Why Tesla is having a harder time than SpaceX

[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.)

[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.

[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".

[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.

[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.

[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.

[SQL2219]

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

[blocked_again]

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

[perl4ever]

SpaceX has blown up, according to a quick search, something like 2 rockets out of ~50. They make reliable, reusable rockets from the perspective of the launch industry, but if they sold a million cars and 40,000 of them exploded into huge fireballs when first used, then Tesla would not be considered successful. On an absolute scale, cars may be easier, but they're not easier relative to the competition.

[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.

[whalesalad]

It all comes down to battery technology.

[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.

[sunstone]

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

[_pmf_]

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

[aurizon]

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

[IncRnd]

Yea man, I saw some of those electric cats a walkin' by. I got back to the crib and saw the old lady stickin' her finger in the wall socket. That musk man, he sure is a mean old dude.

xD

[stephengillie]

What would they do with electric sheep?

[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...

[tobyhinloopen]

Welcome to news media outlets... sensational titles, speculation and no real content

[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.