It was the most popular car show in the world. The hosts were not race car drivers, mechanics, or automotive engineers. They were basically comedians using cars as a vehicle to entertain a lot of people. They liked some cars Jaguars, Porsche, etc. One of the big advantages Tesla had was in approaching the market with nearly a clean slate. However, in manufacturing, decades have gone into creating processes that result in high-quality cars. What a lot of us thought Tesla did was just get rid of the processes that made no sense in their ramp-up to manufacture cars, but what it appears to have done is start everything from scratch.
That resulted in relatively low quality for the initial runs of every car Tesla made. Adapting quality controls and accountability in line with Toyota should have been a goal for the firm, but apparently it was not. There is no price point where adequate quality is optional. Quality should have been job one. Instead, it constantly appeared to be an afterthought. For a luxury brand, being ranked toward the bottom on quality is never good. While the Tesla S and Model 3 are really good cars in their respective segments initial quality aside , the Model X made almost no sense whatsoever.
Instead, what Tesla appeared to create was a pregnant Model S. It had gull wing doors that had a very high failure rate way too complex , a windshield that was wicked expensive to replace — but so big that getting hit by a rock was a given — and no offroad chops at all.
How do you miss THAT meeting? When I was growing up, a story about cruise control made the rounds. One version went like this: A guy came to the U. He rented an RV, and when getting a briefing about the features, asked about the cruise control.
So, the guy went out on the road, set the cruise control, and went back to make some coffee. It ended really badly for the driver, the RV and the rental company. So, what does Tesla call its adaptive cruise control? Tesla refused. One wonders whether Tesla would rather have dead customers then have to change a foolish name. In the U.
On much of the East Coast, the folks who own dealerships are politicians. Tesla rolled to market with a company store model that was at least as problematic as coming to market with an electric car.
It meant Tesla had to set up and fund the entire sales channel as opposed to recruiting dealers that largely would self-fund the effort. The politicians who owned dealerships moved against Tesla and were able to pass laws barring Tesla stores in some states. Oh, and the stores, based on recent reports , perform very poorly compared to the traditional dealerships with regard to selling cars. Solar City, another Elon Musk company, recently was in danger of going under.
To save the firm, Tesla bought it. Tesla, which has been unprofitable, increased its risk of failure by absorbing another unprofitable company. Now there should be a reasonably high synergy between solar power and electric cars, but that synergy has not emerged yet at Tesla. Also, Solar City has been having execution problems of its own. It worked really well for Dell. However, Dell was profitable, and assets exceeded liabilities, which means there was such a thing as stockholder equity.
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Phones Laptops Headphones Cameras. Tablets Smartwatches Speakers Drones. Accessories Buying Guides How-tos Deals. Health Energy Environment. YouTube Instagram Adobe. Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. The announcement caps a nine-month period of turmoil that Musk has described as "production hell" as Tesla has struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3.
Tesla had high hopes for its Model 3 production efforts. In , Musk hired Audi executive Peter Hochholdinger to plan the manufacturing process, and Business Insider described his plans in late "Hochholdinger's view is that robots could be a much bigger factor in auto production than they are currently, largely because many components are designed to be assembled by humans, not machines.
A year later, Musk himself was touting Tesla's advanced robotics expertise. Musk now admits he was wrong about this. Humans are underrated. Musk is discovering that large-scale car manufacturing is really hard, and it's not easy to improve on the methods of conventional automakers.
And while automation obviously plays an important role in car manufacturing, it's not the magic bullet Musk imagined a couple of years ago. Far from leapfrogging the techniques of conventional automakers, Tesla is now struggling just to match the efficiency of its more established rivals.
He points to the experience of General Motors, which wasted billions of dollars in a largely fruitless effort to automate car production in the s. At the same time, it's rarely a good idea to underestimate Musk. Musk has a long history of setting optimistic deadlines for his companies and then failing to meet them. But Musk is persistent and a quick learner. He has made a lot of mistakes so far, but he may still have time to learn from those mistakes and turn Tesla into a competitive carmaker.
In reporting this story, we talked to two different experts who drew the same parallel to GM's automation efforts in the s.
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