Stretch2727
Engineer and Car Nut
Agree cars per employee is not a metric anyone should rely on to run a business.Except it completely ignores that Tesla is not just a car company. Employees per car means nothing when you also do energy storage, fueling infrastructure, solar, insurance, robots, FSD, the dealerships, service, etc. And most of those businesses are in their infancy, not contributing significant revenue yet. It’s comparing apples to chickens.
McElroy *completely*missed the boat on this, illustrating again how many “experts” still don’t get the company. (Edit: partly got ninja’d on this).
The real point John is trying to make is the legacies lost a lot of capabilities as they now have minimal vertical integration. The 90's and early 2000's saw the legacies spin off a massive amount of their internal capabilities. Look up Visteon and Delphi as 2 of the largest. I know I was there and there were a lot of guys around like Sandy and John saying this was a big mistake, but everyone understood it was all about cost. Management was driving this based on the perception automotive components were commodities and not innovative industries. Having worked for both Visteon and Ford I saw where the real engineering was occurring, and I can tell you it was not at Ford. Ford was basically project management and vehicle packaging. Even system level integration and testing was pushed out to the suppliers. Ok they did keep engines and transmissions capabilities internal. Lots of good that does them now.
The stuff they spun off had electronics and software capabilities. I am sure they wish they had this now or they are trying to rebuild it. There is really minimal capability here outside of engine and transmission. They are relying on 3rd parties for almost all of it and now they need to totally reinvent it.
The mistakes were made many years ago based on the assumption the industry was mature and stable. When books are written about the disruption of the automotive industry through the transition to EV's, I think this will be one area where the strategic blunders of the legacy automotive companies will be clearly exposed.