Lars Moravy: Inside Tesla's Engineering future (X Takeover 2025)

That's a very detailed question, John. I try to bring them. I'm going to try to remember all of it, but yeah. So, I joined Tesla in early 2010. And, you know, for those who don't know, before that, I spent about eight, nine years at Honda, which was a very stable engineering job in Ohio where I met my wife who's out here somewhere. I can't see her. Hi. And her family. Thank you, Julie, for coming and letting me move to California. But actually, what happened in late 2009 was, you know, it was about a year after the economic downturn. All of our projects were getting cut and like, you know, pay was cut, hours were cut. And so we had a lot of time to think and I was younger then. I got to work on a few cool projects in that time that never saw the light of day like with Honda. We were trying to revamp the entire Acura lineup and then I saw in those meetings I saw this like 10-year road map of engine development and I was like well this is not inspiring. It was like very just incremental improvements in efficiency and fuel economy. And then a buddy of mine, Dustin Grace, who is a long time Tesla guy, he was at Protera, CTO there for a while, and he just started his own company, Estis, super cool batteries. We were at a wedding in St. John of our other friend Derek and he's like, 'Hey, I'm working at Tesla now. They got this really cool project. It was a Roadster and like it's super fast and like we're making cars real and I just want to let you know I gave all of your numbers to the recruiter.' We're like, 'Okay.' And then that was like August of 2009. Got a phone call the next week and you know started thinking about the vision and where it was going and what it might be and thought you know I always wanted to leave the world a little bit better than I found it and to marry cars which I've always loved and that thought at the same company was an opportunity too good to resist and my wife always wanted to live in California so at the time it was in LA and we didn't have kids so we were like yeah let's go check it out for one year see how it goes. 16 years later, I'm still here. Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I came in and at the time I was probably like employee number 300 something and Elon was still interviewing everybody and we were all working in a small building in actually a room in SpaceX. And it was a very different environment from what I was used to, like a bunch of great engineers with no process trying to make something cool. And I remember when we built the first alpha prototype there in Deer Creek, that's where our office headquarters was on Deer Creek Road. And we did the first drive really late at night. There was like no doors on, no roof. And I knew it was a great car. I knew it was going to be a great car. Not just a great EV. It was like the way that we had built it and the architecture and from the tires up through the body to the chassis into the battery and the powertrain. It was so smooth and so quiet and I think we knew we made a product that people were going to love just because it was great. And I was like when you make a product people love, they're going to tell their friends about it and their friends' friends. And I was like this is it. This is it. This is going to be it. And a few years of hell and hard work later we got there and it was super awesome. And I think that first drive of the Model S, I guess that was probably like December 2011, that's kind of when I figured it out. It was a couple years in.

Yeah, I mean just a couple months or so ago, we launched new versions of S and X. I actually just bought one. Frost blue, great color. And the way we always, when you think about the Model S, it's got this iconic style that Franz put in way way way back when. And that was 2012 and then 2016 refreshed, 2020 refreshed now and again. And when you have a beautiful style, you don't mess with it. You just chip away at the rough spots and polish and push and polish. And I think this last one, we really honed in on some of the gaps that we had from a few years ago in terms of interior features, sound and comfort. I always tell my team we have to make the next car that we make the quietest Tesla that we ever made. And so we do this leapfrogging thing where the new 3 was quieter than the S, which is not great. And then the Y is quieter than the 3. And so now the S and X are quieter than those again. So we're always just trying to make the next product we make the best product we can make. And when you think about what to change, it's always difficult because if people love what you make already, it's like if I change it they might not like it. And we spend a lot of time hemming and hawing and making sure the little things we do are things that everybody's going to love. I think the dynamic lighting in the S is super cool. I think the seats are a little bit improved. The efficiency went up. Even little things like we changed the entire suspension algorithm for adaptive damping into what we call opt hook grounded with our physics based model and it makes the ride smooth. Something I hated about that car from 2020, I remember designing the rear suspension was it always had a lot of parasitics in the suspension rate and we changed all the bushings to get rid of that, lower the ride rates that are lost due to the parasitics so that we could make the car more flowing and free while maintaining all that super crazy speed. And so it's just like finding those when you engineer something, you know what you did wrong or what you didn't do perfectly or what you could do better and we just take that moment the day we release the car and say, 'Okay, here are the seven things we wanted to do better.' And we do it the next time. And that's what the new S and X have now. Still flagship, still great cars, and probably the best cars in the world that you can buy for the money. The value is just stupid.

Engineering. Ah man. So yeah, Model 3 Highland. What is the Highland name from? I don't know why everyone calls it Highland. We have different codes at Tesla and Highland is I think the external one. Anyway, yeah, I mean again that product is about a year and a half old now, maybe a little more than that. And it was a great car to begin with. And I think one of the hardest things to do was figure out how to take big steps while keeping the basis of what it was. And so in that car, we did a lot of, we changed the entire suspension geometry because we wanted to improve the ride comfort and maintain the steering response. And when you do that in a factory that exists and you're trying to change all the components all at once and you're trying to keep the line moving and flip it over on a dime, it's really really hard. And I don't think people notice. You don't see that, right? You don't go up and be like, 'Oh yeah, they moved the upper arm five degrees to the rear and lowered the front lower arm five millimeters so that the anti-squat on the rear is a little bit less now.' And that means the car absorbs bumps better, but it does. And we did all that under the scenes and under the hood and no one appreciates that. Maybe they appreciate the outcome, the quality and the ride, but they don't see that work that goes into it. And the people that are here, some of my colleagues I saw earlier that do that work, they never get to show it off. And I think a lot of times we do updates and the skin is similar and the underneath ground engineering work that's under the skin, behind the interior panels, behind the A surface is really where it's at. And for the new Model 3, the suspension was really the big deal, which is hard for me to say because I designed the first suspension. Everyone was just fixing my mess ups, but yeah, super cool.

In the pandemic when we had all the shortages we got rid of all the ultrasonics and went full on vision and got rid of radar. We did that real quick and then I think we realized there was a couple blind spots and one of the biggest was right in front of the bumper because the triple cam or now the dual cam doesn't see a couple feet in front of the screen. So we decided to add a face cam primarily for slow speed driving capability. The autopilot system doesn't actually use it. It uses inference to know what was in front of the car before it pulls up. But it's super useful for humans and taking that into account and putting it into the FSD system is even better. But I think it was really just listening to feedback from customers that said, 'I really want to see if it's in front of my car.' Okay, we'll put a camera out. And it wasn't that hard of a decision to make. And yeah, I guess the first one we put it on was the Cybertruck, and that was for off-roading. I think Wes made us do that. He's around here somewhere. And then we just kind of proliferated it. And I guess I can't say for certain it will come in the Model 3 at some point, but follow the trend line, it's heading that way.

That's tough. Most proud of? I mean, I think the car just in general is a better car. It's the bestselling car in the world. It's hard to make it better, but I think we did a great job. And it's hard to find some things that are wrong with it at this point in terms of daily use or driving. But I think a couple of the little things that we did in there that people don't notice and maybe don't write about, but were really difficult was, in the second row, we moved the seat belt from the wheelhouse area to the C-pillar, which is right on the door. This is primarily from my experience with my kids. When you fold the seat down or you move the seat forward to get into the third row, the seat belt would fall behind the second row seat and then you can't reach it. So we moved it to the seat pillar so it stays nicely tucked away there so you can always grab it. That sounds super easy. Just move the seat belt. But the seat belt takes so much load and so much crash. And we put it in this little tiny section in between the quarter glass and the door where the seal also had to be. And it was a lot of painstaking work to figure out how to carry the load through there without totally changing the body. I remember poking at the team over and over. I'm like, 'Nope, it's got to be there. We got to move it.' And finally the engineers figured out how to do it. And I don't have a new Model Y yet in my family, but when I drive them, I think about it every day and I'm like, this is going to make people's lives so much better, especially parents. Thanks Rafa and Elise. You guys did that one. But yeah, the amount of work that goes into just that little bit of movement that can make someone's life better is super cool. And then really the whole second row seat is a big win for us. We added power recline, improved the comfort, the fold slats faster. And you got the seat belt in the right spot, and then you got the rear entertainment screen. So making that more of a family car and all the engineering work that went into that second row cabin space, it's like Tesla's always been fun to drive. Super awesome to be in the passenger seat. Now you got an SUV. It's super awesome to be in the second row seat too. So that was a big win.

I think in order to preserve my job, I would tell Elon periodically as we were about to do this, I was like, 'You know, Elon, I think this is the largest changeover of vehicles that have ever occurred in the world at any one time.' And I would say it every couple weeks just so you would remember it because I was pretty certain we were going to mess this up. Four factories. We did it in a total of like 3 weeks across first China, then Berlin, Austin, and Fremont went all at the same time. China was a couple weeks early just because of the shutdowns. And I think the hardest thing to do is the underappreciation actually from our supply chain partners. It's one thing to do it in our factory. In our factory, we make a lot of the components to make our own vehicles, but there's hundreds of suppliers and in many cases we have suppliers in multiple locations. I always say this when people ask, but Tesla makes the most American made cars in the world. We make the most Chinese made cars in the world. And we make the most German made cars in the world because they all come locally sourced from those regions. That means we have multiple suppliers and you take even something simple like a headliner and you got to blow up the airbags and make sure that they work in all three suppliers and all three regions all at the same time. And so my team was all over the globe and we were just meeting constantly at various hours of the night or in the morning to coordinate what was happening. And then inevitably, some of the unsung things you don't see is like, speaking of the headliner, it wasn't working in the US, but the China one worked. So we had to ship the China one to the US. And then we had to validate the North American airbags with the Chinese headliner. And then we got that going. And then Berlin fell short on production. They didn't have enough parts. So we had to ship the North American one to Berlin. That kind of logistics in planning is super hard to do. And it only took us a few weeks to ramp back up to full volume. And I think it's something I'm going to remember for the rest of my life as one of the most amazing accomplishments to be a part of. Thousands of people at Tesla and supply chain and the factories made it happen. They did the hard work. We were just trying to do our best to make sure that engineering wasn't the bottleneck. And I would say that is a supply chain success and they deserve all the credit for that changeover. So Gian and Kin, great job.

Well, then you saw mine, the Starship inspired one over there. Yeah, I did. I mean, I've seen yours before, Don. But they're awesome.

Yeah, I think the Cybertruck is a unique project in and of itself. People ask me what's the most rewarding engineering project you ever had a chance to work on? I think Cybertruck's probably one of them because no one thought it could be real. We showed this car I guess 5 years ago now, six maybe. And it looked fake. The glass broke. It worked backstage originally though. I had the video. I sent it to Elon that night. And I was like, 'Hey man, here's the video from 5 minutes ago. It worked.' Anyway, but no, like I think bringing dreams to reality is an engineer's job. Someone draws something and it's a dream and engineers have to take that dream and break it down to the fundamental physics of it and turn it into reality. There's so many challenges in this truck that you guys all drive that are like unsolvable little things like how do you connect an inner panel to an outer panel made out of stainless steel with no paint and not let the weld burn through. We don't do really any post-processing. It's not like we burn the weld off or scrub it off. We do a little bit of buffing. But that was a lot of processing. The welding engineers spent weeks and weeks figuring out how to make that laser weld work. And the little challenges like that are what make that car super special. And you said it's very different from all the Teslas we make. But actually, it's not. It's got a powertrain that's very similar. It's got a battery under the base. It has seats on pack like the Model Y did a couple years ago. The 48V system was super hard. The Etherloop control system was super hard to integrate, but actually it's just another car. And when you drive it, it drives like a Tesla. It doesn't drive like a big truck. The hardest part about engineering the Cybertruck was to make it a Tesla. It would have been easy to just say it's a truck. We can make it different. We can throw out the screen and say it doesn't need that because it's not rugged enough. We can throw away the instant throttle response. We can make the brakes feel like crap. But we didn't want to do that. We wanted it to be a Tesla at its core and it is. And I think that's why so many people love it because it didn't deviate from what we promised.

Yeah, I mean I think there's certainly some benefits in manufacturing like we don't have to paint the panels, that makes it super easy. The safety of the truck is awesome. It's got the lowest probability of injury of any truck that it's ever tested. So in that way it compares very favorably from a safety perspective. But there's a lot of interesting things that kind of fell out once we drew it all and put it together. The triangular shape on the rear gives it a lot of stiffness in the body that most trucks don't have. I think the stiffness is north of 40 kNm per degree. For reference, that's the same as a McLaren P1. So when you have that sort of ground up engineering and you put it all together, you're able to make a truck that is super special that doesn't have to be a truck. We didn't treat it that way. We treated it like a car, like a product that we wanted to sell, and then turning it into a truck was the easy part.

I mean, we always talked about making a smaller pickup. I think in the future, as more and more the robo taxi comes into the world, we look at those options and we think about what kind of service is useful not just for people, but also for goods. So we've definitely been turning in the design studio about what we might do to serve that need for sure.

Yeah, so Semi's moving along really well. We've had a few updates on the factory up in Reno. The thing with a semi product is you have to make it super reliable. It is the most important thing when you have a tool like that in your fleet, it can't go down. So we spent the last couple of years since we released to Pepsi and actually more people than Pepsi have it. Watt EV has some, SIA has some. There's a bunch, we have our own. There's a few companies out there that are already taking delivery of their pilot fleets. And we've been churning away making sure that on an engineering basis, we're ready to go from a reliability standpoint. Just last week, we built a few betas that are proving out our improvements over the alpha, the pilot fleet, I guess you call it. And those are going through durability testing right now. Production equipment is going into the factory as we speak. Literally, we're doing it 24/7. The powder coat lines are going in, the battery and drive unit lines are showing up. Towards the end of this year, we'll be complete with that. And then we'll start building the production version of the semi in Reno. Probably end of this year, early part of next year. We'll be ramping through second half of 2026. So it's happening. We're going to be in full ramp mode just after we launch Cyber Cab in Austin. So another couple big product launches there. And I'm super excited about the semi because it means so much to the mission. When you look at CO2 and the amount of impact that road transport has, that ground transport has, it's half of what's out there. And we haven't even made a dent as a community in that. So I think we made a kick-ass product that's going to be a no-brainer for shipping companies and fleets to buy because all they care about is cost per mile. So if you bring down the front end cost of it low enough and you make sure that the price of the truck is comparable to that of a diesel and it's lower to operate per mile, there is no reason that they won't buy it. And that's kind of what we've done and we've been working on for the last few years. And those milestones I just mentioned, we're hitting them one by one. I'm looking forward to seeing it on the road. I always get excited when I see one on the road because I'm like, 'Oh, it's going to be so cool.' I was in Yellowstone last summer and when we were driving and I saw one of Pepsi's trucks coming from Modesto going out where I was like, 'Whoa, man. This is weird.' Just to see that in the middle of nowhere. And two, three years from now they're going to be everywhere. That's going to be super cool.

Well, that's going to stop eventually because the cars are just going to take themselves. But anyway, I get your point.

Oh, man. Everyone's favorite question. I did not talk to Elon about it last Sunday night. Hardware then. So no, Roadster is definitely in development. We did talk about it last Sunday night. A super cool product. We are gearing up for a super cool demo. It's going to be mind-blowing. I think as Elon says, we spent a lot of time the last few years rethinking what we did and why we did it and what would make an awesome and exciting, say, last best driver's car, I guess. Given where Tesla's going with autonomy and stuff, we know that it's, I don't want to say it's a swan song, but if we're going to make this transition to autonomy, driving cars turn into a luxury. So the Roadster's got to be the best. And we've been making it better and better and better, and it's now, as you know, even a little bit more than a car. And we showed Elon some cool demos last week of the tech we've been working on and he got a little excited. So, yeah, he says it's going to be unlike anything the demo of that.

It's definitely hard. I was meeting with the SpaceX team last Thursday just for a minute. It's a challenge. If you think about just fuel to weight ratio of a rocket, it's like 90 to 1, 90% fuel to weight, and maybe 95 is really great. But when you have a car, it has to do all the car things. There's a little bit more mass there and you get a separate propulsion system to do the car things. Your fuel to weight doesn't exactly work out to be these high 90s. And that's been making it a bit challenging, but we found some really cool ways to get the mass where it needs to be to get it to do what it needs to do. And it's super fun working with those guys. I think we have a lot of respect for each other as engineers.

It was an interesting question, Kelvin. I do appreciate you guys. I know I reached out a few times and was like, 'Hey, let's meet hate with love.' And I know a lot of you guys went out and brought donuts and did that. I really appreciate that. Having such a strong community that you can fall back on when you have tough times is super humbling. It's awesome to know that we have all of you guys here to do that for us and make us feel like we're actually doing the right things. So thank you everyone for that. Engineering makes it really easy to put your head down and just grind. And I think a lot of us have done that. We really focused. We had a really tough first half of the year with launching the Model Y around the globe. So when you do that, you can kind of put your head aside for a minute and realize the products you're making and what their value is to the world and to the community. So I think for the most part, that's how my team handled it and kind of pushed through it. And it's nice to see some positive news again. The diner opening this week was awesome. I experienced it on Monday. I see a lot of people with diner shirts on. We were out there last Sunday. That was after the studio. We went to the diner. It's just a cool environment to see everyone and the positivity around it. I'm sure a lot of you all went there on the way up here. It's nice to see it coming back around.

Really? No, this is we got a safety driver in it, but yeah.

Yeah, there's no steering wheel. So it's hard to test. I can't imagine. So for it was kind of a fun thing because when you normally develop a car, the first thing you want to do is make the wheel spin. So you have it on a lift and you're like, 'Okay, the wheels spin.' You're like, 'Okay, now I got to turn the wheels.' Normally that's easy when it's a mechanical connection. Cybertruck was a bit harder because there was nothing connecting it. So we had to do a bunch of code. In this car, we were like, 'How are we going to drive it?' We have to test it, crash it, do stability control reviews, do firmware development. So we were like, 'Oh, shoot.' So if you see the RC fleet running around with steering wheels, that's because we had to figure out how to test it. They're not for sale or whatever. That's just a test feature only. And actually, I think it's straight out of the Cybertruck wheel. So it's not even a bespoke thing. But that definitely made it hard in engineering because you got to design it to be no steering wheels, no mirrors, no brake pedals, no accelerators and also figure out how to test it. So it's definitely a challenge. The other big challenge I'll say is efficiency. The watt hour per mile on that thing is super bespoke just for getting the most out of every dollar per mile. And I think having this balance of, okay, but now that a human isn't driving it, I can take away some of the limits that we put into cars because humans overshoot because their steering inputs and braking inputs are aggressive. And then you think, but wait, autopilot's driving it. It might want some of that margin. So this balance between how much do we pull back in order to gain efficiency on things like the tires while maintaining a super safe, super reliable vehicle for autopilot to drive because it's also a driver. The FSD system is basically a driver. It was a bit complicated in our first go. I think it's going to be a great product and it'll be super good, but I think we can go further. I think we can do more. I think we can make it more efficient. I think we can make it ride better. And then I think because we had to just take a baby step, a little cautious step into this first effort of no human in the loop.

Yeah. I mean like it's a little bit weird. Elon's responsible for Optimus. Let's be clear about that. My team does the manufacturing for Optimus and testing for Optimus and actuators for Optimus. Vehicle engineering is definitely a loose title because I have all the manufacturing engineering, I have all the automation teams. And I think that's a strength at Tesla because we don't have silos of groups that only work on Model Y or only work on Optimus or only work on energy. We all are the same set of engineers. So I was joking. I'm like, I don't even know what vehicle. Maybe at some point I was only in charge of vehicle engineering, but I don't know when that ship sailed a long time ago. And it's been awesome and inspiring to be a leader for all these engineers and technicians and people that work with me. I get to represent them in situations like this. And I think it's undersold how powerful that group of engineers is compared to what the rest of the industry might be able to muster. I was talking to Sandy backstage and he's just shooting the about various projects and when you realize how broad you can go because of what you're working on, it's like wow, that's super powerful. And I don't know, head of something, you need to come up with a new title like Elon technoking.

Yeah, I mean I would say one of the most interesting things about trying to build Optimus and manufacture it is the precision. The human body is amazing. I don't know, once you start designing a humanoid robot, you sit in a meeting, you just hold your hand up and you're like, 'How do I do that?' And you kind of move your joints around and try and figure out how to emulate that mechanically is really hard. The human body has some amazing things. The team I know just went and visited a hand surgeon to figure out how the human hand worked a little better. It's crazy to watch and see what the tendons do and how the muscles pull them. When I was growing up, I always thought working on cars was a bit like being a surgeon because you got the hoses and cold fluid comes into the engine on one side and hot goes out the other. It's kind of like a heart. And it is not at all the same. It's very difficult to get the precision you need and the response and the tactility. And I think, as Elon was talking about the other day on the earnings call, Gen 3 the robots will be quite a step forward in those kind of things.

Yeah, I mean China is a powerhouse of building, if nothing else. They can manufacture everything and anything under the sun faster than anyone else in the world. That's a superpower that they have. But as with cars, we're always looking at what other people are doing, but I think we are grounding ourselves in what we think is the right solution. When you look at some of the robots that have followed the Optimus revolution, or even a humanoid revolution, I should say, I think they're less generalized in what we're doing, and that's going to spawn a problem for them down the road somewhere. As with FSD, we've gone with a generalized solution and trying to make the robot live in the human world that we've spent 15,000 or 20,000 years developing. So we pay attention but we don't let it necessarily change the thought process we have.

Yeah, I mean battery tech is definitely at the forefront of a lot of things we do at Tesla. It powers every product that we make. It's one of our core responsibilities to the world to continue to push that forward. And I think if you look year over year, battery improvements have always been incremental. About 3% energy density improvement year over year or something like that. And maybe similar in fast charge. You can go back decades to figure out when the first lithium ion battery happened and follow that linear trend. And I think we'll continue on that trend and we continue to refine it. Every couple years or so, we change over our entire battery cell factories with our vendors. We just in China with CATL launched a new cell a couple months ago with the new product with the Juniper. And also with LG we improved that. And we did that through incremental improvements through electrolyte changes, through cathode changes, through anode changes, through packing densities and manufacturing process changes. I think that's going to keep going for a long time and we're going to find a lot more improvements in the batteries that we make in our vehicles, whether they come from our house in our production factories of 4680 or our vendors Panasonic, LG, CATL, whoever. That's going to continue to happen. That doesn't mean we don't also look at trends like solid state batteries and super caps and other things that might provide other alternatives of energy, but lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate cells have really proven their worth in terms of energy density and capability. And I really think we're only in the beginning of that. I still think there's a lot of gains to be made in microchemistry and in those form factors.

Yeah, I guess I have. I think working with Elon's fun. To have a boss that understands you at a physics level, engineering level, is super cool. I imagine a lot of CEOs aren't like that. I don't know too many. But it really drives the culture in our company and in our conversations that he's always grounded in like, 'Is this possible? How do we do it? What can we do?' And I don't shy away from tough discussions with him if we have to have them. But what I know is you don't go talk to Elon without knowing what you're talking about because he's going to root that out real quick. So I always try and stay grounded in the conversations with Elon. And I found a way to communicate with him over the years that we have mutual respect for each other. He knows when to ask me to push harder or to make sure that we're innovating more. But at the same time, I think we've earned a level of trust with each other that he knows my team and I are just going to get done. So yeah, he's larger than life for sure, but when he's in the meeting room with us, I wish people could just see it. It's just like a bunch of engineers talking about shop. Super fun.

Extremely. Franz and I are good friends. I'm happy to call him my friend. I first met him 16 years ago when I started at Tesla and he's been there just a little bit longer than me. I was looking at the early Model S clays with him and I stood there and I looked and I was like, 'Tires are too small.' And he looked at me and he's like, 'Yeah, yeah they are.' And I think that kind of spawned our relationship because I like cars and I can appreciate what he does. It's beautiful. Design is what sells cars. Engineering powers the workhorse behind it. And our relationship's always been like that. He knows I appreciate what he does. And he's never afraid to ask us to do something crazy. We're always telling the engineers, you don't get to say no. You can say yes and it's going to take this, this, and this, but there's nothing that anyone can dream of that we can't figure out how to do. So that relationship is very different at Tesla. And especially you can see it in the way Franz and I work together and it permeates through the teams. We all try to make each other's ideas happen. There's no animosity of design or engineering. It's just one team and we're trying to make really cool things happen. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we got to go back and do it again. But I'm super grateful to have him as my partner in this journey.

Yeah, I mean I think we just talked about working with Franz and not being able to say no. One of the superpowers we have at Tesla is our automation groups and our manufacturing engineering departments. I think about the 6,000 people that work for me. About 2,000 of them are in automation and machine building. About 1,800 are in manufacturing engineering and about 1,800 are in design engineering. Then you got support and technicians and things like that. So it's really a third, a third, a third. When I think about that, why is that so important? When you invent something new and no one's ever made it before, it's much easier to have the team that's going to build the machine on your team. So you don't have to work through these layers of, even stupid things like I need a quote from a vendor to supply the machine and that takes two weeks and then they got to check with their suppliers and that takes another two weeks and you end up with this stack of timelines where two-thirds of it is just back and forth between different companies and different levels. In the end, you're translating that same goal through that same bureaucracy of tiers of companies. So at Tesla, it's like, 'Hey, I want to make this thing. I don't know how to.' And you're like, 'Okay, let me call the guy or the girl who has most closely made a machine that's built this before.' You call them into the room and they come in and they're like, 'Hm, well, I could do it.' Like the panels on the cyber cabs, when we were doing that idea of how do we make these panels that look like paint but aren't paint and are super easy to replace and durable. So we brought a design engineer and we had Franz's color team in there and then we had the plastics team in there that builds the plastics machines and then we were like, 'You know what, though, we need change of materials.' So we brought the materials teams in. You can't do that in many companies. It just doesn't exist to the level of expertise we have. So that might be a 2-hour meeting and you come out with an actual idea of how to make something real. And then you go do it. So that speed is just all throughout that process that takes away months and months of iteration. Building Optimus and building this is the same thing. We had to invent new automation equipment with a level of precision that most people don't use. Maybe except in the chip industry, but chips are this small and they don't weigh that much. We're talking about doing on a 65 kg humanoid robot and we need the same level of precision. So we had to go all the way back to our machine builders in Germany and say we're going to build a new frame and the precision is going to be micron level and it's going to move super fast because we got to build thousands of these things a week. So then we reinvented the machine so that it has more precision and it moves faster. I don't think those companies you were talking about in China are doing that that are building robots. That's what I get super excited about. I wish more people got excited about it. It's the coolest part of working at Tesla.

Yeah, I mean crazy idea. Where's Sandy? I see him. Good idea, right? Good idea. When you build these machines and you realize how inefficient they are in terms of getting in and out of it, a car is built around a human. So when you're assembling it, you have this big void of space that is inside the car where humans sit in the end. That means you have to carry that through the entire factory. When you watch the body go down a body line and it's mostly air, you're like, 'What am I doing? Why is the capacity of this building based on the air for the humans?' So we had this idea which starts with smaller products. You look at the computer industry and they build all these small sub assemblies and they put them in layers and the big PCBA goes into a case and it's like all of these lines come in through these arteries and they fill a really small mainline. We said, 'Why can't we do that with cars?' A lot of people said, 'Well, the structural load paths go through the A-pillar, they won't be able to support crash.' And other people said, 'You won't be able to get the precision and you need a slip plane here.' And I was like, 'No, those aren't reasons. Those are challenges.' And we isolate the challenges whether it's structural loading through bolted joints or it's assembling a seal plane across a non-planar surface. You just break them down individually and then we go fix that problem or find a solution to this challenge and then you put it all together. We got the product and we think it'll work. We tested the first crash test last week and it came out great and we're like, 'Holy cow, it worked!' And everybody in the room's surprised except all the engineers. So I think the advantage it will give us is speed because we can get more people or more robots working on any part of the car at the same time. And instead of having this super long mainline that's normally 150 to 200 stations, our main line is like 25 stations. That means we can build cars at a rate that I think people will be mind blown by. Just coming off the line super quick. So I'm excited to see if we can make that work. So far so good. Few more months we'll get it done.

It's a personal question. I think I really think it's the semi. And I never thought I would say that like 5 years ago.

Yeah. The semi is so cool. And I think it's on mission. It is totally the mission. And when it's autonomous, oh my god, it's going to be just, we're losing truck drivers all the time. People don't want to drive trucks anymore. It's a really hard job. And we can make it safer, more efficient, better for the planet. That's a cool product. I'm super excited that's happening this year. Well, next year.

I mean, if you had asked me this question five years ago, I would have said, 'Man, I hope we're still here.'

Yeah. And so now I'm going to say the same thing. Man, I hope we're still here. Because we take big swings and sometimes that risk can come with a lot of downside. And I think we're in a big swing moment right now with autonomy, with robo taxis, with Optimus, and with semi. I hope those all work out. Usually we get it right and usually we get it done, maybe not always on time. Elon two weeks. It's hard changing the world, man. It's hard. And sometimes it takes longer than you think it does. Sometimes you think you're right there and then you're not. I think next 5 years we're going to look back and it's going to be like this massive turning point in transportation where before was somewhat of a burden and if we can make it less burdensome and thereby more efficient for the world and hit the mission, then that'll be mind-blowing. I see that future and I don't believe it's going to happen sometimes, but you know what? If you want to change the future into something you want, you have to decide what it's going to be and then just go do it. And that's what we do at Tesla. We just go do the future. Make the future a reality.

Thank you guys. Super fun.

Yeah. Not take down.