Never go full robot.

“The guy telling everyone to be afraid of robots uses too many robots in his factory”:

Elon Musk says Tesla relied on too many robots to build the Model 3, which is partly to blame for the delays in manufacturing the crucial mass-market electric car. In an interview with CBS Good Morning, Musk agreed with Tesla’s critics that there was over-reliance on automation and too few human assembly line workers building the Model 3.

Earlier this month, Tesla announced that it had officially missed its goal of making 2,500 Model 3 vehicles a week by the end of the first financial quarter of this year. It will start the second quarter making just 2,000 Model 3s per week, but the company says it still believes it can get to a rate of 5,000 Model 3s per week at the midway point of 2018.

You went full robot. Never go full robot.

An End to the Road Navigators

I was frustrated after watching the review video of the Tesla Model 3 on Engadget — much like reviewer Roberto Baldwin. The over-reliance on the single, center console touchscreen is a hell of a lot less usable on the road then having a mixture of analogue and digital controls.

Then my astute friend Bryan pointed out to me that we humans are a means to an end as road navigators. As weird as it may seem to us in 2018, eventually steering wheels will be removed from cars. We will eventually, always be passengers.

So why would Tesla waste precious resources making a better car for people?

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Elon Musk’s Master Plan, Part Deux

While Donald Trump talks about bringing coal jobs back to West Virginia, Elon Musk is creating (actually, he laid out his vision 10 years ago) concrete plans to get us off fossil fuels, but we can’t just jump directly from A to Z.

Two days ago he revealed part deux of his master plan:

The first master plan that I wrote 10 years ago is now in the final stages of completion. It wasn’t all that complicated and basically consisted of:

  1. Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive

  2. Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price

  3. Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car And…

  4. Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.

Elon Musk a great example of putting your money where you mouth is. Talking the talk and walking the walk.

What’s important about Musk is he has a reason for everything. Everything is done by design.

I should add a note here to explain why Tesla is deploying partial autonomy now, rather than waiting until some point in the future. The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.

I’ll tell you this: I trust a partially autonomous Telsa over a human being who’s driving while playing fucking Pokémon Go and slamming into a police car.

Smack Talk

Elon Musk with the smack talk to the German press:

In response to claims that Apple is poaching key members of Tesla staff to work on its long-rumoured self-driving car project, Musk joked: “Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the Tesla Graveyard.” But just to make sure that his comments weren’t entirely dismissed as harmless CEO-style jostling, he added: “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.”

I love the smack talk that happens at the top of the corporate food chain.

It reminds me of when Steve Jobs was on stage with Bill Gates at an AllThingsD Conference and compared iTunes on Windows, “like giving someone ice water in hell.”

That Jobs quote is from 2007. Given the confusing klusterfuck iTunes is right now in 2015, I hardly think of it as a glass of ice water. Even in 2007, iTunes was more like a glass of luke warm water.

Now look at me with the iTunes smack talk. Where did that come from?

I wasn’t planning that.

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Product