Elon Musk Interview: 1-on-1 with Sandy Munro

hey boys and girls um we got a special treat for you today um i've gotten the opportunity to uh to meet with mr elon musk and today we're going to talk a little bit about um his aspirations we luckily got a tour through the um program here at uh and brownsville um and i i just seen it says bocachia a gateway to mars so it's it's kind of it's kind of really exciting i was really really happy that i got the chance to to see the the uh the product that's being manufactured here these rockets it's spectacular the way they're doing it and it's totally different than anything i've seen with rocket production at any other company so with that i'd like to introduce mr musk and uh and i guess we'll maybe you could answer a few questions or actually i'd rather i'd rather hear from you than than talk i i've been doing a lot of talking lately and uh um like uh i've had criticisms in the past um of uh of you know were you talking to an interview or something uh yeah no i wasn't in an interview was when i did my reports and uh and the uh and it was what it was okay and even on the the model 3 we have i wanted to show you the gaps on one side but not on the other i i don't understand how that can happen so but i thought your criticisms were were accurate yeah well and so i've got a question um we've been traveling all over the place and suddenly we're fighting we've got a sticker on the side of the car that says the mineral life and people are coming up and showing us their car and telling us about their experiences with a tesla and why not yeah these guys are really uh deep into into loving this thing and it doesn't matter whether it's that eight-year-old or six-year-old kid what that came up mister are you sandy monroe people know and and they they're deeply involved in the tesla and yet for some reason or other we have a couple of little problems with our car and then i see another car and it's a perfect build if i would have had that any any kind of comment or response or whatever from that would be greatly appreciated yeah um well it it took us a while to kind of iron out the production process especially during a production ramp um it's um that's like people like friends cannot ask me like when should they buy a tesla like well either buy it right at the beginning or when the production reaches steady state but during that like production ramp that's it's super hard to you know be like in vertical climb mode and get everything right uh on on the little details it's just a super difficult thing um so um if you really want like things to be dialed it's like actually very very early cars or once once production is leveled off that's when it's going to be best well we noticed that we have a we have a 21 at the model 321 and ours had the little problems but but but at the end of the day this guy's car was fabulous paint jar was spectacular sure but the paint was it was a big deal but now this other car i saw and it was a model 3 with white interior which i personally think is the better color than we got black but that that thing was absolutely pristine perfect that's as good as anybody anybody could possibly do i just don't understand it mine was built this month his was a month later mine had problems his is perfect yeah we actually did improve uh gap and paint quality quite a bit towards the end of last year even even in the course of december there was like um yeah it we were able to really focus on it and improve it a great deal um like one of the things that was happening when we were like ran from production was uh the paint wasn't necessarily drying enough uh so it's like well if you go faster you know it's it's like you you just discover these things like so if we knew them in advance we'd fix them in advance but but like like you ramped the ramp the line and and then uh the paint that had had an extra sort of minute to dry or two minutes or whatever now it doesn't have the two minutes and so it was more prone to uh you know have two issues that might be correct correct this is like one example yeah um and uh yeah it's it's a production as hell like the like the real the thing that's i think unique for cars for tesla is achieving volume production it was like of any american startup car company i i think tesla's like the first to achieve volume production in a hundred years basically like i think chrysler was the last one yeah um and uh so like prototypes i've said it's probably like prototypes are relatively speaking easy and they're also like fun like prototypes are easy and fun and and then reaching volume production for with a reliable product at an affordable price is is like excruciatingly difficult yeah so you've done a good job i mean uh i've seen the difference between the one we had in 2018 then the model y which was that's the first i i never recommended anybody else's but the one the model y when we tore that down um people were coming up hey which one should i buy and i said i'm not into uh doing that but if i'm going to buy an electric car and we've seen everybody's i mean we've torn every everybody's electric car apart if i was going to tell somebody to buy one and he had had to have one i would suggest the model y and lots of people did that this one this model three we've got um this may be the second one that i'm going to suggest you know you can either have one of these two and then i won't have to worry about you coming back and telling me there's something wrong with my skull or something that they they both they both work really well yeah and i have to tell you we've been we've gone about almost 6 000 whatever i can't remember 6 000 plus miles so far in a couple of days in a few days and uh the seats in your car are phenomenal absolutely phenomenal i i can't say enough about them i i i drive a jeep wrangler yeah and uh and if i had to sit in that seat for an hour uh i'd have to get a chiropractor and uh and uh and probably surgery these seats we were sitting in them for hours and hours and hours and hours and there's no fatigue they're brilliant and you make them yourself yeah yeah absolutely so um i mean what we're really trying to do there with the seat is um and we put a lot of effort into this is minimize any peaks and any pressure peaks so it like evens out the pressure yeah like if if your butt hurts it's basically going to be because there's there's some part of the seat that is um producing a a pressure peak yeah and that's that's gonna just cut off your circulation and make your butt hurt um but but there's there's been quite a few iterations in fact i mean we've the early model s's had i think probably the worst seat of any car i've ever said it's like if you wanted to sit on a snow and toadstool that was the early model s seats um now if you sat on it for an ever it barely i guess it's better than a stone toilet stove so because if you started long enough eventually your body your heart would win eventually yeah because your butt can repair itself on the seat cannot yeah so eventually it would be like um acceptably comfortable but it would be a very difficult wearing process um and so we you know we it's like we try to go from okay from stone toed stool to something that is just um i don't know lap election it just feels great you know and um yeah that you can sit in for a long time time and it doesn't it doesn't it's still comfortable that that was a long journey and a lot of effort yeah well yeah it paid off um i like i said we do a lot of work on different things and i would say without a question of a doubt the seats i never read we did no room in the back seats but um we had it filled up with junk but uh but um i would suggest that that seat is in my estimation for my body and when it is the best seat on the planet there's nothing better than that and a lot of the oems they don't they don't want to make seats because they say that's something that should be outsourced and i believe that anything you touch anything that uh that you're going to interface with yes has to be has to be made in-house because that's your profound knowledge so yeah absolutely and you can iterate on it and keep making it better and this this this particular seat um it's it has improved quite a lot from the early production model three and one you know early pressure model three two to present day it's improved a fair bit um and like one of one of the breakthroughs was like actually franz when hull thousand had a seat that the studio had done and and i sat in that seat i'm like wow this seat's great we're like okay let's figure out how to make how do we get a production seat to feel like a bespoke handmade handy tailored seat without costing a ton of money so you just can't it's very difficult to do that if you're working with a supplier you know so well near impossible because they got to get it cranked out and moving and quickly and then what they want to do is they want to take the underpinnings those weldments or castings if they haven't gone that far they want to use those over and over and over again for everybody and so consequently everybody may look different on the outside but inside uh probably not so much so that's that's good stuff but i have to tell you about the best stuff and okay so we had um we had the beta autopilot uh system and um and we did have problems but the problems weren't with your system they were with the roads people are painting either they don't paint in certain areas or they paint right in the center so how are we going to get legislation to make it so that things are consistent between states in the old days it probably didn't make much difference but now we're moving into self-driving and uh well i mean i think for self-driving even if the road is painted completely completely wrong um and a ufo lands in the middle of the road this the car still cannot crash and still needs to do the right thing so the like what really matters like the prime directive for the autopilot system is don't crash like that that really overrides everything um so no matter what lines say or how the road is done the the thing that needs to happen is minimizing the probability of impact while getting you to your destination conveniently and comfortably but but the prime directive absolute priority is minimize probability of of injury to yourself or to anyone on the road on the pedestrians or anything like that so and it's really it can't be dependent on the road markings being correct or anything like that it's just going to be no matter what it's not going to crash well um i still think that that the road commissions in one eye better shape up because like i said corey and i had an issue and luckily and luckily i got out of it but what happened was they painted all kinds of lines all over the place there was an old off-ramp and a new off-ramp and a bunch of cones and some flashing red lights it was totally i have no idea if i had to take that thing and knew i had to take it i would be totally confused as to what to do where but when the car came into it the the lions are telling it okay go here and that scared the living daylights out of me if we would have crashed if it would have been somebody i used to race and i kind of like can get out of stuff and and even though i'm old i'm kind of agile and but if we would have crashed the press would have instantly said it was all your fault and in essence the fault lies in this massive mess that that we were trying to keep up with and then quite frankly i stopped driving in the in the right-hand lane that was it i mean the car wants you to keep going back there because it wants you to follow the rules but you can change that it's a setting oh really yeah you'll have to show us that because uh i don't like uh i don't like that one but but it's it's it's following it's following the rules and that's great but you have to have the roads at the same sort of thing so i want to make sure that we've got this on tape or on whatever not tape but but video because i'm guaranteeing you somebody is going to screw up somewhere and and and people have to know it's the road that can bugger the things up as well as whether your stu your uh your autopilot thing i mean it would certainly be helpful to have roads with uh accurate markings and everything uh but like i said the really for self-driving it's got to be even if somebody tries to trick the car they do not succeed in tricking the car right um because you know people will do weird things so it's got to be maintain safety no matter what and don't let yourself get tricked that's yeah so well maybe that's the best segue ever because what i want to do is i wanted to talk about um i i actually uh john what's john's last name no no the guy that led us gave us a ride yeah okay well i'll just say john l.a silicon valley yeah la silicon valley whatever i thought anyways so anyways he um um he gave us a ride okay and and we taped it and you can hear me going you know my voice went up about three octaves i was so excited um corey said he's got a sore ear for me giggling or whatever i have nev i've sat in in f-18s i didn't fly them but i was sat in them and i saw how everything was supposed to work on the ground yeah i i flew or through a simulator i flew a c-17 i know what you can do and what you can't do what autopilot will go to and i never seen anything never ever seen anything quite like what you've got in the new self-driving thing this this is just absolutely brilliant this should get into the marketplace as fast as possible it's it's it's accurate it's much more accurate than what we have in the in the model 3. it's accurate it's it's kind of aggressive because if there's a hole it'll it'll find that hole it makes left-hand turns which i've heard from everybody can't be done i mean these are the things that this is the this will save more lives and airbags seat belts and anything else that anybody's ever ever gotten because that's correct yeah i i really i i was so impressed i i couldn't believe it and i have some videotape and i just asked you for using it i i want to put that out i want to i want the rest of the world to know what the new standard is because in the auto world some people are going to win some people are going to lose and some are going to fade away the more they fade away the worse it's going to be for the for the general population but i'm telling you that that system i don't know who you developed or how it developed but that is absolutely developed like we developed the hardware and the software um uh we've just got we've got a very talented team that we bought from scratch uh at tesla for autopilot software and autopilot hardware um and uh yeah it's uh just we've got really a lot of talented people again i gotta ask a technical question how many lines of code is in that in that thing a bazillion a trillion whatever what uh well i don't think lines of code is necessarily a metric of goodness uh well maybe but i mean it's so it's so it's so intuitive either that or it's ai and it's cognitive knowledge or something i don't know but yeah i think generally the i would consider lines of code to be i like a large number of lines of code to be bad not good um and in fact i would generally give like two points for deleting a line of code one point for adding a line of code um so uh and and then like the lines code thing when you when you have neural nets uh where you've um right i got it it's it's not you know it there's a whole whole lot of statistics going on basically a lot of dot products yeah um going on um the lines of code is becomes especially uh not a merit figure merit for when you've got a lot of complex neural nets operating um you have a lot of matrix math uh i mean that said i think we haven't actually counted it but i mean it's maybe i don't know a few hundred thousand lines of code that's amazing i'd like it to be less you know well your your philosophy about getting rid of uh lines of code i have a philosophy about getting rid of parts so the more parts you get written in fact uh a long time ago when i counted up the number of things in the in the wheel area uh i said this should all be one part and then totally agree yeah and you yeah you got it actually i can tell you how that that problem arose um and it it it was uh you know um like first of all i think you can generally see the the errors the organizational structure errors they manifest themselves in the product so um for uh the you know um the the sort of wheelhouse areas of the body uh uh there was a lot of engineering done and there were a lot of uh right answers to the wrong question um so somebody would say like well what's the best material to make this little section of the body out of and what's the right materials make this little section and and i think we've got probably the best material science team uh in the world um at tesla and then actually uh a lot of them also just do work at spacex as well yeah i know i'm coming to that question too or yeah yeah but so uh the the engineers would ask what's the best material for this this purpose best behavior for that and and they got like 50 different answers and they were all true individually but they were not true collectively right um and so and when you when you try to join all these dissimilar metal you know similar alloys and uh you you have galvanic corrosion so you cannot you've got to have better seal and you've got gaps that you've got to seal and you know i've got to join these things and some of them don't some of them need to be joined with rivets some need to be joined with spot welds something needs to be done with resin or resin and spot welds and it looks you know frankly it looks like a sort of bit of a frankenstein situation when you when you look at it um all together um and and it's uh i can i can't emphasize enough the nightmare of of ceiling in between the gaps that is like uh that might be the most painful job in the whole factory is is spackling on the the sealant yeah um and then you make you have a little if there's like if there's like a little error with curing the sealant or like like just somebody who's been working you know for several hours makes a slight mistake then you've got like it now you've got an mbh issue because you've got a little hole and you've got a leak issue and it's it's just like this is terrible so um i mean you can muscle through it and we have but it's just uh way better to have a single piece casting um and then you don't have any gaps no sealant uh you don't have dissimilar metals and you can uh reduce the size of the body shop dramatically right um so just just having the the rear body castings for model y uh allowed us to reduce the the body shop by 30 percent yeah so there's roughly a thousand robots uh on the model 3 body line which by the way is also not a figure of merit you want fewer things not more yeah um we got rid of 300 robots uh just with that rear body casting yeah and then when we go to the front body casting we'll get rid of another 300 robots right so i don't know if you well you probably don't have time for my stuff but i have in my shop for 15 years a rear casting a center casting and a front casting to make a car yeah i always totally agree thousands of engineers and i mean uh big big time uh executives walk by it hey have you ever thought of doing oh you know sandy and they don't do it and they don't do it because we got this body shop sure and and because they've continuously hung their hat on this thing they figured you know this is the way it should go but when you came up oh i will tell you i'm very disappointed i thought i was going to see a single piece casting in a model 3 as well i thought you were going to shoot the two and then glue it together but that's all right i mean at some point i'm getting over probably switched to a single piece casting uh but um it's it's like uh we i think we need to get the probably the texas factory and the berlin factory going um yeah and uh like we just we need a like we do have an issue of like it's hard to change the wheels on the bus where it's going to 80 miles an hour down the highway yeah so uh you know model 3 is like most of our or what is most about volume model y will become it will exceed model model three um but it's just we we just need basically an opportunity to kind of redo the factory without blowing up the cash flow of the company yeah i mean i understand the you've got a lot of stuff in place so uh we're looking forward to seeing what's going to happen in berlin um that that's one i'm really really interested in because quite frankly uh you're a lot closer to you know you're a lot closer to the the um the casting companies and germany has fabulous tool maker so i'm expecting to see lots of good stuff out of that are you going to have to or maybe you don't want to talk about that but are you going to have three castings then or just a two well effectively there'll be a rear casting a front casting and then the center will be a structural pack yeah so structural pack is also this is an important thing uh that i've been wanting to do for since the beginning of the company um but it was it was always tough to kind of like because it's a coupled problem so like and and when when you're in uh sort of high-speed r d you're it's you really you often want to decouple the problems can try to solve uh electrical issues in the battery uh and you're trying to solve structural issues and if you bring them together then it's it it's hard you know you're you're putting the whole the whole company at risk basically yeah but now since we have model three model y in production um we and and we have a new factory that's getting built um this is our opportunity to say okay now we're going to do a couple problem where we're going to combine the the battery pack and the basically body chassis the primary structure the primary structure and uh we're gonna transfer share uh through the the the cans of the of the cells um and just to you know shear transfer which is gives you a super stiff um you know real great moment of inertia it's like a carbon they do this with carbon fiber you know and composite sandwich like have an aluminum honeycomb with upper lower carbon face sheets um and you get incredible um sheer transfer unless you're a great moment of inertia for it you get a real stiff big plate um and so getting dual use of the the cells and like so the cells become structure um and that's like what a point i was trying to make at the um a battery drape presentation but i think a lot of people didn't quite understand why that's such an important thing um you know the the cells today in every car are carried like a sack of potatoes they have they actually have negative uh structural value um because not only they need to be not only they don't serve to aid in the structure of the car and they um they have to be isolated from the rest you know from the rest of the car so it's isolated from you know vibration and shock loads that kind of thing so so then you've got to put mass into isolating the cells um because otherwise they'll bang against the side of the the battery casing and that's that's not good um but by essentially binding the cells in there um and where the bonding foam uh serves as both a an adhesive and a fire retardant yeah it's you you basically get you get you know two bows with one stone exactly yeah so multifunctional designs is something i really really try and uh get my the companies that i work with i try and get them to do that and uh we got a ton of people right after the the battery your battery show saying oh you can't do this you can't do that so we made one up or made a wood blocks and went down and said this is what's going to be and then we i talked a little bit about um you know what the effect is and the loading and transfer of loading and how much safer and stronger this is going to be on and on it's the highest rating i think it's the highest rated uh show we've ever put out i'm just explaining uh you know why this is such a good idea because you got you got people you know designing cars all over the planet and they're telling me why it's not a good idea and i'm saying tell me again i mean really you're an engineer that you this is the kind of stuff that that really needs to have happened yeah i think it likes to be helpful to show and tell because if you say like um you know shear transfer using a steel cancer shear transfer between upper and lower uh face sheets what does that actually mean like well let's show you uh you know this is what happens if you've got just a little floppy sheet or or you just have like a limited number of uh stringers for shear transfer you can see it's like it's still it's quite bendy um but as soon as you have a whole bunch of cans or honeycomb or anything like that and you bond an upper lower face sheet it gets crazy stiff like you can't bend like you just put them together like one thing's floppy and the other thing is stiff as hell um and that's really what you want and then um this this will give also give like um like the torsional rigidity won't be much better and so if you're like you're trying to improve like the the the ride and feel of the car you say like you know what what's the what's the frequency of this car is it like a like a sort of real bendy spring or is it like tight um and that feeling of like is this car tight really if people don't understand why does this car feel better than the other cars like well because you've got your natural frequency is high and you've got good torsional rigidity and then another factor is like what is your problem moment of inertia so like basically to what degree is like the mass group towards the center as opposed to spread out towards the outside um and like you can see this like with like an ice skater where if the ice skater holds arms out it you rotate slowly brings arms in rotate fast that's what polar that's that's what's meant by polar moment of inertia exactly so it's like can you rotate this car fast uh you can if you bring the mass to center right and and quite frankly we've had lots of people discussing you know the pros and cons here but to me you were saying well we got two for one but you really got three for one yeah because now you've got body stiffness that's gone up and all the other stuff that's going along with it right and and then on top of that you've got um i i when people say well what's it like to drive the car because again we've stopped in lots of different places and i tell them if you uh if you get a 7 series bmw and drive that that's what you're basically getting it's the same sort of a suspension feel as that and it and you don't have to you're not muscling anything around everything is tight and perfect and tight's a good and then if you when you go to the when you go to those three let's say three structural members that i mean if you put a body on top of that it's going to be a perfect build and as a as a guy who had to work in body shops and as a guy who used to make molds and dyes and whatnot it's really difficult to take a whole bunch of pieces and glue them together and there's no nothing right i'm just using fixtures and then some you're gonna have to stack up i mean that's the issue yeah it's like uh if you've got a whole bunch of separate parts and each of them has got a given tolerance um even if that tolerance is tight and it could be like you know 0.2 millimeter tolerance but you've got like 50 parts okay now yeah you know and you multiply them together yeah and you can't win exactly you're gonna also have like just variants between cars so um that's for sure like one of the reasons why it's best to just combine the parts and not have separate parts uh and then also just go for extreme levels of precision um like you know one of the examples uh uh you know we use tesla is like lego so like lego is super precise because the press fit um i think they're precise down to uh you know about a quarter millimeter or less um you know basically about ten thou and and each one is exactly the same yeah it's going to be like if the lego if lego's like two presses is is too soft or too hard like it was too soft the precipitate won't work it's too hard you can't get it on right um so uh but they can get make something to that that is like a tiny fraction of a millimeter accurate and it's a low-cost toy right you know by 20 bucks for a lego set um and um and so so like if lego can be that precise and so could a car exactly yeah actually um i i got to tell you i i applaud bmw for putting out the i3 but it ugly but the uh but the thing that we got from it was that carbon fiber body was absolutely perfect and when you have if you had the stiffness of the castings down below and you take a carbon fiber basically structure and put it over the top absolutely every door is always going to be perfect you won't have to have fixtures you won't have to have anything it just goes boom done that's ultimately what i think a perfect build is probably going to go for but most people don't want to do it because they're talking about oh carbon fire is so expensive no it's not it's not really that expensive and and at the end of the day you have to take it and look at it a total account it cost yeah how much does it cost to basically where's all the tooling and whatnot how about all the scrap that you get on and on and on yeah i mean there are some other issues with carbon fiber which is that you know carb fiber with resin has a coefficient of thermal expansion which is basically zero and if you have parts that are say aluminum or steel uh that's you know aluminum's got quite a high you know cte um stainless has it's like about halfway yes you know so it's like um so then you know if you have like a hot versus a cold environment like you can't have your doors jam yeah so having uh you know matching matching cte is pretty important for things like a door frame um all right you know so that's uh you know if so if we're using say steel we probably need to stay with a steel door because otherwise we're going to get like cte issues yeah but at the end of the day we found out the tricks that that bmw used so they've got cross car beams which is going to shrink the most and they're embedded right into the carbon fibers how is that possible this will rip free we tried this when i worked on the boeing 787 and stuff yeah and we tried that and when we you know you do the thermal expansion and contraction it rips free from everything but clever design or clever engineering on bmw's part made it so that you could do that so i'm not saying you know run out and do this right now but eventually you guys are material science experts i mean you make your own we know sure a little bit about what's inside those electric motors and and actually the the aluminum used for the for the mega castings these things all nobody has anything like that nobody's using it most people i mean they develop our own allies like so it's like some of the challenges with uh with doing like a large aluminum casting there is you don't want to have um a a a sort of a heat crate or quench step afterwards so like like uh often in order to get good properties from uh aluminum you need to you know yeah yeah well if yeah if you want to if you you want to heat heat treat it and and then the heat treating uh and any kind of like arrow certainly no water quench uh or it's it's going to cause the the things get a potato chip on you it's going to basically warp um so we had to develop a a custom alloy to make sure we could get good material properties but not require a any step after the casting that could distort the shape that was actually that's an important that's like a very important thing um for example like the model s uh and nx castings they um for the you know original model s not the new one but the for the original they required a heat treat step right afterwards and and so it was always a pain in the neck because we couldn't really expand the casting because it would it would run pretzel on us like just potato chip or pretzel it's like uh not not uh you can't scale that so yeah threatened about development alley that was okay and had good also had good elongation properties in the event of a crash there's like kind of a hard materials problem so well it worked out really well and the uh no one believes me i know a fair amount about you know casting and why not and uh no one believes when i say you know it fills up in four to six milliseconds oh that's impossible really well okay fine that that kind of stuff um is lost on most engineers because they don't take materials so i wanted to be a mental urges yeah mature science is i think one of the most useful classes you can take in engineering for sure absolutely um i mean um the the area that our department i was going to be in at stanford for grad studies before i kind of put that on hold slash dropped out basically uh was material science yeah so yeah well i'm a big fan of material science well i i am as well i think that uh i think that that's something that i saw disappear when i was at ford motor company because of the things that were going on uh in the uh late 80s and uh sorry the late 70s and early 80s and they just had to shed some stuff and that went away uh like they don't they don't invent materials there anymore and actually no one else did either or does either um so i think that those kinds of things um are the things that maybe the bigger oems should be thinking about i think bringing stuff back in especially now i mean i don't need the size of an engine plant and a transmission plant and i got a little dinky electric motor and a and basically a two-speed gearbox or one speed gearbox i mean that's uh that's that's that's going to be a big big difference i don't know what they're going to do with all that stuff i really don't know how um how they're going to start implementing this i mean you may have heard that general motors said that 2035 they're going to be nothing but electric cars that's cool well that's uh that's a pretty big step um i've been saying for a long time in fact i had a lot of inch a lot of executives come in after i gave a speech and said uh this was a couple of years ago now and i said that the crossover point for electric um over ice is 20 30. and uh basically that was because of tearing apart your car the model three majority of your car would say crossover point how you're finding it fifty percent of the vehicles are going to be are sold are going to be um or more than 50 percent are going to be a pure eevee or they're going to be hybrid and um and hybrid like you know for sure i think it probably ten years it's probably a majority ev yeah i i truly believe that but when i brought it out i mean the analysts i don't want to get too far deep into that but analysts were saying you know maybe somewhere around 20 45 there'll be about uh you know 15 percent ev's and whatever and now we're looking at california with eight percent right now and going higher and then you've got europe saying forget it you can't drive here if you've got a if you've got a nice vehicle on and on and on so a lot of people were hoping that everything was going to stay the way it was or basically go back to the good old days as it were i was not i was i i was in your camp like i say when i got your car initially and there really been i didn't care one way or another car's a car we take it apart we look inside we find out how much it costs and what the techniques and technologies are and then we must move on sure with yours um initially i don't like this i don't like that then i drove it um because i was the last one to drive that vehicle and he said you should really take this thing for a ride and see what it and i took it into a parking lot there's a college that's near us and i zipped around and whatnot and i'm i feel young again this i didn't expect that that that excitement and then we started looking at the electronics and how much better even the wiring is in well i think the wiring was so we have a lot to improve on the wiring front um i think there's a lot more that can be done to improve wiring yeah well right now also like 12 volts i mean what are we still doing with 12 volts 42 is where everybody should be but i think 48. more 48 yeah but but at the end of the day we we we need to do something that'll that'll reduce the wire diameters and stuff like that and yeah and that's just nothing but cash in the bank yeah so uh so i'm a big fan of that as well with the new sx we're also we're we're finally transitioning to a lithium-ion uh 12-volt uh so oh good yes it's an excellent idea smaller box it's got you know way more capacity and and the the the the calendar and cycle life match that of the main pack so we should have done it before now but it's great that we're doing it now also like this is one of those like you know inside baseball victories that's yeah kind of a big deal um but yeah like the 12 volts is like very much a vestigial voltage yeah and it's like absurdly low um so um i mean even like basically powered ethernet is like around 50 volts yeah um and so so you can have like powered ethernet nobody's like sweating at that like there's a power to ethernet this like phone here um nobody's worried about like powered ethernet like whatever 40 48 50 volts um that's that's really what the car the car's low voltage system should be at yeah absolutely i agree in fact when we talk about the y i was expecting to see that because you'd said that you're getting rid of weight and uh and the length of wires and whatnot and when i pulled it off the harness looked kind of similar so it is what it is you really want to you really want to put you want to put power and data over the same wires that's right and and have it be a high speed like higher speed than can bus right and so so you can like basically uh dump data on the bus instead of having all these point-to-point wires absolutely that's that's kind of like uh what i was kind of hoping i would see when we we took apart the y but again you say same thing it's hard to change the tires when you're going 80 miles an hour so i guess the the last thing is uh probably um probably the most controversial um you made comments which i've been saying for years um at monroe if you uh if you want to if you want to get your masters i'll pay for it if you want to take a course in um mechanics or something i'll pay for it if you even if you want to take a wood carving thing i'll pay for it but i will not pay for an mba i won't do it ever never so you made a comment and i uh i started tap dancing because uh people listen to you i don't get the same kind of respect but people listen to you and i really really was excited uh when you when you talked about about that uh so if you can elaborate on that a little bit that that would be great yeah i think just generally the the path to leadership should not be uh through um you know basically nba business school situation it's it's like it should be kind of work your way up do useful things and um you know and there's a bit too much of the somebody goes to a high-profile mba school and then kind of parachutes in as the as the leader but they don't actually know how things work um they you know they could be good at say powerpoint presentations or something like that um and they can present well but they don't actually know how things work because they do not um you know they're they're kind of like just not aware of what's really needed for uh you know to make to make great products um so i mean i don't want to trash mbas too much here and i actually do have a dual undergrad wharton undergrad and physics um at upenn so um you know i have like you know it's like i have direct exposure to to uh um you know to business school and i went you know to do undergrad business school with with physics but um and i was a teaching assistant for two semesters and i graded mbas and uh undergrads um so uh but i think it's just a little bit too much like like people look at mba school as like i want to parachute into being the boss instead of earning it and like i don't think that's that's good like yeah well speaking of not good and this might be the last thing i've never really been a fan of short sellers i i don't know whether you have a comment on that well i think that the you know there's there's very few areas in life where you can you can sell things that you don't own um and the short selling really really um where you can sell shares that you don't own uh when i said it was vestigial i mean it came from an era when uh stock stocks were traded by people traveling on horseback uh to exchange stock certificates and in order to have the the transaction speed not be like not take weeks somebody would say well the the stock certificate is coming on that horse i don't have the stock certificate right now but i promise you that i'm getting the stock certificate uh and the writer is going to be here i mean new york writers going to be here from chicago in three days and then and then i'll be able to give you the stock certificate that's where this whole silly thing arose um but then but then the problem is like the way short selling is used today is it's it's kind of like a uh it's frankly used against the public you know and so the most people aren't aware that short selling even exists and then the ones that are uh very few of them know how no actually how to use it it's basically like .01 of stockholders know how to use uh short positions to to get ahead and it's so it's it's like i think effectively attacks on the public i think it's immoral myself i just don't think it's right at all yeah a big group can come in and crush a company simply because well we're going to make a lot of money i haven't made my haven't made my quota this month or what have you so i i really don't care for it yeah i mean tesla was under a massive attack by the short and distort where they take a short position and then they do everything possible to trash the company in every six ways to sunday um and they were successful um and and this has now happened to tesla twice it happened in 2013 and it happened in in basically 2017 through through 2019 um and uh i mean the intensity of the attack was was was crazy and i was like man this this you know it would like cause you to lose faith in humanity the the greed of this wish this went on um and like we don't have shorting in like private companies the vast majority of companies over 90 are are private and you cannot short them and yet somehow we get you know private companies get things done so there's there's a a a a perniciously false uh effective markets argument made for a shorting and it's it but it is vice disguised as virtue well at the end of the day um we had a common uh um a common um adversary and um um i'm really hoping that now because uh he's bad on oil and uh and biden is basically clobbered oil in a lot of different directions i'm sure that um um he'll be skeptical about doing um any more trades um on a short end anyways i can't thank you enough i i'd really like to shake your hand thank you so much thank you for for giving us the time and uh i i can't say enough about a lot of stuff but i really can't say them i the most exciting thing that's happened to me in a long time was driving that uh the the self-driving uh the self-driving uh i'm telling you it's just sure it's it blows your mind are you gonna are you gonna let anybody else have that yeah of course i mean we're gonna roll out the um pulsar driving to the whole fleet and make it available to the whole fleet we're just being very careful about the testing um and um i think there's actually sort of a dangerous uh middle ground that would be careful of where the the system is is good like 99.9 of the time and and that could lead people to be uh complacent and and then uh but then that one time where it's got issues that that you know we don't want people to basically it can be so good that you you get comfortable but not not initially good enough to handle all of the corner cases um so we we want to just make sure that in that transition to full self driving it's really um we're taking as much care as possible yeah well i'm i'm i was happy with what we had on the uh on the uh autopilot um it's the first time i've ever gotten a chance to see what the scenery looks like i always just do lines now i can have a look around and feel comfortable or confident that my hands are on the wheel and if something goes wrong i can correct but i can also enjoy what's going on yeah i mean the like you know so publicly but basically the a car that does not have self-driving in the future will be about as popular as a horse horses are they're still horses people have horses and they're they're but they're they're it's a horse is not what you use for day-to-day transport no yeah but even even a horse will get you home sometimes if uh in the olden days they'd get drunk fall asleep in a buck board and no horse would take him home self-driving as far as i'm concerned we're just getting back well i think actually that's that's one of the things we're we're going to program into the car that if if you if you if you fall asleep in the car it'll just take you home yeah like it's most likely that's where you want to go yes um that's a great idea yeah um and then we're even gonna have it like so um if it detects that you're having issues it'll take you to the hospital like you say like you know just like yeah having a heart attack or something yes it'll just take you straight to emergency room well i think i mentioned this already i think that the self-driving feature is going to save more lives than seat belts airbags and every other thing that we've done to cars combined because that's that's the way to go absolutely i mean worldwide there's about a million people a year uh dying in car accidents and that's a hell of a lot and yeah so there's like 10 million people that get seriously injured so it's like you know we got to hustle on this yeah and and why not we got the technology to do it yep anyway thanks very much elon all right anyways i'm i'm so flattered i'm so happy i got a chance to meet you all right talk to you shake your hand thank you so much [Music] you

Channel: Munro Live

Views: 2,046,459

Rating: 4.9316115 out of 5

Keywords: Elon Musk, Elon, Sandy Munro, Tesla, Model 3, Model S, mega casting, MBA, Short Sellers, interview, Engineering, material science, 4680, battery day, Tesla Sandy Munro, Model Y

Id: YAtLTLiqNwg

Length: 48min 59sec (2939 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jfr0lang]

TL, DW:

• Sandy laments build quality issues, Elon claims that significant improvements were made in panel gap consistency during the month of December. They agree that paint quality is up dramatically.

• Sandy praises the seats of the Model 3/Y as best in the industry. Elon recalls that early Model S seats were probably the worst ever.

• Sandy complains that Autopilot relies on unreliable road markings. Elon acknowledges the issue and reiterates that Autopilot's #1 priority is "never crash." There's work to be done in both software and standardization.

• Sandy praises the FSD Beta as a dramatic and impressive improvement over standard autopilot. He thinks the potential to save lives is better than seatbelts or airbags.

• Megacasting praise. NVH, complexity, cost, consistency, labor... all improve. Sandy is disappointed that legacy auto is unwilling to embrace this future of manufacturing.

• Model 3 likely to get megacastings after Berlin and Austin are operational. Elon says it's hard to change the wheels when you're rolling at 80 MPH.

• Structural battery pack discussion. Nothing new that I could hear if you watched Battery Day.

• Elon wants every car and part to be as precise and consistent as Lego.

• Materials discussion. Tesla developed an alloy for megacastings to avoid the need for heat treatment and the subsequent deformation. Legacy auto doesn't do materials R&D.

• Sandy believes ICE vs. EV inflection point (EVs > 50% market share) will happen before 2030. ICE is doomed.

• Refresh S and X using a Li-Ion 12V battery to improve weight, capacity, and size. Brief discussion of 12V standard vs 42-48V.

• Elon re-visits the idea of using ethernet cables for car wiring, power and data over the same wires. Not there yet.

• Value of engineering compared to MBA degrees. MBAs don't make anything.

• Elon and Sandy complain about short sellers. "Immoral" that a large group can short a stock and then attack the company. Elon calls shorting a "bias disguised as virtue."

• Sandy says FSD Beta is the most exciting thing to him. Elon stresses the risks of a 99% solution. In the future, cars without FSD might be seen as horses are today: not for everyday transportation.

• Brief discussion on the future of FSD. It might take you home or to a hospital based on context. Elon wants to hustle on FSD because lives are at stake.

[u/Valendr0s]

How nice of Elon to do this interview.

• Seats: I agree that the seats are very comfortable. But they're hot.
• Road Painting: Really needs to be addressed, and I think at the federal level. Markings need to be at least more correct and standardized. I think they should have Self-Driving vehicles automatically report confusing markings to whatever authority that is required to fix it.

The main change I'd make to markings (other than making sure they are visible enough and not ambiguous), would be a dashed line whenever lanes merge out or merge in. The current lane should never be fuzzy.

• Manufacturing / Supercasting: I think it's funny that the casting takes the jobs of 300 robots. Robots takin the job of robots at this point.

---

Just finished. Very good interview. Interesting to see two manufacturing guys shooting the shit.

[u/110110]

48 min!? Nice! Going to be a super busy morning at work for me 😆

Spoiler: New S + X have a new LiIon 12V battery that matches the cycle life of the main pack! Finally... LOL

[u/UsernameINotRegret]

New Model S/X will have a lithium ion 12 volt battery.

[u/geniuzdesign]

0:00​ Introduction

1:18​ Production Hell

5:57​ Seat Discussion

9:47​ Autopilot

17:10​ Megacastings

22:15​ Structural Battery Pack

28:11​ Precision Assembly and Material Sciences

34:57​ EV Crossover Point

37:46​ Electronics & Wiring

39:53​ MBA's, Short Selling & Closing Commentary

[u/UsernameINotRegret]

Haha the plan is if you fall asleep with FSD on it will just drive you home

[u/Bitcoin1776]

First 10 mins is Sandy explaining to Musk wtf is up with yoo gaps son... this is going to be great.

[u/AitchK]

New S and X have li-ion 12V

[u/notthepig]

wearing an aerospike engine tee as well u/everydayastronaut