Either they are publicly exaggerating the scope of the projects they are working on (eg the “million mile” battery and “full rewrite of FSD”), severely underpaying engineers and understaffed, or something else.
I've never understood the argument. I've worked in several different private companies, and calling them "Efficient" is so off base as to be laughable. Remember, a private company will happily let an import engineer go instead of giving them a small raise.
Having worked on many R&D projects, I am nearly certain that any claims they make about efficiency are about as reliable as a startup telling early employees that their stock will be worth something. Sure, it could be true.
Frankly I doubt that they've done a detailed enough analysis to know these kinds of things at TRL 2-3, at best they've done a back of the envelope calculation based on lab results at small scale to show it's not obviously stupid, or if they're really on the ball they've got a license for Aspen and have some incredibly oversimplified model that shows it's not obviously stupid.
Really, at this development level, "not obviously stupid" is a pretty positive thing. If they're doing the work right, they are trying to demonstrate that it's stupid every day because that's how you avoid discovering it's stupid after five years of R&D and $50M.
Well yes, but the fact that they are expensive is a byproduct of their rarity (which results in us talking about cheaper engineers), and that can be symptomatic of a system with an efficiency problem. The argument then is about confirming that it is.
The figure of merit is cost, and it's only correlated with efficiency. If efficiency was king, we'd all be driving 60% efficient cars...the technology exists but the cost is not acceptable.
> It turns out the inefficient places tend to get out-competed
It turns out that a lot of 'efficiency optimisation' is done inconpetently, like removing 'un-needed' parts from a car: seatbelts, airbags - they just add extra weight!
Lika federal aviation authority hiring engineers from boeing to check their own work to 'improve efficiency'
This sounds about right. This is why I don't believe in the "industry is more efficient than government" dogma. Large organizations of people are generally inefficient unless extraordinary care has gone into the engineering and maintenance of the organization.
The obsession with efficiency is disingenuous too. The two limiting factors are generation capacity and cost/economics. Efficiency by itself says nothing.
In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too, but for a whole century gasoline powered transportation was more feasible. Aviation is still only feasible with kerosene despite it being less efficient than electric propulsion.
That is an overabstracted viewpoint that assumes they just crank up a variable. How do the efficiency gains take place in the first place?
By creating something new that is more efficent. Even if we ignore economies of scale as a source of efficency there is a replacement curve in action which would create growth! A situation where they would immediately scrap the old equipment for the same payload and switch to a new more efficient one is extremely rare.
If they need to be five times more efficient, why is the plan to spend a lot of money on things that do not directly impact customer service, like giving away rides to poor people, and using self-produced Biodiesel?
Either they are publicly exaggerating the scope of the projects they are working on (eg the “million mile” battery and “full rewrite of FSD”), severely underpaying engineers and understaffed, or something else.
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