John McNeill

We'll do a one-click loan.

And we got 44 clicks like eliminated immediately because we questioned a loan doc.

Like who would be crazy enough to question paragraphs and loan docs?

But we were crazy enough to do this sort of thing.

So that's first step in the algorithm.

If you're going to have a breakthrough, it gets a lot easier if you remove requirements that aren't real.

Elon gave us this challenge.

Could we take 50% of the cost out of building a car?

So he wouldn't ask for 5%.

He wouldn't ask for 10%.

He'd ask for something ridiculous because it takes you to another level of thinking.

So the way a factory is laid out is they're often more than a mile long and they're kind of long rectangles.

And you can go to the halfway point, the 50 yard line of a car factory, and you can look to your right and you've got hundreds of robots building the skeleton of the car.

It's called the body shop typically.

And you can look to your left and you've got thousands of people hanging parts on that skeleton.

And that's called general assembly.

Doug Field, who is head of engineering, and I walked out on the scaffolding that sits above the floor so we could like start to brainstorm about how we could take 50 percent of the cost of the car out.

And we were doing this because we'd been to China and we'd seen how cost effective China was.

And quite frankly, we were scared to death.

And so this wasn't just like an exercise out of thin air.