not even just the input materials that are helped by two-order-of-magnitude scale differences; assembly is also affected. Say you're considering a $100k robot to replace some assembly step that is currently done by a $10/hr human. At Bollinger-scale, that robot needs to save an hour of labor for each unit to pay for itself in a year. At Ford scale, it needs to save 36 seconds. Past that, engineering is affected too. At Bollinger, a $100k/year engineer can pay their own salary by shaving $10 off the unit cost. At Ford, that same engineer pays their salary if they reduce the unit cost by $0.1. Lastly, there are huge NRE's that are inherent to developing a car for sale (or any product, really) that scale very sublinearly with volume (think regulatory compliance and crash testing, prototyping, tooling etc), but that are amortized much more quickly at 1M EAU than 10K EAU. Given all that, it's astonishing that they are (hopefully) bringing this design to market at only ~2x the street price of the mass-produced competition.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Yes, but thought the electric car part market should have scaled by now. That leaves a smaller job of building the chassis. By how boxy it is should be easy pretty shortly. Hopefully price will come down quickly, because a simple no-telemetry e-vehicle is what I'm interested it.

InitialLastName 5y ago
It isn't the electric car parts that are necessarily the bit that need to scale, though. The custom-manufactured sheet metal goes from being made out of house to owning your own metal-pressing facilities. The screws, fittings and hardware goes from "what we can buy off the shelf or pay to make custom" to "what's on the shelf was made initially for us". Same story for electronics. It's not even just the input materials that are helped by two-order-of-magnitude scale differences; assembly is also affected. Say you're considering a $100k robot to replace some assembly step that is currently done by a $10/hr human. At Bollinger-scale, that robot needs to save an hour of labor for each unit to pay for itself in a year. At Ford scale, it needs to save 36 seconds. Past that, engineering is affected too. At Bollinger, a $100k/year engineer can pay their own salary by shaving $10 off the unit cost. At Ford, that same engineer pays their salary if they reduce the unit cost by $0.1. Lastly, there are huge NRE's that are inherent to developing a car for sale (or any product, really) that scale very sublinearly with volume (think regulatory compliance and crash testing, prototyping, tooling etc), but that are amortized much more quickly at 1M EAU than 10K EAU. Given all that, it's astonishing that they are (hopefully) bringing this design to market at only ~2x the street price of the mass-produced competition.