I read a overview of a teardown of a tesla by a auto manufacturing engineer. He claimed the tesla used way to many parts. The one I remember was the rear wheel well. A car company might form it out of 3 parts welded together to form one piece to be installed and welded into place. tesla used 9 pieces because of poor design and probaly lack of big enough presses to form larger parts in one shot.
Bill D.
An expert dismantled a Tesla Model 3. He found poor design and manufacturing are squandering profits - Los Angeles Times
It's stuff like this that furthers my skepticism of a company like Tesla. The idea is that this guy, and the company, is supposed to be doing all these new things that the big manufacturers that have been doing this for many decades have failed to do. I find that idea somewhat hard to believe. I think maybe there are some things that they are doing that are new and cool, but I'm generally skeptical that they are nearly as advanced as the media purports them to be.
From your article:
“If that car was made anywhere else, and Elon wasn’t part of the manufacturing process, they would make a lot of money,” Munro said in an interview. “They’re just learning all the old mistakes everyone else made years ago.”
Human behavior tends to forget the past quickly. How many times have there been people held up as being the next new thing and it never happened? Much more than turns out to be the reality. Theranos is one recent example I remember, and now it's all crickets about that. No "let's be more careful" - nope. Just move on to the next one and hold them up and do it over again.
This is just one of many reasons why there are the "Tesla bears" that short its stock. At this point, I don't give it any more credence than the many others during the dot-com bubble and such that were supposed to change this or that. When it happens, I'll believe it. I remember reading a while back that they lose money on every car they sell. Sounds a lot like all those companies that went bust before.
When I think of advanced manufacturing, I think of something like Toyota, not Tesla, although admittedly I'm not drawing on tons of expertise or detailed knowledge on car manufacturing to say that. I just know that Toyota has tried, and is trying, new things all the time. From reducing the plant size, to even removing automation and replacing it with workers (how's that for moving forward?), I would put my money on them instead of Tesla.
Sometimes I even wonder if Elon Musk is just a crazy guy who's managed to get a ton of money from investors to play with...
Here's an article from just a couple years ago that, in retrospect, seems to make this point. You can see where Toyota is moving in one direction with automation and Tesla is proclaiming that the future is moving in the other. Fast forward a couple years later, and Tesla has come out and said this was a poor decision.
Robots won't replace humans in auto factories anytime soon