
Why Tesla is having a harder time than SpaceX - doener
https://qz.com/1244768/why-are-electric-cars-so-much-harder-to-build-than-rockets/
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azernik
I've been following the SpaceX trainspotting (rocketspotting?) community for a
while; in the process I've read bits and pieces about the launch industry in
general.

The heavy-lift launch market is, indeed, an easy one to compete in; Bezos is
slow out of the gate, and the rest of the competition comes from some truly
wacko engineering organizations. The car industry already optimized its
products and processes for cost and efficiency, while the (American)
competition seems not to have even tried. (The European and Russian programs
have their own handicaps, and India is doing just fine in the adjacent medium-
lift market.)

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kuschku
And it's not like SpaceX revolutionized the launch market yet — a decade and
10 billion USD later they're still launching for similar prices as
Arianespace.

The only reason the launch market seems to be easy to compete in is because
the US launch market has historically been a prime example of corruption.

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annerajb
The importance is the cost. they are lower priced on reused flights with a
10-20million discount. Regular non reused flights they are about the same
price as competitors (if you count 20millions less the same)

New design launching in three weeks would reduce cost even further price will
go down maybe by 10 million but cost should go down by around 50 million

~~~
kuschku
The cost od the lower bay on an Ariane 5 is 60 million USD.

The cost of a launch on Falcon 9 is 62 million USD.

That's not 20 million less, that's 2 million more — ofc, finding a second
satellite to launch with is with Ariane more time consuming, so you'll not be
as agile.

And if SpaceX cuts the cost of a non-reusable launch (previously 62mm) by
50mm, to 12mm, that'd be a breakthrough. If you meant to say that they cut the
cost of reusable launches (previously 30mm) by 500mm (aka paying people for
launching), then lol.

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walls
If you launched with a second satellite on the Falcon 9, wouldn't it only be
30 million? Seems weird to compare launching multiple payloads with launching
one.

~~~
greglindahl
SpaceX has launched a pair of comsats twice, it was organized by Boeing.
However, Boeing hasn't succeeded in selling any more of these pairs.
Arianespace has had a lot more success in convincing customers to fit into the
upper berth/lower berth size/mass limits.

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borntyping
There are millions of working, reusable electric cars; and tens of working,
reusable rockets (maybe even less than that). Tesla is having problems
building factories, but that certainly doesn't mean electric cars are hard to
make.

~~~
azernik
Yeah - more like "why are electric car _companies_ harder to build than space
launch _companies_ ".

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mulmen
Are they? There’s a lot of electric car companies, they’re just lower volume.
Sounds like the question is “Why is rapid scaling of automotive manufacturing
hard?”

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hyperpallium
Mass market products are harder to build, to a cost.

~~~
agumonkey
yeah it's mostly a scale/optim problem, otherwise musk has enough brains in
his team to make the finest cars.

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nimish
Anyone can build a $1MM car. There's tons of low volume hypercar makers.

It takes real engineering and business genius to sell millions of a $20000 car
that doesn't suck and turns a profit.

Honda's finest engineers are likely working on the civic and the accord, not
the NSX.

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api
It's harder in different ways. Mass production of any complex product comes
with a whole set of challenges that are unique and different from what SpaceX
is facing.

It could be that Musk's style is better suited to SpaceX's sort of challenge
than to the mass production challenge. The latter is less sexy leap forward
and more a matter of a billion boring little "six sigma" style optimizations.

~~~
perl4ever
It could also be possible that he just doesn't care as much about Tesla and is
therefore not contributing something crucial to it.

~~~
taneq
This was my (admittedly cynical) take. SpaceX is Musk's means to his self-
declared primary goal. Maybe the best of the best candidates get nudged
SpaceX-wards.

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manicdee
My guess is that Elon realised that rockets are hard and handed the important
decisions over to the experts (namely Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller) who
were able to start from blank paper.

At Tesla on the other hand we have a business that seems a lot simpler at
first blush, with Elon reportedly terminating or driving away anyone who
disagreed with him.

Now Elon has finally admitted that fully automating their first large scale
assembly line was a bad idea.

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SQL2219
Because you're building for a million customers not 6.

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blocked_again
Yeah. It's easier to make reusable rockets than Nike pants.

~~~
perl4ever
It seems like a tangent, but I think it may be. If you make reusable rockets,
I would think you can sell them based on a straightforward list of technical
capabilities. If you want to compete with Nike, and your shoes or clothing
don't look right and don't have the Nike logo, you may not get anywhere even
if you have all the technical boxes checked.

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walshemj
Hard to make at an affordable price and there is a lot of difference to how a
production line works and small batch high cost items like rockets.

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whalesalad
It all comes down to battery technology.

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walrus01
Wh per kilogram, Wh per cubic cm, number of charge cycle life, $ per kWh cost
to build. If you look at how many kJ are in one gallon of diesel, it's kind of
amazing. Even when 50 percent is lost to heat in an internal combustion
engine.

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sunstone
Because SpaceX has almost all the bugs worked out of it's workflow now and
Tesla doesn't yet.

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_pmf_
Quality at any cost is easy. Quality at low cost is hard.

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aurizon
Electric cats are far easier to build than reusable sockets...

~~~
stephengillie
What would they do with electric sheep?

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aurizon
Make a BAAAAD joke...

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wallace_f
I don't understand this headline. It didn't tell me why building electric cars
is harder than orbital, reusable rockets. It told me that the difficulty in
competing in the market for cars is relatively quite competitive, and that for
reusable rockets was virtually stagnant--Which I already knew, and believe
most readers here do. But we wouldn't read it if that were the headline.

The headline is open to all sort of interpretation. Most of them, misleading.

~~~
Certhas
It's also obviously not actually harder. SpaceX has built a few dozen reusable
rockets, Tesla alone has build tens of thousands of electric cars. Nevermind
that people have been building electric cars for a century or so.

But then, the question: "Why is doing things cheaply at scale at high quality
harder than creating a few items by hand?" wouldn't draw so many clicks...

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IkmoIkmo
tl;dr Why are electric cars harder to build than rockets:

1) they're not.

2) a different question: why an electric car company may be more difficult to
succeed than a rocket company, is because the former competes with a trillion
dollar internal combustion engine industry with more than a billion drivers of
vehicles, deep-pocketed incumbents, and the latter has relatively little
competition.

