Comparisons between Apple and Tesla have not only been common for years, but are expected.
Some of these can be limed to timing. Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs passed away in 2011 and left the tech world with a visionary vacuum. Tesla was about to launch its first original vehicle, the Model S sedan, and position Elon Musk to accept Jobs’ role as America’s ruling business futurist.
Tesla was also a creation of Silicon Valley. The Native American auto industry was represented by the Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – which originated in Detroit a century earlier, when California was better known for a thriving film industry and as an agricultural powerhouse.
So Tesla was the new Apple, Musk the next Jobs, and the goal of creating a fully electric car that would save the planet from global warming was the 21st century version of the personal computer revolution that led Apple in the 1980s. .
It sounded good, but there was a problem: Musk did not play along.
Instead, he had to emulate a much, much older American visionary: Henry Ford.
Elon wants to be more like Henry – Henry Ford
Ford was a pioneer in the moving assembly line to build the Model T, which shortened production time to 90 minutes and made it the most successful vehicle of its age. Later, Ford created the paradigm for what we now call ‘vertical integration’ in manufacturing: the River Rouge plant in Michigan, which was completed in 1928 and at one point literally filled train carriages with iron ore to one side of the facility. , completed cars that roll the other.
Musk is obsessed with the legacy of this famous factory, in part because the global automotive industry completely abandoned vertical integration in the 1980s. Toyota has developed a new production system that has greatly reduced inventory and that car manufacturers have been able to turn on or off production, depending on consumer demand. Combined with distant global supply chains, a new process called ‘lean’ manufacturing has supplanted vertical integration.
But Musk wants Tesla to drive manufacturing into a new, highly automatic, 21st-century iteration, and for that he needs much more control over what goes into every Tesla vehicle, from batteries to seats, software to windshield glass, self-driving. sensors to chassis components.
This back-to-the-future approach means that Tesla is in fact doing the opposite of what Apple did. Cupertino is definitely invested in owning the user experience, which is called a “walled garden” ecosystem where an Apple person lives in an Apple world.
However, Apple is a design, software, and marketing company that effectively produces nothing but intellectual property and staggering profit margins. Millions of iPhones have been put together by partners in Asia, and this is proof of CEO Tim Cook’s genius and management chain management that Apple is thriving in the post-Job era.
Tesla, meanwhile, is manufacturing virtually everything that goes into its vehicles. In fact, Musk frequently complained that the carmaker’s progress had a speed limit that was determined by exactly one obstacle: the company’s slowest supplier.
Elon sticks to his game plan
Musk was wonderfully stubborn to stick to his game plan and went so far as to openly criticize the so-called Toyota Production System, a jaw-dropping but understandable move. He thinks Tesla can do better, with fast-built factories filled with robots rather than human workers. He dreams of cars being built like Coca-Cola are currently being bottled while turning automatic assembly lines, and Tesla has begun exploring this innovation in the manufacture of its new, larger lithium-ion battery cells. (Tesla also saw the dream of nightmares when it tried to automate the assembly line for its Model 3 sedan in 2017, and had to toss a legitimate Henry Ford era temporary line under a tent in its parking lot.)
This does not mean that competitors do not want to emulate the Apple model and manufacture the iPhone from cars. Apple itself probably wants to follow its own model with its loaded Project Titan effort. Serial entrepreneur Henrik Fisker has emphasized that his new company, Fisker Inc., is following an “asset-light” approach and is working with Canadian Magna International to build a debut vehicle, the Ocean SUV, by 2022. Foxconn will be producing another project called ‘Project PEAR’ by 2023.
The traditional car industry divides the difference. General Motors is investing $ 27 billion to expand 30 EVs by 2025 – and the automaker is converting both existing factories to EV production while building a new plant in Ohio with battery supplier LG Chem. If you want to break it down, you could say that GM aims to be an asset medium, as opposed to Fisker’s asset light and Tesla’s asset heavy.
Every system has a reasonable chance of winning. GM knows what he’s doing. Tesla can reduce the amount of time it takes to get factories up and running and cars rolling off the line. Fisker was able to quickly set up a fresh transportation brand, which could achieve within two years what Tesla needed two decades to achieve.
But one thing is for sure: Tesla is absolutely, certainly not the Apple of cars. It’s time to end the equation once and for all.