But they didn't actually drop the colors they just called them "limited edition" and raised the price of them. Following quote is from their notification email.
I have poor language skills. Sugar=profanity.
I work in manufacturing. A lot of experience, way harder than cars.
I’ve worked at north americas largest powder coat oven as an engineer, before I went into waaaay harder:
We had a highly automated conveyance system fed by robotics - finished parts hung onto automated carriers feeding many spray boothes (more than Tesla) and many ovens (more than Tesla). This isn’t tit for tat but I know their pain, I promise. (and my manufacturing post record here stands for itself, review it if desired)
It was a god damn apocalypse when we introduced a new color because the dumb sugar production management decided “let’s discount the change over time in our forecast because the staff will become more proficient over time.
Nope.
That sugar takes just as long as it takes.
But more importantly, as you may be about to imagine, it sugars everything.
So when the production came online everything missed estimate (once ramped up) despite no one area being any slower than designed, except change over from color group to color group.
More complexity in manufacturing is cancer, and it should be fought by all staff like they’re an antibody.
More colors isn’t just paint booth details: it adds pallets of material that have to be received, QA-d, organized, delivered, old removed, contaimment disposed of once empty, lines to clear, quality metrics that must be monitored and managed from the supplier, etc. it’s more tremendous and leeching than you can imagine but once a product is offered it’s hard to pull it.
It means you have to pay a fork truck driver that much more to drag *sugar* around, and have to build your building bigger, buy more shelves to hold it, and reduce your run time on all other options to give it time.
Permutations like this cause WAY more ripple headache to manufacturing. Reducing that will be a tremendous benefit far beyond “paint shop capacity”.
This decision is why I invest in Elon musk. Either he’s this intelligent or trusts those who are.
Edit; final sentence, *is an example of why*