8 March

I use Tesla as an example for EVs, because they’re the world leaders. What they’re doing is remarkable in all sorts of ways we never hear about. For example a few years ago, they hired an ex-LEGO executive to head up their new Nevada gigafactory operations. There’s a very smart reason for that. LEGO is actually incredibly precise, within fractions of a millimetre, otherwise it wouldn’t work. And LEGO makes billions of parts every year, in automated factories. That takes enormously precise engineering. That’s the skills they hired the LEGO executive to bring to Tesla. But more than that, they way they build their cars tries to minimise the number of parts, because every part has to fit with absolute precision with every other. So they combine as many parts of the car into a single piece as possible. A modular appraoch (just like LEGO). And just like Apple do with laptops, creating a single formed/molded ‘unibody’ rather than assembling from lots of different parts. And it goes even further. They build the gigafactories themselves, using the same modular ideas. They can build a gigafactory in under 11 months. You can struggle to get a family home built in that time.