In some ways, I think the long software-is-eating-the-world boom has been bad for us as an industry. We have been so successful with "throw tech at it" solutions that we don't know when that isn't a good idea. E.g., the Silicon-Valley-reinvents-grilled-cheese flop The Melt [3], or the $120m clown show that was Juicero [4].
American car companies spent decades trying and failing to learn Toyota's approach. They even had enthusiastic help from Toyota, who even went so far as to take GM's worst plant and redo it as a joint venture. (Interestingly, it's the same plant that Tesla now uses. [5]) For those unfamiliar with the story, I strongly recommend This American Life's episode on it. [6] But my takeaway was that executive arrogance kept GM from learning that there was a much better way to make cars. That sounds more and more familiar these days.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40461624/how-toyota-is-putting-h...
[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18960044/ns/business-autos/t/study...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-trendiest-grilled-cheese...
[4] https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
I think underlying a lot of this is a disdain in America for blue collar workers. People at the top thing of them as dumb monkeys and that there is nothing to what they do. Hence the falsely assume a computer or robot can do the job just as well.
The Japanese showed that by utilizing what humans are actually got at you get better productivity. Using humans the same way as robots is a very bad way of utilizing the flexibility inherent in a human.
It could simply be that everybody knows that blue collar job are eventually going to disappear. You don't want to build your latest factory using technology that will make you obsolete in a few years.
Obviously we were not quite there yet in the 80's/90's. Otherwise you would be reading the opposite story on how Japanese Car Factories failed because they used human instead of machine like in the US. Actually you can replace "Japanese Car Factories" in the previous sentence with a lot of thing that are actually true today.
Now, about Tesla, there is some relevance. They are still building car that are very much like regular cars and other manufacturer are building their own factories regularly for new platform/model, not held back by legacy issues. So it does indeed seem that Tesla is at an experience disadvantage.
I guess what happens is that this is Tesla trying to leverage a manufacturing bet on top of its successful "electric car" bet. You can see that on how harshly they lashed at journalists talking about their manufacturing safety, and draw some parallel with the initial review of the model s ( compared to today where you can make a 100 million view video bad mouthing about their car and Musk would probably not even be notified )
Tesla real goal is to find a manufacturing process that can get them producing car 1 order or 2 order of magnitude faster than the competition (and you know such a process cannot include human). They want to be the market leader by volume on every single class of electric vehicle in 10 years.
Everybody does not know that. Indeed, a lot of people know the opposite. Including Toyota, who went from a small-time player in post-war Japan to the world's largest car company based on the belief those jobs weren't going anywhere.
How is just assuming that without evidence not disdain for blue collar workers?
> Tesla real goal is to find a manufacturing process that can get them producing car 1 order or 2 order of magnitude faster than the competition (and you know such a process cannot include human).
I'm not sure this is true, and if it is, I don't think it's a particularly smart goal. Toyota spends ~30 worker-hours on building a car. Getting that down to 3 doesn't do much to reduce costs, and getting them down to 0.3 does way less.
To make that happen, Tesla will have to invest a lot of money in less flexible, less repurposable hardware and software. This a) doesn't save money in the short term, b) can introduce significant lags (because they're spending time up front to save time later, and also because they've increased delay risk), and c) may lock them in to suboptimal techniques in conditions where human workers could keep improving.
In order for that to be disdain, you need to associate people identity with their job.
I'm not a millennial, but I'm still young enough that the concept of job as identity does not fit the social reality of the people I know. They have moved between position enough that they cannot just be summarised by their present occupations.
So this is not disdain for the people, but for the jobs. And not only those jobs, but all the jobs, including mine. I want Star Trek for my great-great-grand-children, not grinding at work till they drop.
> I'm not sure this is true, and if it is, I don't think it's a particularly smart goal. Toyota spends ~30 worker-hours on building a car. Getting that down to 3 doesn't do much to reduce costs, and getting them down to 0.3 does way less.
I don't know what Tesla is doing, but what you say is correct, there is no gain to make by replacing a human by a robot if the robot is not providing massive economies somewhere. I personally don't think that hate of blue collar worker is really that valuable to Tesla, so I'm thinking more of massive throughput increase. Since it appears that Tesla want to spread in every market segment, being able to build a "10x" production line would allow them to do it at a fraction of the time of their competitor.
Note that I'm not suggesting that Tesla is going to make it, or that the technology is ready. Musk and Tesla investors do.
Another point which one always has to keep in mind with Musk. Maybe that's also related to SpaceX. If humanity has a future in space, it needs to be able to build stuff with as little human as possible.
edit: I just noticed that I missed the proof. Like the majority of the people on HN, I'm in the business of automating other people job away. I have friends working in the engineering field and I have yet to hear a story about some new tech requiring more human being than before. It is the same as white collar work: next release will require less people or less qualified people.
Plumbers are not going to disappear. There is heaps of repair work that won't disappear.
But beyond repair, look at construction. There are all sorts of claims about how 3D printing and full automation of house construction is coming, but go and look at almost any construction site you see.
(edit: Innovation is hard with construction in part because people want things that will definitely last 50 years. Fail fast is great on a web app, but what about failure in 10 years because 3D printed concrete doesn't work correctly in your location? How about brick laying robots cement failing in 15 years when the company is insolvent? Are you up for the risk? )
Power tools introduced in the 1950s or earlier have made a huge difference, but these jobs do not appear to be disappearing.
In Australia I've heard of teachers and people who can write mean python code quitting to become builders.
People with power tools are productive and very flexible. We're a long way off from a machine that can attach a deck to a house and make a hole in a wall for a window.
This is circular reasoning. Blue collar jobs will only disappear if no-one builds factories using them, because everyone knows these jobs will disappear.
> you know such a process cannot include human
Sounds like you're just assuming this is true, because "more tech is always better/faster/etc". I'm not so sure this is correct.
$6 for a tiny, soggy microwaved cheese sandwich. $3 for a tiny bowl of soup.
Real estate wasn't the source of their failure.
> while yes, the headaches of real estate in the Bay Area—where The Melt first set roots—are well established, fingering real estate is a bit like pointing out that it gets cold every winter
Also, you said you haven't heard of them, but you made the claim that it's a microwaved soggy grilled cheese sandwich. I've never had a soggy grilled cheese at The Melt.
I remember when this image was making the internet rounds a couple years ago and I was surprised how many people hadn't thought about the issues with it. Luckily, I know no one that had tried it for real.
Overall, I never liked the idea, and I told her that. I said it was way too expensive and they would have to decrease the price by 80% for it to be viable. But for the people who got it, mainly celebrities and millionaires, they loved it. I think I remember that Beyonce or Katy Perry or Britney got it for all of her dancers, etc.
The entire "green juice" industry is large, and the founder made his first millions by selling chains of these types of juices. The target was to make a glass of green juice less expensive than what you would find at a high-end gym or juice shop. The plan was to build it out with the people who were willing to pay for them, like celebrities and influencers, and then make them mass-market. The biggest expense was getting the food chain up and running, trying to get enough local farmers, etc, and getting the freshest ingredients possible. The internet connection, while ridiculous on the surface, was necessary to ensure that the ingredients were still fresh, because they literally had no preservatives. They wanted to avoid having people drinking a glass of mold or worse especially if they weren't mindful of expiration dates. This could also help if they sold these presses to juice shops (a later business strategy) and the person selling the juice might have old expired stock.
But once it was set up, the plan was to scale out and lower prices through higher volume. Unfortunately, the bad press hit just as they were doing a round of funding and went bankrupt soon after because funding dried up.
Do I think it would have been a hit? Probably not. But the idea wasn't absolutely stupid. It's about the same as any other Silicon Valley idea I've heard. Cater to a very select market of influencers first, and then scale out and create a new market based on green juices. The company absolutely believed that green juices would help the world, because it's a lot healthier, etc, so if you buy into that mindset that they could create a new industry, then it made sense.
Did they make pure business strategy mistake? Yes, just like other companies. Did the founder have too much of a Steve-Jobs-Deity complex by trying to over-design the press? Yes. But it's not nearly as bad as people believe from the headlines. The goal was to create a new market, like how Uber created a market by lowering prices for ridesharing. If you could lower the price of green juice to the price of a Starbucks latte from $15, then they really felt like this company would be a tremendous success.
They started in 2013, long after books like "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" explained exactly why scaling up before you have traction is a huge mistake. They could have learned the "this isn't working" lesson for an order of magnitude less money. If they had done that, they a) would have had capital to recover from their early mistakes, and b) would have been much better placed to find that low-cost solution.
When I look at a crater like that, I think about the 50+ seed rounds (or 20 A rounds or whatever) that could have happened but didn't because they got high on their own slide decks. They blew up not because they couldn't have discovered these problems, but because they didn't want to.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/20/health/romaine-lettuce-e-coli...
Was it overengineered? Yes and they wasted a lot of money. But my point is that there were reasons that weren't completely insane.
Not to mention that even this doesn't require anything fancy. The screw press was invented two thousand years ago by the Romans to make JUICE!
It was ridiculous on the surface, but also ridiculous all the way through to the core. We eat a lot of perishable items, and we have a well understood mechanism for dealing with it: Expiration dates. Making the expiration date into a QR code that gets scanned and then sent to a server so it can be checked by a computer is a thing you can do, but you can also just put it on the packaging, the way every other item in your pantry and fridge do.
If you really wanted to be crazy, you could encode the expiration date in the QR code and check it that way - again, without a net connection.
> But once it was set up, the plan was to scale out and lower prices through higher volume.
Not a bad plan. But as has been pointed out ad nauseam at this point:
1) One of the reasons the price was high is that the machine was poorly designed and hideously over-engineered. Relying on prices to drop as your volume increases is great, but if you do an even mediocre job at product design, you need to rely on a lot less volume.
2) The fundamental idea of the machine wasn't very good. A supply chain to ship bags of high quality juice to people? Great idea. A fancy machine to (effectively) open the bag? Not a great idea.
> But the idea wasn't absolutely stupid.
There were elements of the idea that weren't absolutely stupid. But taken as a whole, as implemented by Juicero? ...yeah, it was absolutely stupid.
Let's be clear: The business model was selling a hideously expensive gadget for very high prices, so that you could then sell the buyer a bunch of juice packs. Selling a cheap gadget for high prices and abandoning the juice packs might have been a good strategy (albeit scummy); the mainstay of stupid infomercial gadgets. Selling an expensive gadget for a low price so you could make it up on the juice packs might have been a good idea (it's a tried and proven strategy). But an expensive gadget at an expensive price, so you can sell juice? All you're doing is crippling the sales of the juice packs.
> Did they make pure business strategy mistake? Yes, just like other companies.
Just like other failed companies, yes. The only companies to succeed after that level of strategic failure were the ones lucky enough to pivot. This wasn't a viable idea!
> If you could lower the price of green juice to the price of a Starbucks latte from $15
I dunno about where you live, but around here a green juice from a juice bar is already a lot closer to a Starbucks latte than to $15, and the Juicero packs were actually more expensive than just going to a juice bar.
You're totally right that cheap, high-quality juice for the masses is a viable idea. And you're right that initial high prices, falling due to volume is a good idea. What I think you're missing is how little these things have to do with Juicero.
The expiration of these packets were measured in days or maybe a week, not weeks. Also, as I mentioned above in another comment, there could be particular product recalls like the current romaine lettuce recall. I'm not arguing that it wasn't overengineered, I'm just pointing out why they did it. I wouldn't have done it, but they chose to.
> One of the reasons the price was high is that the machine was poorly designed and hideously over-engineered.
It was totally overengineered. When my friend read the product breakdown from one of the blogs about how it was as if completely unexperienced mechanical engineers had designed the press, she said this wasn't too far off the mark. But the main reason for the failure wasn't the press, it was the food supply chain. That was way too intensive and expensive and wouldn't scale the way they wanted it to. They spent money on food scientists to make sure that the combination of vegetables they used wouldn't interact during the time that they were packaged together, etc. The people they were marketing to were pretty price-independent. $600 for a dumb press wasn't a big deal if they got a great green juice, which they did. Their phase to expand and lower the price was in the future, before they died because funding dried up.
> Just like other failed companies, yes. The only companies to succeed after that level of strategic failure were the ones lucky enough to pivot. This wasn't a viable idea!
Firstly, 90% of all startups fail.
I never said it was a viable idea. I thought the idea wasn't good. But the investors took a chance. That's how it works. Even YC admits that the idea is less important than the people who are attempting the startup. The founder had fundamental experience with launching juice bars on the East Coast, and the idea to create a new market wasn't horrible. Investors took a chance, and then the management fucked it up.
And yes, you can laugh at how dumb the idea is now, but the same goes for Soylent, or even the infamous Dropbox comment in HN. But at least their idea wasn't just "sell $600 juicers ad infinitum and make $$$$". That's my point. A lot of the article miss this.
Juicero is just another failure like all other failures we see all the time in Silicon Valley. There are far worse examples of bad investments out there. I'm sure it's definitely in the bottom quartile of bad investments, but in my opinion it's not like it's the worst ever and doesn't deserve the level of humiliation associated with it. It was just a mismanaged idea that got bad press and then the Internet Lynch mob jumped on it.
I don't know if you can give this as an example in support of internet connectedness - we seem to be doing OK with the romaine lettuce issue without overpriced IoT salad bowls.
That isn't a particular hurdle. There are plenty of products in my local supermarket that have an expiration date measured in hours after purchase (usually about 3 or 4 days in total, the sticker is printed on-location, this especially concerns some raw meat products).
>Also, as I mentioned above in another comment, there could be particular product recalls like the current romaine lettuce recall.
That might require an internet connection but not permanent either. The juicer could simply have a blacklist of product IDs. Supermarkets also already implement this at the checkout. The cashier will be unable to add the item to the bill, even if a supervisor gets out their admin keys and tries it manually (the computer will even block same-price manual entries after a blocked item is scanned during checkout).
In the lean startup world, people talk about early products in "painkiller vs vitamin" terms. If you're going to build a new kind of business, you want a product that people are desperate to have. If it's a nice-to-have, it's much harder to find enough early adopters to build a sustainable business. (Not impossible, but it takes a lot more capital and is much riskier.)
Juicero was literally a vitamin play. Nobody needs it, but some people like it. Coffee, on the other hand contains an addictive stimulant that 60+% of Americans consume every day. People need their morning coffee, and will literally develop headaches if they don't have it often enough.
Juicero=Nespresso is one of those comparisons that only makes sense if you don't think about the details. Sure, it's got some surface plausibility, but only if you don't think much about the details.
Royalty would pay the equivalent of millions of dollars today for spices because they would balance your humors.
A source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
The US used graphite and paid ridiculous amounts of money for it. The USSR greased pencils or out right crayons instead.
It's okay to be wrong. I distinctly remember believing the (false) pencil story once, before reading more about it and learning the (far more interesting) actual story. And also realizing that the false pencil story pushes certain goals and agendas, too, so probably isn't accidental.
Always good to be humble and remember that I'm not smarter than a rocket scientist in their own field.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
I think with this way of thinking there will never be progress. It's thanks to this try-and-fail that this man was able to build things that nobody thought to be feasible. We are talking about mistakes that were done in the '80s, meaning that this man is trying to leverage what we have nowadays and he still can't, which is pretty sad, considering how advanced we think of ourselves compared to 40 years ago.
Sometimes it's this way of thinking that really prevents innovation: we tried, it didn't work. Sure, you tried under different circumstances, I am quite sure you gave up on that for whatever reason and you are fine with it. Good lesson. However, there will be a new generation that will make it, no matter all your "I told you so".
I want to see if in the future, when we'll have highly developed AIs, we will think "oh, 200 years ago we tried already and it didn't work".
What Tesla is doing is like building a modern app but refusing to do A/B tests or code review or version control, generally universally accepted methods in the current industry, and going back to re-try software development patterns of the 1980s that failed.
I think if you had picked any other example you'd have been correct, but many current-day AI advances are based on decades old techniques. One caption from an article about Geoff Hinton states: "This publication from the mid-1980s showed how to train a neural network with many layers. It set the stage for this decade’s progress in AI."[1]
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one...
The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture. This is why the n-gate summaries love to describe Hacker News reinventing everything from first principles -- there's this ingrained assumption that it's literally impossible for anyone outside of SV to have ever had any kind of relevant experience or possessed any kind of relevant knowledge, and so there's no point in studying the history at all.
Tesla is now learning, in a very painful way, why hubris is traditionally considered a major flaw, and that maybe this stuff is harder than they thought and they could have benefited from standing on the shoulders of some giants.
Is that the same arrogance of the opposite party saying "I told you so, son"?
I have never been in the Silicon Valley, so I won't talk about that. Yet, I think that this mentality creates at least 1 good thing after trying 99 times.
I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path, that you need to always follow what your "parents" have been telling you, etc - and this is due to the environment I live in, unfortunately.
If Musk had been able to achieve what he had envisioned, now we would be talking about something totally different - OMG, what a genius, how come we didn't come up with that earlier? How come this young man made something we thought impossible, despite all the studies, etc.? And so forth. That's the same cowardice that doesn't allow us to think further, to think bigger. He does, he fails, he tries, he fails again, and who knows, maybe he makes it. If he doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. Without that way of thinking, we wouldn't have put our foot on the Moon.
Who said it has to? I didn't.
What I said was that Silicon-Valley-type people often display a certain amount of hubris in believing that nobody else has ever done what they're trying to do, and therefore disregard free knowledge that others obtained at great expense.
Musk is attempting the revolutionary, never-before-heard-of, herculean task of... building a factory to make cars. Strip away all the PR-speak from Musk's and Tesla's public announcements and statements, and that's what you find underneath. "Build a car factory" is not a new problem. We have over a century of prior art on things people have tried, what succeeded and what failed. It's the willful ignoring of this prior art that I'm complaining about; other companies have learned about the advantages and disadvantages of automation, for example, but the whole enterprise of Tesla is wrapped up in so much mythology around breaking new ground and being completely new that they were constitutionally incapable of admitting "yeah, this is a thing other people have done, too, maybe we should study how it went for them and learn from that".
Even still, I find it hard to see the future for Tesla that real fans seem to perceive. SpaceX has literally and figuratively taken off, but Tesla just seems stuck. I’m especially leery of how willing they seem to be to beta test software that can cause loss of life and limb. I also don’t see how existing Titans in the automotive space can’t just eat Tesla’s lunch, given that they can crank out a couple orders of magnitude more cars per year than Tesla. What is Tesla doing that they can’t copy, given that Tesla is still trying to figure out the assembly line?
This position is completely fair.
But the company taking these risks should never, ever have been Tesla.
Can you list a couple of things that this man built, that everyone thought not possible?
Non-state entities have made all of the USA's rockets.
They weren't reusable because at the time they weren't cost effective. It's only recently that material sciences has reached the point where reusable rockets are potentially cheaper than single-use rockets (and even then, only after 5-6 launches).
Nobody had landed a rocket that way before SpaceX and Blue Origin did it.
There is nothing fancy about Falcon 9 rockets materially wise as far as I know. The key innovation was in the control software and using software industry style rapid iterations to try again and again until they nailed it.
SpaceX developed rockets at much faster pace and lower cost than the competition thanks to this iterative approach vs the water fall method used by the competition which cost 10x as much and is significantly slower.
Your talk of material science would be more relevant to the space shuttle I think. That was an attempt at reuse using sophisticated technology and materials. The spaceX innovation is reusing a cheap rocket. NASA developed a reuse system based on a very expensive and advance design.
Let's not give SpaceX accomplishments that weren't actually theirs - it makes it easier to dismiss everything else they're doing. The DC-X did this (as a sub-scale SSTO demonstrator) in the 90s.
The key to success in those cases was that those industries were quite moribund. In the case of space it was nearly comatose.
Attempts to radically leapfrog and disrupt less stale industries are going to be quite a bit harder.
I appreciate the value of thinking things through from first principles, but there comes a time when you have to stand on the shoulders of giants and save a few billion dollars of wasted cap-ex...
The relevant portion with the stock analyst starts about 46:00 in.
Humans are in many conditions surprisingly fast, accurate, flexible, space saving and cheap when compared to a special robot that does the same thing.
Tesla started with a clean slate, of course they will repeat some mistakes but they have the prospect of building a revolutionary product. In a way, a bit of chaos comes with the territory.
The Tesla obviously has better mind share at the moment, but various aspects of the vehicles are pretty comparable (even though they aren't really aimed at the same market segments):
https://www.consumerreports.org/tesla-model-3/tesla-model-3-...
I don't see a generational advantage for Tesla when I compare the 2. I see Tesla having a very short amount of time to match quality levels and production volume.
It's based on media reports like https://electrek.co/2016/11/30/gm-chevy-bolt-ev-loss-before-... and http://gmauthority.com/blog/2017/06/ubs-gm-probably-loses-ab....
Electrek report is based on taking to GM insiders. gmauthority is based on a vehicle teardown.
For what it's worth during earnings calls Tesla discloses profit margins for their cars.
As I understand it, GM never publicly disclosed profit margin for Bolt so the unofficial guesses is all we have to go on.
It paints a hopeful picture if you're interested in the future of electric cars, I think. The Bolt is something GM threw together with the minimal amount of effort necessary, understanding that this generation would have pretty low volume, and it's honestly really good for what it is.
An additional 72 mile range for the Model 3. And a standard compact car form factor to Chevy’s sub sub-compact. I’m sure that yields some shoulder room and other comfort benefits.
The form factor is also not a technical thing, it's the sort of thing I was trying to head off with they aren't really aimed at the same market segments. I think it is fair to say that the Model 3 is the more desired car, but that's not the same as demonstrating a big lead in electric platforms.
Whatever Tesla is trying, they aren't actually delivering that, either. The model 3 may have curb appeal (the interior is another story) but it certainly isn't at a low price (the base price is above the median total—options and taxes included—transaction price of a US new car purchase.)
Before Tesla, EV were seen as clunky, not very convenient and half baked conversion from already existing gas vehicles chassis. A few people were buying them because "hey, I'm saving the planet" (not really, this sweet electricity is still coming from fossil fuel).
But Tesla made EV kind of sexy, partly due to Musk other adventures that made people dream, mainly SpaceX, but also because of the "sporty" feel of the Model S and the "high tech" image of it.
Frankly, personally, I'm a bit tired of all the "praise Musk like a god" thing. The guy is refreshing in a world where everything must summarized in Excel and companies seems to be managed more by accountants rather than technology.
The guy is interesting as it has made the public aware of new possibilities regarding cars. He has unlocked something. But should we deify him for that? no. EV are still under conventional cars in term of autonomy, cost and reloading time. And personally, I think that cars are kind of a waist of resources to begin with: it costs a ton, it consumes a lot of energy per passenger and it's a mostly underused complex piece of machinery (few hours of commute every day at most).
Nowadays, I kind of wish for Tesla to crash and burn. I know it's irrational (and I will probably be down voted for it), but at least, it will shut-up the other irrational part of the audience praising Musk constantly and without reserve.
Now the market exists where there are companies doing the infrastructure and companies doing the cars. I’d argue that jumpstarting the market was revolutionary. I’d also contend that we’re seeing the beginnings of the another market jumpstart from Tesla in the pairing of battery storage with renewables.
If you look closely, there is very little that's actually innovative about Tesla (and what is is mostly Panasonic battery tech).
Same deal with Tesla, if they can get Model 3 production up.
People don’t like to acknowledge this as an accomplishment. But the idea, and successful implementation, of selling an electric car that isn’t what a soy patty on gluten-free bread is to a burger was quite a revolution.
The only marketing activity Tesla hasn't actually used is paid TV commercials, unless you include Hulu or online streaming, in which case... Tesla has actually used every mode of advertising commonly used by its competitors.
The fact that Tesla doesn't actually categorize its marketing activities as marketing in its financial statements just means that Tesla isn't following GAAP.
Marketing, promotional and advertising costs are expensed as incurred and are included as an element of selling, general and administrative expense in the consolidated statement of operations. We incurred marketing, promotional and advertising costs of $66.5 million, $48.0 million and $58.3 million in the years ended December 31, 2017, 2016 and 2015, respectively.
Historically, we have been able to generate significant media coverage of our company and our vehicles, and we believe we will continue to do so. To date, for vehicle sales, media coverage and word of mouth have been the primary drivers of our sales leads and have helped us achieve sales without traditional advertising and at relatively low marketing costs.
In fact I would claim most technologies are like that. Hence to call something revolutionary, it makes most sense to talk about who has made a radical improvement.
It is kind of like how there were smart phones before iPhone, but iPhone was such a radical improvement that it represented a revolution.
In much the same manner, the Model S was a revolution, similar to iPhone. It pushed electric cars significantly forward and set the bar for what an electric car could be.
If you disregard labels, Tesla was the first company to place this particular, very risky, bet. And it has paid off.
Electric cars were considered either not practical, or not desirable. Tesla made a car which was both.
If you disregard that, than fine, nothing was revolutionary. But then, by that standard, nothing is revolutionary.
Not sure what you see as revolutionary, but 10% improvement is evolutionary, maybe 30%, but 100% improvement is a new level.
On range, Tesla Model 3 only has a slight advantage over the Chevy Bolt, 20 miles based on third party test. Tesla isn't remotely close to 2x on range unless you're comparing the Model 3 to a first generation Nissan Leaf.
Speed? Definitely not 2x, unless you're actually claiming Model 3 can do >180 mph (Bolt is rated a 91 mph max speed, and the first generation Nissan Leaf had a max speed of 93 mph. Model 3 is rated at 140mph max speed).
Acceleration? Chevy Bolt is 7 seconds 0-60, while the Tesla Model 3 is 4.6 seconds. Not 2x.
Comfort? Almost tied. Advantage? Bolt, considering that the most expensive Bolt (with all options) is still several thousand $$$ cheaper than the cheapest Model 3 available for the foreseeable future.
Brand recognition? Depends on where you are. Everyone has heard of Chevrolet. Not everyone has heard of Tesla.
Design? Depends on what you're looking at. If you mean just the lines of the vehicle as they were intended, sure, the Tesla wins. If you mean the lines of the vehicle as put into production, the Bolt wins, hands down. The Model 3 is already infamous for misaligned panels, large gaps in the exterior between panels, misaligned window panes, misaligned handles, etc, and these are all signs of poor design failing to account for manufacturing tolerances. You won't find a Bolt with any of those problems.
So...basically what it boils down to is that Tesla is evolutionary at best in some categories and a step backwards in others.
Tesla's branding tactics are no different than the other auto manufacturers. I don't think you can ding them on that. They all play to an audience or niche, it can be heavy handed. It can be GM talking about trucks and ruggedness or BMW talking about performance machines. Tesla focuses on "innovation." It can all be a bit cheesy.
I am waiting for the rest of the autos to catch up and deliver their flagship electric cars. I think consumers will wise up and choose the car that provides the right value for their $. Porsche will price their upcoming electric sports car cheaper than the Tesla roadster...I would take the Porsche.
But anyway, how often does the average driver drive around with their foot flat on the accelerator? I don't understand the obsession with getting to 100k/hr right now.
In these parts, most people seem to be quite content with a car that will get to 60m/hr in 15 seconds, as evidenced by all the Toyota Yaris and vehicles optimised for off-road four wheel driving. I imagine a Yaris owner would think it'd be nice if their tiny little car could do that, but it ain't happening without a set of tyres the defeats the purpose of owning a subcompact.
Also, Tesla is known to misrepresent in it's PR releases. See https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/06/insurance-institute-for-high..., in which the IIHS notes that Tesla only received an "acceptable" for the type of crash that actually results in the most fatalities.
If you look at most production facilities (at least in Europe) there is usually one line which produces several models, in various body styles each with various different engine/transmission combinations and additional parts for specific emissions markets and climates. (That's just some of the complexity in the Powertrain system, there's more related to the interior, exterior, electrical systems, suspension, HVAC)
Tesla's model 3 line has virtually none of this complexity but still has issues in productions. Needless to say, if this was an established automaker producing this line, they would easily be up to full production volumes within months. (For me, this is part of the reason why people in the car industry are bearish on Tesla, they understand the challenge in setting up a whole new production line by a novice to the industry. By the time, Tesla have ramped up to a significant volume at good quality, the VAG, PSA/Opels, FCA, GM, Fords of the world would have their relatively simple (complexity wise) EVs designed and ready to ship (or almost ready to ship))
To me it seems like their current woes are a production quality issue or logistics and planning issue.
The Model S was their first attempt at volume production so should have been a good chance to resolve the basic issues, learn from their mistakes and build up good practices. The Model S was notorious for its poor panel alignment, squeaks and rattles and other minor quality issues but things had improved as the production went on. Dishearteningly though, it seems that this wasn't enough. The challenge of producing a low volume product like the Model S really doesn't compare to the Model 3's 6000/week ambitious target. Previously, they could ship a Model S and have their service centers fix all the production issues. At significant volume, you need first time through quality to be almost perfect.
For continuous production systems to work, all the processes need to keep to their 'takt time' and also be done to the correct standard (sufficient 'process capability'). Making sure your processes are capable is the hardest part and where your Six Sigma (Master) black belts are worth their weight in gold. The other thing they need is suppliers delivering on time and to spec. Logistics planning also is huge, with delays in supplier shipments potentially stopping the whole line. Supplier quality can also be an issue so having your own knowledgeable engineers working with them is key.
They have a huge task ahead and everyday they build below target, they are burning millions of dollars of revenue potential.
What we know now is that Apple had been investing in the supply chain and the manufacturing side of things for a very long time before they actually got into this business.
Tesla seems to me to be a company based on the idea of, "Yeah, Apple just went off and pwned the smartphone market, just like they pwned the mp3 player market. So, yeah! We're going to do the same thing. But with cars."
I don't really think that Tesla really understands the situation, the planning, and the investment it took for Apple to really do what it did.
You can buy this knowledge.
This is my new favourite metaphor for AI.
Automation is not a black-and-white thing, either, as it is often portrayed. Sure, some things are fully automated (e.g. assembling the car body), but many things are partially automated. For example, there is a tool which is essentially 5/6/7 torque wrenches coupled to a lifting arm. This tool allows a line worker to mount a tire with little physical exertion in seconds. You see this sort of thing all the time at car assembly lines; offloading mechanical power to the machine, while having a human line up and steer things. (This also avoids a whole bunch of safety concerns you normally have when operating autonomous equipment in the same physical space occupied by humans)
Another example: The body of virtually any car is self-supporting (there is no frame), so getting it right is rather critical. To achieve both the high strength and low weight of a modern car body the steel is deformed very closely to the maximum deformation it can withstand. This needs very good matching of the process to the steel. So, the manufacturer of the steel coil tests each coil individually for its exact properties. For mass production lines only coils meeting very tight tolerances are used. For low volume lines the process is adjusted individually for each coil based on the manufacturers testing and some in-house testing.