A better comparison might be Toyota, though, when it comes to innovating on manufacturing. One of the things you'd really want to hear from Tesla is why a given part of the assembly line differs from established best practices, and that sort of explanation is something you never really hear from them. You do hear things like "oh, yeah, we just got rid of that stupid, fantastically expensive automatic conveyor belt system and replaced it with something simpler," and if you read the histories you know that Toyota and others retreated from systems similar to that in years past for similar reasons.