11 January

Ignoring all of the Elon Musk distraction around Tesla, their engineering is superb. Like the new Model Y, when you build a car all of the component parts have to be bolted and welded together, which takes time and a lot of money to build the robots and train the people to do it. The new Model Y took an underbody that used to have 70 component parts (top pic) that had to be put together, and replaces all of them with one part only. The bottom picture. Which is cast aluminium. They literally stamp the underbody in one piece, from a mould. Not only does this save huge amounts of time and money in production, it means the car has no parts that can move against each other to come loose, and make creaking and rattling noises. It makes it much stronger and quieter. Using this sort of innovation, Tesla rolls a new car off the production line every 13 seconds.