> Making cars is really, really hard. There's a HN meme of sorts that goes like "I can build that same website functionality in a weekend, why does company XYZ

> Making cars is really, really hard. There's a HN meme of sorts that goes like "I can build that same website functionality in a weekend, why does company XYZ employ 5000 people to do it?!" It's a recurring theme because there's some truth to it. Someone can indeed build the core functionality of that website in a weekend, if they ignore 99% of the difficult work of doing it in production and supporting customers and all the rest of the mundane but important parts. Building a car isn't that hard really. Lots of people do one-off car build in their garage with basic tools and a shoestring budget. And they can build a fun car which works! Sure, it's not maintainable nor supportable but they built it and it works great. So while Tesla is well past the guy in a garage stage, they are still at the stage of "building cars is really easy" (if you ignore all the maintainability and supportability and long tail of parts availability and everything else that established manufacturers know how to do).