Producing physical things is hard. Issues crop up every step. Of the way, and any one thing can have big downstream impacts. Just think of the web of supplies chains that feeds into the components that go into a car. And in Tesla's case, throw in the fact that they are still a new company and haven't had decades to iron out all the kinks.
They've been around 15 years and they bought a modern manufacturing plant purpose built to make cars. They can buy talent. I won't cut them too much slack, supposedly they're worth more than GM. Now prove it.
Well, Bentley is making ~9000 cars per year with ~3000 employees. Tesla is making ~100k cars per year with ~37k employees (not counting all the subcontractors). That's exactly the same ratio, and it's bloody awful compared to large-scale car manufacturers. E.g. Toyota has 10x the number of employees as Tesla but makes 100x as many cars. Even if next year Tesla production is 5000 cars per week all year, they will still have >4x as many employees per car built compared to Toyota.
Also, Bentley is fully owned by Volkswagen. If they wanted to "scale up" to a downmarket Model 3 equivalent, they'd take the VW MQB platform, use most of the non-platform components from the Mk7 VW Jetta (probably offering the 250hp and 300hp engines with AWD), spend 2-3 years developing sufficiently distinct styling parts, and then be able to churn out 100k cars per year.
Exactly. The Bentley thing would be just a badge, in fact now there is very little of their SUV being 'made in England', it is done in some Skoda factory somewhere.
But how much of a Tesla is Tesla? Don't large parts come from suppliers, e.g. all the seats from Lear corp? Or did they re-engineer those too?
I think the Ford F150 truck is the benchmark, in the U.S. there are 3000-4000 made a week. The price starts around the price of the Model 3 and then goes up and up with options.
Plus you get a lot of truck for that compared to a car, and due to the Chicken Tax there are incentives to buy the things.
Recently there was a fire in a supplier plant that affected the F150, with JIT they had to close the lines. But then they shipped the dies to England and restarted making the vital parts so production is back on. Really Musk should not be making promises if even the mighty Ford F150 truck can be brought to a production halt due to one fire in one supplier factory.
That story is quite interesting and right now there is a 747 flying those parts back from England to make sure Ford can keep on getting their $40 billion in revenue from selling that truck.
I would be intrigued to know the numbers of vehicles per employee for the F150. Note how there is zero export potential for the F150 for a multitude of reasons whereas the Tesla products are definitely hot in international markets.
Yawn. You know Tesla isn’t just a car company, right? They are an energy company as well. They have people building out the supercharger network. Software engineers writing autopilot software. Employees working at Tesla sales centers. Tesla is not structured like a traditional automaker. Stop trying to compare with false metrics.
More than 90% of their revenue in 2017 came from selling or leasing cars. That makes them a car company, full stop. If they have more than 10% of their employees doing other stuff, why on earth do they have all these employees that generate basically no revenue?
I kind of deduct points for arrogantly assuming he knows anything about manufacturing cars at scale to teach a company that produces roughly 9 million vehicles a year.
The people that work for Toyota and GM aren't stupid, and those organizations have been at this game since before Elon was born.
Yet Toyota is pursuing hydrogen fool cells, GM scrapped their first EV and released the Bolt to great fanfare only to have it limited to compliance quantities.
Ford is withdrawing from the sedan market.
All US manufacturers with their decades of experience were almost destroyed by Asian manufacturers in terms of cost and build quality.
GM went bankrupt at least once in recent history.
The game has changed many times. It will keep changing, and in five years we will see that anyone not mass producing EVs as real products and not mere compliance vehicles is exiting the automotive industry.
Tesla put an awful lot of time into getting their glorious factory factory rolling. Bentley might just copy existing high volume production lines from the beginning.
Alfa had a mishap like that in the nineties and for thirty years sales dropped because “all alfa rust” even when the problem was long resolved, even when the actual model went out of production
