The Leaning Factories.
“Everyone who tries to reinvent this business believes that
auto companies are populated by dummies who don’t un-
derstand Moore’s Law,” General Motors said. But compared
with a silicon chip, manufacturing a modern car is more
complicated. A car has to be of a certain size with parts
from across the world, and each customer has chosen their
own color and technical details. Except the parts made in-
house, Model S consists of 2 000 parts from 200 suppliers.
All these parts have to come together at the right place
and at the right time – or the factory will stop.^59 This
is what SpaceX and Tesla needed as they grew to more
complex entities. Elon accepted the challenge. “I think
manufacturing is really cool,” he said. “It’s like the ultimate
Lego.”^190
“It’s actually astounding that you can buy a car with all
the things a car has for $20 to $30 000,” Elon said. “There’s a
whole bag of tricks that the industry has come up with over
many decades to make a car super-reliable at a super-low
cost.”^325 A description of these tricks is impossible without
first telling a short story about how Toyota became the
world’s largest car manufacturer.
Toyota is today is a well-known car manufacturer. But
in the early 20th century, Toyota was a family loom busi-
ness called Toyoda Automatic Loom Works. The founder of
the company, Sakichi Toyoda, had a son, Kiichiro Toyoda,