Zythryn said:
RegGuheert said:
...It seems their approach is known to have serious drawbacks, yet they are pursuing it anyway.
...
The approach of trying to land rocket stages also has serious drawbacks, yet SpaceX pursued that route anyways.
Perhaps the advantages are worth the challenge?
What benefits would those be?
Costs? According to the article, they spent double per car what other manufacturers spent for this line:
TorqueNews said:
"Tesla has spent c.2x what a traditional OEM spends per unit on capacity."
But doesn't that expenditure saves them on labor costs? These analysts estimate that Tesla will reduce labor costs by $50/car by spending $550/car on automation:
TorqueNews said:
"So the net labour saving may be only $50 per unit. Yet putting the automation into the plant seems to involve an apparent capital cost that's $4,000 higher per unit of capacity than for a normal plant. If the product is built for 7 years, that's over US$550 of additional depreciation per unit built."
Perhaps this expensive automation buys higher quality? Not according to
the Business Insider article linked from the article I linked:
Business Insider said:
Bernstein adds that the world's best carmakers, the Japanese, try to limit automation because it "is expensive and is statistically inversely correlated to quality."
So that leaves throughput. I suppose that is the major topic of discussion, isn't it? The thesis of the Business insider article seems to be that it is the robots themselves that are to blame:
Business Insider said:
In a rare win for humans over robots in the battle for labor efficiency, Wall Street analysts have laid down a compelling argument that over-automation is to blame for problems at the billionaire Elon Musk's electric-car company.
They put it more bluntly farther down in the article:
Business Insider said:
Warburton, who spent his career before Wall Street at the International Motor Vehicle Program — a partly academic, partly commercial organization based at MIT — wrote that "automation in final assembly doesn't work."
So, is that the final word on the subject? Of course not. Analysts are often wrong, especially when it comes to new technology. But we all know that automation of vehicle manufacturing is NOT new. And the articles are pointing out that what Elon Musk is trying to do with the Model 3 has been tried before and the result was not successful.