Recently, Musk was again in news due to his tweets — probably not his most famous or costliest tweet ever — for threatening to move Tesla HQ out of California and manufacturing out of the Fremont CA plant. Supply chains and production has been sputtered in the US and elsewhere due to COVID. It is true that maintaining idle plants is prohibitively expensive. I take a look at how Fremont plant works well for Tesla, and how shifting capacity is complicated.
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Dreamliner delays have affected Boeing’s 737 plans with tragic consequences. FAA approach to safety compared to China Aviation.
Leave a CommentLast April, I wrote about a whimsical Tesla analyst call. I had briefly mentioned three issues: (A) personality of the founder vs. personality of the firm (B) over-exuberance about Tesla before they could start making cars in scale. (C) cautious optimism about Tesla eventually fixing things for better. It seems like those were much simpler times, but who knew? That April call was a Donnie Darko style foreboding of many bizarre things to happen later. Since then Elon Musk’s twitter feed and other interactions only got stranger, beginning with an undergraduate-level banter on Karl Marx and capitalism, dissing people, creating tent-city and night outs at the factory, relaxing at a podcast, eventually leading to the costly “420” tweet that was fined…
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I was in Japan this summer and met some wonderful Wharton alumni. Of course, fulfilling a childhood dream, I also had a chance to take the Shinkansen (Bullet train) a few times. Of course, in these days of disrepair of public transport systems such as the MTA and Amtrak, Shinkansen is an engineering marvel. But more than the engineering feat, what is impressive (of course, as an operations prof) was the nearly flawless operations of the Shinkansen. Shinkansen bullet trains leave south from train tracks in Tokyo every 7-9 minutes. This frequency is nothing short of amazing. If you consider the fact that the Hakari express takes 3 hours to get to Shin-Osaka station outside Osaka, there are 20-26 trains…
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