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Beautiful. Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont. > Peterson […] found that the factory could use robots
by leobg 1y ago
Beautiful. Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.
> Peterson […] found that the factory could use robots to do an increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would fix a robot instead of packing a box. Peterson estimates the average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff, has gone up some 50% over the past five years—without a change in head count.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoSo a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn’t sound noteworthy.
- lazide 1y agoThe US has (near as I can tell) forgotten even the basics. Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoI don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing 17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.
- lazide 1y agoThe US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries. Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy. As to if that matters? What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.
- phil21 1y agoI really despise this talking point. Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were talked about as the prototypical “we make airplanes instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” example. But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each individual component. There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy, workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national security. If we had simply gone up market and retained useful engineering and manufacturing skills/talent pipeline/capacity I’d totally agree. But we have not. Not to any appreciable degree by any metric other than numbers on a spreadsheet. We are talking about this in a thread discussing manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts 60 years ago it’d have been seen as utterly pathetic.
- 201984 1y agoMeasuring in currency can be rather misleading. Consider one country that manufactures a billion dollars of diamonds per year, and another that manufactures half a billion dollars of steel per year. Which has more industrial might? You need to compare what's actually being made and how much to draw conclusions.
- givemeethekeys 1y agoWhat's noteworthy is that an American company didn't immediately fire its employees to make way for the cheapest experts it could find for the new roles. Instead, they retrained their existing people for the new roles.
- AfterHIA 1y agoIt's a small thing but it's these little victories that give me a much needed ethics boner.
- didntknowyou 1y agodoubt it's some altruistics thing, likely retraining existing box packers were cheaper than hiring tech grads
- leobg 1y agoSeems like you and Adam Smith put different weights on the value of altruism. > It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
- appreciatorBus 1y agoNo one implied they were doing this altruistically. It's noteworthy simply because they bucked the conventional wisdom (offshore everything, US manufacturing cannot compete etc etc) and succeeded financially.
- yieldcrv 1y agocorporations doing retraining, what a concept
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIsn't Tesla Fremont widely considered a failure? The Model S was an expensive car with a bad reputation for quality. Then in 2017 they introduced the Model 3 and their "Alien Dreadnought" automation. That significantly delayed mass production of the Model 3 and almost bankrupted the company. Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai, and learning how to build a car from the Chinese. They then basically copied the Shanghai factory to Germany.
- luckydata 1y agono, that factory makes a ton of cars. had teething problems like every other car factory in the world. source: my significant other worked at tesla for a decade, now at Rivian.
- nomel 1y agoWhat's are your metrics of "failure"? Fremont factory has produced 3 million cars, in a manufacturing hostile/barren California (and thus Nevada gigafactory), covering ~50% cars produced yearly. [1] > Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai ~50% are made in China, with ~50% of those being sold in China (well until this year), avoiding significant Chinese tariffs. [2] [1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fremont-nevada-3-million/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fremont-nevada-3-million/ [2] Nice historic graph, including poor sales this year. https://carnewschina.com/2025/03/10/tesla-exports-3911-cars-from-china-in-february-down-87/ https://carnewschina.com/2025/03/10/tesla-exports-3911-cars-...
- bryanlarsen 1y agoSure, and the vast majority of those 3 million were cars were built after they disassembled their "alien dreadnought" factory and Tom Zhu et al went to China to learn how to build cars, and brought that knowledge back.
- nomel 1y agoAnd all the other US manufactures originally learned how from Japan. Some of their original manufacturing ideas didn't work out, and they iterated to better processes. That's not failure. That's plain old boring fucking engineering. Do you think China is bad or something? Everyone, especially in the industry, knows that there's more manufacturing expertise in China, because that's where the vast majority of the world has outsourced their manufacturing (and pollution), for decades, and the forseable future. Just ask the politicians, who have been singing "manufacturing is never coming back to the US" for decades, to justify their policies that prevent people from manufacturing in their backyards.
- hn_acc1 1y ago>Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont. Hopefully without all the illegal toxic waste dumping, forcing people to work during quarantine and ignoring crazy homophobic / racist environments and suing/harassing whistleblowers. The Fremont plant is not something to strive for in any way other than "it's a plant that manufactures things in the US".