<story><title>Experts say Tesla has repeated car industry mistakes from the 1980s</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-repeated-car-industry-mistakes-from-the-1980s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjwright</author><text>I agree entirely with the sentiment of the article, and I think Elon and Tesla are hopelessly deluding themselves with belief in their superior engineering and product design. But...&lt;p&gt;Just because a few companies failed at factory automation in 1980 doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it couldn&amp;#x27;t succeed in 2018. It&amp;#x27;s patently absurd to knock Tesla for trying it again in the era of ultra-high resolution cameras and advanced machine learning algorithms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Robotbeat</author><text>This is true. But a key point: Tesla doesn&amp;#x27;t actually have to beat state of the art in automation to be profitable. Their cars are already great, electric cars are simpler, they&amp;#x27;ve streamlined the sales process in a way that already gives them at least 10% greater cost advantage if everything else is equivalent (while also eliminating a major pain point for consumers).&lt;p&gt;But it goes beyond just the fact that technology has advanced: Tesla is willing to pursue alternative approaches where others have long stopped (and this is a point the author of this article makes later on). The fact that Tesla doesn&amp;#x27;t have the conservative culture of other car makers means that they&amp;#x27;ll make mistakes like this, but also that they&amp;#x27;ll find new solutions (or recognize existing solutions in similar fields that haven&amp;#x27;t become industry standard) whereas others would not.&lt;p&gt;You cannot automate EXISTING car designs much. And Model 3 does make improvements, but in many ways is built similar. It&amp;#x27;s like trying to automate soldering components by hand. Automation of electronics required a change in the fundamental way electronics were built. Through-hole is hard to automate but relatively easy to build by hand. Surface mount is simple to automate and ultimately better in several ways, but is super annoying to build by hand. Tesla needs to find the surface mount of car manufacturing. And I think they&amp;#x27;re trying.&lt;p&gt;Something particularly hard to automate for automobiles is the wire harness. There are many degrees of freedom; it&amp;#x27;s kind of like tying your shoe: easy for humans, hard for machines. The Model 3 uses less wire than the Model S&amp;#x2F;X, but only by a factor of 2 or so. Model Y, on the other hand, is supposed to use like an order of magnitude less. This is like optimizing a circuit board for automation by only using a few through-hole components, relying mostly on surface mount.&lt;p&gt;So Tesla is going to have to continually redesign their vehicles to be more and more amenable to automation. They can&amp;#x27;t do this as a step function, and Musk has realized that now. (This is another good point the author makes.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Experts say Tesla has repeated car industry mistakes from the 1980s</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-repeated-car-industry-mistakes-from-the-1980s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjwright</author><text>I agree entirely with the sentiment of the article, and I think Elon and Tesla are hopelessly deluding themselves with belief in their superior engineering and product design. But...&lt;p&gt;Just because a few companies failed at factory automation in 1980 doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it couldn&amp;#x27;t succeed in 2018. It&amp;#x27;s patently absurd to knock Tesla for trying it again in the era of ultra-high resolution cameras and advanced machine learning algorithms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>talltimtom</author><text>The failure isn’t in trying to automate. The failure is in expecting automating everything to go perfectly and therefore making the line troublesome to carry out when specific automated sub tasks fail.</text></comment>