John McNeill

It was an exercise we believed in long term survival.

So Doug and I are out there looking at the factory and we look to our right and we see all these robots building the skeleton of the car.

And then Doug's like, I got an idea.

So he comes back the next day and we're in a conference room and he rolls a matchbox car across the conference table and says, here's the idea.

And like, what a toy car, what is this?

And he said, well, in the body shop where we're building the skeleton of the car, it's all robots welding about 300 parts together.

That's not the way matchbox cars are built.

They're casted.

Somebody pours liquid metal into a mold and a car comes out.

What if we could cast the cars?

And I knew enough about the physics to say, Doug, the reason you can't cast cars is kind of obvious.

You can't pour molten metal the size of a car into a mold and have the mold not melt and have the pressure of that situation not like explode a factory.

Like there's a reason why Matchbox can do that because they're the size of our thumb.

But you can't do that with bigger metal pieces.

He's like, I know, but I think it can be solved.

And so he turns to me, he says, do you have anything we could melt?

I'm like, yeah, I got a bunch of scratch and dent rims in the factory that we reject.

And we put them out behind the factory and a recycler comes and picks them up every week.

We can melt those.

He's like, we're going to get a few engineers and we're going to start to melt these wheels.