Musk’s Attainable Ideal
No, this isn’t some article about Elon Musk’s latest business venture at Twitter. This is about his attainable ideal, and what they mean for the future of manufacturing (for now, let’s leave the discussion of whether an ideal is attainable to the philosophers). By “attainable ideal”, I am referring to a vision that he has for how he would like to transform factories and how Tesla’s operational plants already fit into that vision.
As the father of Tesla, he spends a lot of time thinking about the future of manufacturing, particularly in regard to how his company would operate if it were fully autonomous using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. He really doesn’t think the way he envisions his factory of the future should look anything like our current industrial landscape. Inspired by his role model (as it appears to be), the legendary industrialist Henry Ford, Musk shakes up the conventional and lets creative destruction come through thanks to the world-class engineering that asks for the moon (Elon might have rephrased this idiom by replacing moon with another astronomical object — you know which one it is).
“I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things. I spend my time-solving engineering and manufacturing problems,” says the prolific entrepreneur. Undoubtedly, he has already developed solutions to some of the issues facing the car industry, leaving the other car companies scrambling to catch up.
In November 2021, Bloomberg reported that Volkswagen’s CEO warned his company that Tesla may outperform them in terms of production pace with a rate of 10 hours per EV against VW’s 30 hours at its plant in Zwickau, Germany, with a decently teasing headline: “Elon Musk Wants to Show Germans How to Build Cars.”
Tesla appears to be rewriting the rules of the game in the once-German-dominated industry of auto production. But, how? Musk’s following tweet dated July 2020 gives the hint: “Gigafactory is the product even more than the car.”
Gigafactory (it’s the name Tesla uses for most of its production sites) fulfils Musk’s obsession to build things in a spectacularly different way, as he calls “the machine that builds the machine,” using the power of AI and autonomy (not automation!). The top auto analyst at Morgan Stanley, Adam Jonas, stated in a report that Tesla is building the future automobile plant. The EV maker is working to establish itself as a pioneer in domains like artificial intelligence, according to the tech billionaire, and not just a maker of “nice automobiles.” That’s quite a bold statement reminding me of Angela Strange’s (General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, known as “a16z” — the renowned venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, California) thought-provoking argument: “Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company.” Musk’s strategy, as things stand, embraces a modified version of this assertion — it is inevitable that every company will become an AI company.
Manufacturing AI (the set of AI technologies that reshapes manufacturing practices, e.g., self-optimizing machines, detection of quality defects, prediction of efficiency losses and breakdowns, intelligent image-recognition capabilities and so on) has set a new high at Tesla, and it certainly pays off. Musk’s determination to attain the ideal transforms the industrial evolution and catalyzes the diffusion of disruptive technologies such as AI and autonomous robotics.
Henry Ford’s invention brought the first affordable passenger car. It was not the car itself (Model T) that was inventive, but the production system. AI and such game-changer technologies are abundant however, dispersed applications without a concrete strategy to revolutionise a system are far from really changing the game. Elon Musk follows in Ford’s footsteps and pursues a system revolution — Gigafactory is the product even more than the car — in order to attain his ideal, which makes a gigantic global company’s CEO feel uneasy.
