A Tesla factory converts a pile of unassembled aluminum and some specialized parts into a ready-to-ride car in almost exactly 10 hours, all on a continuously moving assembly line that snakes itself through the Gigafactory.
The Fremont Factory has 5 lines, 2 for Models S and X and 3 for Models 3 and Y.
Horizontal scaling seems absolutely essential; there’s a limit to how fast you can move a single assembly line.
And the speed at which a single line moves also affects how far it a product moves before faults are detected. In general,
If at any point we discover a fault at any step in the assembly we immediately halt the line, preventing any quality issues from propagating to anything beyond the first faulty product.
Fault introduction → detection time can be significant. For code changes, regression on user retention metrics may only show up after months or even years.
I’ve seen ‘tighter feedback loops’ being promoted, but if our end goal is changing the trajectory of human civilisation, we would need proxies to mock out many sections of the feedback loop and these may be imperfect(we cannot even measure how imperfect they are relative to ground truth).
The Fremont Factory has 5 lines, 2 for Models S and X and 3 for Models 3 and Y.
Horizontal scaling seems absolutely essential; there’s a limit to how fast you can move a single assembly line.
And the speed at which a single line moves also affects how far it a product moves before faults are detected. In general,
Fault introduction → detection time can be significant. For code changes, regression on user retention metrics may only show up after months or even years.
I’ve seen ‘tighter feedback loops’ being promoted, but if our end goal is changing the trajectory of human civilisation, we would need proxies to mock out many sections of the feedback loop and these may be imperfect(we cannot even measure how imperfect they are relative to ground truth).