Or that a team of 500 people (that's massive) wasn't getting strategic goals done. Plenty of supercharger expansion, but it wasn't hitting the most needed spots. I enjoy road trips and I keep an eye on the map on supercharger.info.
For example, Phoenix has seen growth in multiple locations added on the west side. East side? Still iffy as to how far into satellite cities and the mountains you can go.
I'm not saying it was all bad, but it did give the impression that the team was grabbing the easy locations instead of digging in and getting into the needed gaps.
And 500 people. How does that effort need 500 staff?
Any time you are trying to negotiate for land, lease, electricity, city and county permitting, local contractors, etc. it is a really challenging and difficult process with all kinds of hidden pitfalls.
Okay, and the above is the best case when you are doing it as a local who already knows the ropes, the contacts, and the gotchas.
Now, imagine how many people it would require to try orchestrating this circus act, juggling new sites all over the country, maybe the world, from an office complex that is remote from the actual location.
How many sites were they working on at any one time? Tens? Hundreds?
How many specialists were needed for the different aspects that each site shared?
How many sites could each of those specialists juggle at one time?
You can add to all the above:
countless hours being spent on the phone and computer,
sometimes only to find out you are talking the wrong person, or, worse yet,
multiple people traveling to the location, some doing so multiple times, incurring the delay and costs that contributes
the time spent coordinating between team members working shared aspects of several projects
This is likely a fair description for the group who were let go. They were likely doing a near impossible task as well as they could. It was just very inefficient due to these challenges. I'm surprised they were doing it as well as they did with so few people.
If Elon were to see something like this as a bottleneck,
despite these people doing the very best they could be expected to do, and compared it to managing the Megapack sales and deployment (remember Elon saying, "I can have that installed in 90 days, or its free"), what would he see as a way to streamline the process?
Maybe, applying the knowledge and techniques that are more efficient for Megapacks to the Supercharger expansion program could have crossed his mind.
Maybe he has some other idea in mind. Who knows?
No matter what, Elon saw a way to get around this bottleneck, and acted decisively.
)
