Tents?
Elon continues to disobey EVERY lesson of industrial production. He's finding out that physical reality won't let you get away with delusional theories, even if cultist investors will.

What gives manufacturing experts pause about Tesla’s tent is that it was pitched to shelter an assembly line cobbled together with scraps lying around the brick-and-mortar plant.

Tents? The last time we heard about tents in connection with auto production was during the desperate attempt to get VW up and running in bombed-out Germany.

Before that, a more relevant example. John North Willys started as a supersalesman, not a car guy. In 1910 he was selling Overlands, and the factory couldn't supply anywhere near the number of cars his customers wanted. He visited the plant to investigate the bottleneck, and found the factory was a sloppy conglomeration of tents and sheds, with workmen wandering around doing miscellaneous stuff when they felt like it. He took over the company and turned it into a serious factory. The rest is EXTREMELY SUCCESSFUL history. Willys is now #3 among American brands, just behind Ford and Chevy.

“We had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts,” Musk told CBS This Morning in April. “And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.”

Conveyor belts are not a Disruptive Innovation. They were perfected in 1880.

Elon's overall modus operandi is to pick up a century-old invention, call it new, and fuck it up so badly that nobody will ever want to use it again. He is a de-inventor.

Elon is now at the Overland stage. He needs a JN Willys or an Alfred Sloan to move in and take over. Unfortunately there's no indication that he'll allow it, and the shareholders are hypnotized cultists who know even less about reality than Elon does.

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Numerical sidenote: Where does Tesla fit on the sales chart? Last among 11 American brands. Year-to-date numbers from one webpage:

Ford 340k
Chevy 291k
Willys 130k
...
Tesla 12K

How common are Teslas on the ground? In recent years I've seen exactly the same number of Studebakers and Teslas. One each. About 5 years ago I saw a Tesla roadster in a Saturday collector car cruise situation. This month I saw a '41 Studie Champion driving to work.
  ¶ 5:07 PM