John McNeill

And then we're going to take that molten metal and we're going to pour it into small molds first.

figure out how to do small molds and then we'll figure out how to make those molds bigger and bigger and bigger.

So eventually they figured out how to cast half of a car skeleton, but it's all because Doug had this like insight and then pursued the insight in small steps.

And we failed and blew up stuff and it wasn't linear, but we eventually got there.

So now when you look at a Tesla car factory,

Whether you go to Austin, Texas or Berlin or Shanghai, you see that there is no body shop anymore.

Half the factory is gone because there are no robots that are welding two or three hundred parts together because two parts come together to make that car.

And we couldn't have foreseen a second order benefit.

But the first order benefit is you remove a ton of complexity and cost.

The second order benefit was when you're welding two or 300 parts together, the skeleton never quite aligns.

And so you have to really do a lot of work to get the doors that you're going to hang on that skeleton to align and the windows and the seals and all kinds of stuff.

When you have two parts that are cast and you put them together, everything fits every time.

And so all of a sudden the doors fit, the windows fit, the gaps are right.

Doug literally changed car manufacturing.

And now eight years later, every car manufacturer in the world wants to get their hands on casting.

But they can't.

It's really hard to do.

So Tesla has built this compounded advantage over time with that one challenge to take 50% of the cost of the car up.

Exactly.

And all the manufacturing issues that come with those 300 pieces not aligning very well.