For a while, when I was more bullish on all electric cars, I think it was because I drew the wrong analogy from my smartphone. Sure, smartphone battery life is inconvenient, but unlike an electric vehicle, I can still use it while it recharges. An electric vehicle isn't useful while plugged in; I cannot run to the hardware store for a new flapper when the toilet is leaking when the battery is low. It's similar to railroad motive power trending toward diesel electric...there are use cases where all electric makes sense and justifies the infrastructure, but not the general case.
Mazda has traditionally been extremely negative on electric or other non-ICE powerplants.
[edit] This works in other areas. It seems like Apple is going upmarket fast and killing anything on the low end. Its already affected market share. I wonder if it will eventually get into profits.
Tesla are working on making a dark factory. Completely automated and that moves a car along at 1M per minute.
From a Quartz article in 2014:
So far, people taking back work done by robots at over 100 workspaces reduced waste in crankshaft production by 10%, and helped shorten the production line. Others improved axel production and cut costs for chassis parts.
“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” project lead Mitsuru Kawai told Bloomberg. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”
All those suppliers built manufacturing capacity because of established relationships with the automaker. It's why there will be German owned suppliers associated with a German manufacturer and Japan owned suppliers associated with a Japanese manufacturer, etc.
Manufacturing at scale happens by outsourcing. It's not the technology that limits, it's business capacity.
That's a good one. Next you'll tell me supply chain and logistics is just as simple as buying SAP or even better, that SAP is for fools and you're betting off rolling your own solution.
An unattributed quote my father told me back in the 80s: "Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding expense to an airplane also adds weight."
Elon's main focus right now is "building the machine that builds the machines", he says they will have the most advanced manufacturing in the world, vehicle or not, and based on his past successes, I don't see anything that will stop him other than death or illness.
Scaling car factories across the world is something that took BigCar decades and billions upon billions of dollars. And the level of automation expertise BigCar has is something that Tesla won't have for years to come.
> SpaceX has already accomplished a much harder task (reusable rockets), which not even nation states have been able to do.
SpaceX had three advantages:
1) no political bullshit like NASA has to suffer from with political aims shifting at least with every new POTUS, only Elon at the top with a clear, extremely long term vision
2) they were free to research in any direction they wanted and in the workflow they wanted, without being stuck on technologies, suppliers etc. due to unions, political collusion or other "government-only issues"
3) massive increase in technological capabilities: SpaceX came at perfectly the right time to enjoy the combination affordable super computing, 3D printing and especially decades of material science and rocketry research, while the Russians were/are stuck due to a lack of money and the ULA was hampered by being stuck on Waterfall-style development and general government issues.
https://electrek.co/2016/10/13/tesla-vp-vehicle-production-i... (yes, yes - it's electrek, a less than unbiased source...)
http://jalopnik.com/toyota-is-developing-new-solid-state-bat...
The incumbents tend to lose out in such scenarios, especially when they don't go all-in with the new tech and don't do it quickly before the new entrant establishes itself as a powerful player to be followed in the market.
So far, virtually all car makers have failed on all of those points.