In a January 2019 post titled Progress or Perfection – Pick One I speculated that Tesla was simply being expedient when it built the Model 3 out of what reverse engineering firm Munro and Associates described as a crazy patchwork of parts and assembly processes. My claim was that if haste makes waste, then in…
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital…
What is Maximum Plaid? Never one to shy away from his nerdy impulses, Elon Musk named the launch mode in performance model Teslas “ludicrous mode” in homage to the movie Spaceballs. Doubling down on this, he’s referring to the next more ludicrous than ludicrous mode as “maximum plaid” – another reference to Spaceballs. If you’ve…
What matters is the pace of innovation. That is the fundamental determinant of competitiveness. Elon Musk – during Tesla Q1 2018 earnings call SCAMPER In a recent post I wrote about SCAMPER, a proven idea generating technique. In this post, I am going to examine ways we can apply SCAMPER to come up with the…
Another week, another departure Two long-serving manufacturing executives have just left Tesla, joining a steady stream of high level employees deciding to look elsewhere for work. I have written a lot about Elon Musk’s exploits in this blog and while I don’t agree with every move or tweet the man makes, it’s of little doubt…
Part-ly crazy Munro & Associates tears down cars to produce competitive analyses of how those cars are assembled. While they found many things to praise about the Tesla Model 3, they derided its heavy and complicated body structure. Among the reasons for this was apparently wasteful use of many parts where a single stamped component…
Does success breed success? Kaizen is a Japanese word for improvement. In manufacturing circles kaizen is used to describe continuous improvement – constantly refining processes to improve the quality of the outcome. In an earlier article I made the point that the small batches forced by limited manufacturing might created an opportunity for Japanese manufacturers…
Shockingly bad In June 2018, Bloomberg published an article describing Tesla’s latest controversial measure – producing Model 3 cars in a tent covering the area of two football fields, constructed in the parking lot of their existing Fremont, California production facility. (The tent is visible in the title image of this post, behind the Model…
What matters is the pace of innovation “I think moats are lame. They are like nice in a sort of quaint, vestigial way. If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long. What matters is the pace of innovation, that is the fundamental determinant of competitiveness.” Elon Musk –…
Only one wire Back in grade school, one of the smartest guys I ever met surprised me when I realized he didn’t understand that electricity had to flow in a circuit. His assumption seemed to be that electricity poured in, did its job and left, like air and fuel through an engine. It turns out…