Thomas von Tschammer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's been the story of Detroit for quite a while. It's been companies that they came up, they got so big and so powerful and had such market dominance. that they forgot that they might need to evolve. And they've come a long way since then. I'm talking, that's like a 50 years ago phenomenon. They've come a long way, but they're now going to be faced, I think, with their most profound challenge ever. And competing with like Japanese companies in the 70s and 80s is potentially going to be easy mode compared to competing with AI native companies if things go a certain way. So it's going to be really interesting to watch the organizational dynamics and challenges of that. When you think about it, some numbers today, Western Europe or US OEM, it takes them between 48 to 60 months for a new car developed. From the moment they want to launch it to the actual moment it hits the plant and it's being manufactured. In China, it's 18 to 24 months. Everything those companies in the US and Europe care about is how do we get from 60 to 24 months, right? Because that's what's going to create the next competitive advantage finally. Yeah, that's a sobering stat. I mean, the number of iterations in a given time is a pretty hard deficit to overcome long-term. Quite sure how to phrase this question, but one thing I wonder about is, in a way, if we really super optimize the design process. It seems like at least in a naive way, we might end up making things really hard on manufacturing. The sort of, going back to like my dad's, the start of his career, there was literal like pencil on paper and like annotation of it should be this much, right? And the tolerances that that existed on the machining side were just a lot more generous than I think they are today. And I think maybe even you could imagine, again, if the design gets so optimized and we're really satisfying these constraints down to the absolute maximum in our designs, it sounds like that would create really super tight tolerances and really super difficult manufacturing challenges. And so how do you think about I guess maybe one answer is this is the role for the human engineer, but don't satisfy, you know, let's not satisfy ourselves with that answer. How should we be thinking about like just how far we want to push design, optimization, and when we need to meet manufacturing a little bit more in the middle?…

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