Car Design vs Manufacture, which is harder ?

[HTSS_TR]

Making cars are very complicate tasks, from understanding what your customers want to design/engineer thousands of parts that fit well together to testing and then find good suppliers at good price ...

Most established car manufactures are very good at engineering the car and they have good relationship with suppliers for many years, so they usually don't have much problem to produce their cars at the volume they can sell. The only problem established car companies may have is designing a car that their customers love to own.

Newer company like Tesla has opposite problems, they can design a car that their customers love to own but they just can't make enough of them. They have their own problem with assembly lines, and they also have problem with suppliers. If they can't even make 80-90k model S and X this year how can they make 500,000 cars in 2018 ? If their suppliers can't satisfy the sub 100k parts on time this year how do they make 500k parts in 2018 ?

The way Tesla is doing the last 2 quarters in not meeting their own goal of 40,000 model S and X, they will not be able to even make 200,000-300,000 cars in 2018.

 

[HTSS_TR]

Quote:
“We were in production [censored] for the first six months of the year,” CEO Elon Musk told analysts during Tesla’s earnings call.
...
Musk mostly pinned the tough slog on suppliers.
...
“Then we just managed to climb out of [censored] basically partway through June. Now the production line is humming, and our suppliers mostly have their [expletive] together. There’s a few that don’t. One I’m going to be visiting on Saturday personally to figure out what the [censored]’s going on there,” he said.



https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/why-tesla-stuck-production-[censored]-171000509.html

 

[UncleDave]

Manufacturing.

Anyone with a computer and a seat of Bentley, Dassault solid works, or Autocad can design lots of things they could never hope to be able to manufacture at any price point, or real volume.

The design challenge is to hit stated goals, while being able to manufacture inexpensively.

UD

 

[Pop_Rivit]

Starting a car company from nothing is a huge undertaking, and there are bound to be issues along the way. Musk also has some lofty goals, along with some technology that is still being developed. I continue to hear some people yapping about how it will never work, yet they seem to be selling everything they make as fast as they can make it.

Will they be successful in the long term? I would not be surprised-Musk is enough of a forward thinker to make some interesting things happen, and given where he's come so far (in every one of his businesses) I have little doubt that he can work with suppliers to get production up to projected levels.

I suspect that a lot of the suppliers underestimated him and never thought he'd be selling as many cars as he is now, and that may be part of the problem. But then, coordinating an assembly line of that level of complexity, especially with just-in-time inventories and a brand new company has to be a nightmare.

 

[spk2000]

I deal with engineering design issues daily. Sometimes the design people get carried away making things complicated and unachievable in real world production. Then I have to go back to the car manufacturer and ask for deviations and drawing changes. This is why there are often 25 changes to a print before the product is even launched. Conceptually it sounds good but making it at a normal fast production rate and low cost often conflict.

 

[JHZR2]

For an existing manufacturer, everything is evolutionary. There is a baseline design (the last model or a similar model, or an idea of what it should be like and some parts bin stuff to kind of make it work), then the engineering to make the new thing work. There is also set R&D pipeline.

A company like tesla, you can bet is made of lots of industry know-how, with lots of parts either the same as, or made by the same suppliers as would be found in any other brand. That lets some of the underlying stuff leverage the industry as a whole, and still be evolutionary. The engineering of the power train and the controls is a bit more unique, but it's not like that hasn't been done already either.

While the fundamental parts and concepts of operation can be long standing and known, the industrial design for manufacturability and maintainability when formulating a new company in a clean slate, derived from experts across the industry and with different concepts, must be tough. Couple that with new supplier agreements and competition for suppliers against long standing OEMs, and it's got to be really tough.

 

[PeterPolyol]

By design, I'm sure you're not referring exclusively to body design. The engineering is by far the most intensive process- at least good engineering is. This is why some of the biggest and greediest corporations balk at- and outsource all of their engineering. Some companies will even fall 2 full generations behind in technology because they can't be bothered to redirect money from the advertising and marketing departments over to in-house engineering. Doing actual work requiring brain power and sensibility is far less profitable than spending billions to brainwash people into buying whatever you're already selling.