Dear Slate - you need to show these things before I'll buy

[E90400K]

The “production hell” will be very real. It’s an incredibly stressful period, but also an exciting one.

I was involved in the Model 3 production ramp as a manufacturing engineer, and while it was intense, the camaraderie inside the factory and the very public pressure to make it succeed were powerful motivators. When everyone knows the stakes and there’s no room for error, teams can do some pretty remarkable things.

Right now, Slate’s manufacturing process teams and equipment teams are almost certainly deep into sourcing custom machines and tooling with long lead times. The facilities work alone is a massive effort. Anyone who’s done a home renovation can appreciate the chaos of scheduling trades, inspections, and materials, now multiply that complexity by ten. You’re pouring concrete footings, bringing in precision assembly equipment, coordinating electricians and pipefitters, all while the vehicle design and supply chain are still evolving.

That kind of concurrent engineering, designing the product and the production system at the same time, is challenging but honestly one of the most rewarding parts of manufacturing. The next several months will tell the story for Slate. If they execute cleanly and get the fundamentals right early, a lot of downstream risk gets reduced. I’m rooting for them and genuinely curious to see how they navigate this phase.

Great post.

I too was part of a team that recently (beginning in 2007) implemented a national transportation surveillance network as a new "disruptive technology" to an existing legacy system. What we as a team accomplished was extraordinary. I too found it exhilarating as well as production hell (really "integration hell"). My early background was in aerospace manufacturing as an equipment planning engineer, so I am well familiar with the entire process of designing manufacturing space and filling it with production equipment. Slate's team has their work cut out for them. We called it spiral development in our system integration environment, which can be fraught with huge risks to successful completion. Just ask Ford about its MIC top for the Bronco.

 

[bmello]

Great post.

I too was part of a team that recently (beginning in 2007) implemented a national transportation surveillance network as a new "disruptive technology" to an existing legacy system. What we as a team accomplished was extraordinary. I too found it exhilarating as well as production hell (really "integration hell"). My early background was in aerospace manufacturing as an equipment planning engineer, so I am well familiar with the entire process of designing manufacturing space and filling it with production equipment. Slate's team has their work cut out for them. We called it spiral development in our system integration environment, which can be fraught with huge risks to successful completion. Just ask Ford about its MIC top for the Bronco.

Gone are the days of “throwing it over the fence to manufacturing.”

The only way to hit timelines like this is to develop the factory and the vehicle concurrently. Product engineers have to be deeply involved in production, and production engineers need a real seat at the table during product design. That’s not a new idea, automakers have been doing variations of this for decades, but the risk profile gets very real very fast.

There are always inflection points where you have to place an order for a custom machine with a serious price tag, long lead time, and no absolute certainty that either the machine or the product will work exactly as intended when it finally arrives. You mitigate risk with prototyping, simulations, and pilot builds, but at some point you still have to pull the trigger just to get the machine builders started and keep the schedule intact.

That’s the uncomfortable reality of aggressive programs like this. It’s also what makes it interesting. When it works, it’s because the organization is aligned end to end and willing to accept calculated risk rather than waiting for perfect information that never comes.