Slashdot Mirror
Ford Spent $200,000 To Dissect a Limited-Edition Tesla Model X (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Ford Motor paid a sum of $199,950 ($55,000 more than the retail price) to buy one of the first sport utility vehicles made by Tesla Motors, reports Bloomberg, citing vehicle registration documents. The white Model X is a Founders Series with a vehicle identification number indicating it was the 64th one made at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California. The vehicle, with Michigan plates, has been spotted recently in the Detroit area. Automakers often buy cars made by competitors for road testing and for 'tear-downs' to reveal components and materials and how they're put together. But it's unusual to pay such a high price -- almost $212,000 after Michigan sales tax and title -- for such an early model.Well, this $200,000 could shave off hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and development.
It depends on what they did with the knowledge that they acquired.
One of the most important cases was when Compaq used one team to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS in 1982 or so, then another team to take the documentation that the first team created in order to implement a new BIOS to the same specifications wtihout actually looking at the IBM product.
If Ford takes apart the Tesla, documents the kinds of welds, the kinds of materials, the kinds of battery chemistries, and a bunch of other relevant stuff, then passes that information to another team to design a car using those technologies, with the automaker's patent lawyers involved to help avoid treading where they shouldn't, then they're probably good.
Also bear in mind that Musk has made public statements about letting others use his patents. Could be that Ford is protected, to an extent, but such a well-documented public declaration, at least for Tesla patents at the time that Musk made the assertion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
Yes, a lot of startups sell-out to other companies, but so far that doesn't seem to be Musk's style. On top of that Tesla is poised to grow exponentially without having to be purchased by another company. Tesla is generally doing things that most of the other companies don't want to do or haven't figured out how to do, there's not a lot of reason for them to want to be bought.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
There's no way to stop it, one way or another Ford will get it. Every technology company on planet earth buys their competitors products and does a tear-down analysis. Often it's done by marketing or marketgineers to come up with a product spec & cost target, but if you are smart you pay attention to what your competition is doing. If nothing else it challenges your notions of what is possible, and that is always a good thing.
I've taken apart many systems in my time. You know you're in a healthy organization when you take apart a competitors system and say "Wow, they did something really clever here". You know it's time to leave your company when you do it, see something really clever, and your peers say "Aw but that must cost too much" or "We'll never get to be able to do this", etc.
But these auto companies are notorious for penny pinching too. One of the Chrysler mini van tail gate latches were weak. A proposal to strengthen it was rejected because the additional cost of some 50 cents was deemed too high.
My brother consulted for Chrysler. The employees will get a beige phone with a blinking red light to show there was pending voice mail. But contractors are not allowed that expensive phone. They get a phone without the light. Stupidly the phones were all rented from the telco, for ages, decade after decade. This was not in 1970s or 80s. It was in 1999 or so. They could have bought the whole damned phone, better phone for cheaper price. But still Chrysler rented these phones and saved money by denying the consultants the blinking red light.
In general, in all bureaucracies, once a precedent is set, it will be followed, come hell or high water, costs be damned. But getting the precedent set would be very difficult.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
Lots of reasons...
First, Ford has a dealer network and service network that is far greater than anything Tesla can put together.
Second, Ford might well say, we have done well with EcoBoost, what if we offered EV versions of everything we sell. Musk has said that his goal is to promote EVs, not just sell them. If Ford came to him and said, "Merge with Ford and you'll be the head of the EV division, tasked with making EV versions of every Ford product" he might find that idea attractive.
Finally, while Tesla is growing, they have a huge challenge in front of them. Going from 50,000 cars to 500,000 cars is not nothing, selling and servicing them isn't as simple as you'd think, and many things could yet prevent him from hitting his targets.
A lot of people consider Tesla's success to be a forgone conclusion. That is never a good idea and it isn't true either. All companies run into challenges both big and small, some break through and win, some do not.
After engineering, some of my friends went into IC design. There first few projects were rather painful.
They would sit in large halls where laid large sheets of competitors ICs. The competitor products were stripped apart, grinned few microns and each layer scanned into these large sheets.
There fresh out of college labor was in charge of then crawling over these large print outs and decoding the design.
If Tesla had some patents, Ford can get some people to just read them.
Most patents explain how a technology works, but not how to make the product. When car companies tear down their competitors' products, they are looking more at how it's made than how it works.
What's surprising is that Ford is trying to figure out how a very expensive car was manufactured. Most of the time the challenge is trying to figure out how to make economy cars cheaper, since the profit margin is much smaller on those products.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".