Two Tesla Production Chiefs to Leave Ahead of Model 3 Ramp-Up

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla-production-chiefs-to-leave-ahead-of-biggest-challenge-yet

by mgevans • 10 years ago

76 48 10 years ago

Chronic51• 10 years ago

Waiting for the HN fanboys to defend Tesla.

gist3• 10 years ago

I will give the obligatory "why is this article on HN" comment. This is inside baseball and tabloid type infotainment. It certainly doesn't "gratify one's intellectual curiosity" in the way that the guidelines on posting most likely intended.

Analemma_2• 10 years ago

At some point you're going to just have to accept that an upvote/rating system means that the articles on HN are "whatever the HN community wants to see", and no amount of griping or rules lawyering is ever going to change that. HN is a self-selecting population which mostly shares the same interests, and those interests are usually about hacking or IT or entrepreneurship, but not always. The population likes hearing about Tesla, so Tesla articles get front-paged.

dang• 10 years ago

This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in comments. We also ask people not to post drive-by dismissals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gist3• 10 years ago

What would be nice is if you could issue some guidelines on downvoting.

vessenes• 10 years ago

Who knows the real story here, but I can imagine once your stock options vest, financial prudence and personal sanity don't really point to doing the next big ramp-up at Tesla.

You're heavily recruitable for large swaths of stock at any number of startups, presumably with a status bump on top, or you could just take your well earned millions and chill for a bit.

Whoever is running the Model 3 delivery program is going to be living at the office for the next 36 months, by contrast.

TaylorGood2• 10 years ago

Will say this: I met a director from Tesla just after their unveiling of the Model X. She said a small number of people were assigned to fully assemble / prep each vehicle shown that night.. for roughly two weeks they worked 20 hour shifts and slept 2 hours each night. Most teams were working on them right up until the cars rolled on stage; there was still wet paint on one. Also, it was said a "normal" workweek of 16 hours days isn't uncommon..

So, your theory is the story.. she can't wait for options to fully vest and gracefully exit. It's not for lack of thrill, growth, etc. – just that after 3-4 years it is heavily taxing and a pace of sanity is much desired.

vinhboy• 10 years ago

I hear people tell stories like this about successful companies all the time.

If this is really how the game is played. I quit.

jernfrost• 10 years ago

I just don't get how you can be successful doing stuff that way. People with that little sleep are not going to function optimal. They are going to make mistakes.

But both Tesla and SpaceX seems very successful so I wonder if they are successful despite of this or because of this.

luckydata3• 10 years ago

Tesla goes from one firefighting to another, it's a place that while growing is not "growing up". End of quarter are always nuts, people are asked to perform miracles and of course quality suffers when everything is a fire. They had some serious rethinking of how the organization works lately so a bunch of people that had a lot of power ended up with considerably less of it, and some new faces are ascending rapidly.

bitmapbrother• 10 years ago

The Model X has been plagued with problems. I'm guessing they were asked to leave.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

I am not so sure, it could be they are leaving because Musk is interfering too much in design and production that they cannot effectively do their jobs. Tesla has the highest warranty expenditure per car in the auto industry, even out pacing Mercedes. The X simply has too many tricks that its obviously not from any self respecting design committee but pushed by someone who doesn't listen. Same problems arose when they did their first car.

Animats• 10 years ago

It's going to be a tough few years getting the plant running profitably. Tesla hasn't tried to be price-competitive before. They need to get good at low-cost, high-volume auto manufacturing. Trying to get "fast", "cheap" and "good" all at once is very hard. Tesla tends to get "good", but not the other two.

For comparison, see Apple's plant in Fremont, 1984-1992. This was Steve Jobs' vision of manufacturing.[1] It looks great. It's got automatic stacker cranes. It's got pick and place machines. It's got mobile robots. Everything is very tidy. But it's inefficient. Designing a factory around a storage and retrieval warehouse machine turns out to be a bad idea. Too much of the plant is material handling rather than manufacturing. Apple closed that plant and outsourced manufacturing to Foxconn.

This is the sort of problem you hit in setting up a manufacturing plant. It's easy to end up with too much work in progress spread around the plant. This is worse in automotive, where work in progress is physically large and needs storage space.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjyh2Fhnuk

chollida1• 10 years ago

Interesting timing for this as they report earnings tonight. They also announced that they've leased 2 buildings near Livermore that give them almost 1,000,000 square feet of space.

There is alot of speculation on CNBC that these announcements were made early to help direct the investors call as TSLA is widely expect to report poor earnings this quarter due to Model X delays.

Tesla's Powerwall is also starting to be installed. I always thought they'd announced the powerwall to gauge interest. I assumed that they'd want to focus all their battery storage capacity towards car deliveries. I guess this is a positive sign that they can meet their battery needs.

blackguardx• 10 years ago

I thought the consensus was that the Powerwall was to soak up some capacity at their upcoming plant and get their per unit costs down.

kirrent• 10 years ago

I seem to remember reading that the powerwall is specced to use the batteries removed from Tesla cars once they've reached something like 70% of original capacity. Reuse is cheaper than recycling.

luckydata3• 10 years ago

The new buildings are because the factory is running out of space for office workers - there's quite a few there and now they are pretty crammed and in places where ventilation and other "amenities" are not readily available.

revelation• 10 years ago

Ahead of model 3 ramp-up? Last I checked they didn't even have a single "production" car yet and that ramp-up isn't scheduled to happen for the next two years.

It's like saying "Obama to leave ahead of zombie apocalypse".

chc• 10 years ago

The Model 3 is supposed to already be in customers' garages in two years. The ramp-up better have happened by then or they'll be behind schedule.

As for why the ramp-up is a big concern now: There were several times more Model 3 reservations than Tesla projected, so they need to increase their production capacity in order to meet the demand. Getting ready to produce the cars is part of the ramp-up, and it's turned out to be a bigger task than they expected.

ams61103• 10 years ago

Also the "reservations" are not contracts. If the Model 3 is significantly delayed, some number of those will not follow through with a purchase. Especially if there are other competing options on the market by then, which there almost certainly will be.

marricks• 10 years ago

Listening to the earnings call today Elon said one of them is staying on for a transition, and that they will be announcing a big hire in the coming weeks. Sounds like an experienced veteran in production?

I mean, this sounds like it could be hype but they have a pretty special thing with this many pre orders, US manufacturing, and a really exciting product.

Two Tesla Production Chiefs to Leave Ahead of Model 3 Ramp-Up

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