Elon Musk says that Tesla is struggling with automatic supply chain

Tesla CEO Elon Musk participated in a slow Recode / Decode podcast interview with Kara Swisher this week. In over an hour he covered a lot of ground. It is worth hearing.

I got it all and heard everything about how painful it was for Musk to work the 100-plus-hour weeks needed to solve the many problems with the full ramp for the production of Tesla Model 3 since.

I shared Muscle's pain – for it's honest, it's anxious to listen to him, infinitely repeat the same narratives about how it's difficult to mount a car while working on modern supply chains. I feel like he has hit this point of view dozens of times at this time. He usually notes that, regardless of the decline in Tesla's manufacturing process, it may be due to the company's slowest supplier.

It's probably true, but nothing new. Swisher did not push him on this and I do not expect her to. She probably does not have a detailed understanding of the automotive industry and she does not need. She is a technological journalist. But she could probably say something like: "Great, sounds like a challenge ̵[ads1]1; but are not everyone else who also makes cars with this? Or not."

She was just the last audience for this musical lecture. Do not misunderstand me; Musical lectures can be fascinating and important. They have real value. But his "Carmaking 101" spell is often drawn to the more experienced automotive and investment bank analysts who have spent years covering major global automakers who break supply chain management every single day.

Musk tells us something that everyone already knows

The bottom line is that when Musk launches in this lecture, my reaction has generally been asking, "Why are you so strenuous to tell me something I already know?" It would be as if I spent 10 minutes informing him that gravity is a fundamental consideration in designing missiles to deliver payloads.

The way these cars are built is the result of a comprehensive decision of something called the Toyota Production System, developed by Toyota in the 1970s and 1980s. (Musk, by the way, has criticized TPS, not without justification.) In essence, TPS has ordered for "just in time" stock management: one part must arrive at the car mount point right now. Deft supply chain management means that large and expensive inventories can not be stored.

Everyone in the automotive industry is aware of this. There is a given. In fact, no one speaks Musk about it. For more than a decade to cover the automotive industry, I've had some conversations with lean manufacturing experts, but the supply chain is a backdrop, the endless, lowering of the humming of the machine that drives around the world.

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Serious problems occur every single time. Ford had to call back some crucial F-150 pickup truck production this year due to a supplier's fire. A number of car manufacturers have had to cope with the massive recall of airbags manufactured by Takata. And after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, Toyota and Honda saw its supply chains interrupted for several months.

Why does Musk go back to this?

So why does Musk so often visit this rap?

Part of that is because Tesla has not always had access to the best suppliers, nor the best teams at the supplier. It was only a consequence of the Tesla scale. The situation has improved.

You can suggest that Musk is involved in misdirection or blame-shifting. But I do not think he is. Rather, I think he dislikes expressing serious frustration and uses different tastes of lecture and you speak as a way to avoid it. He loves technical details. It calms him.

Should I bury Musk's handling mechanism? No. But it will be a bit old and what Musk likes to call "production hell" starts to look like something Tesla has it hard to either avoid or learn from. It is actually important that Tesla improves its ability to make cars so that it can meet the impressive demand for its vehicles and achieve Musk's goal of accelerating sustainable transport.

So it does not matter if the supply chain supply is really a misdirection. It is turned into an irritation at best and a distraction at worst.