And the Tesla Roadster was just a modified Lotus Elise.

Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.

And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers.

I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream.

I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

> And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers.

What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. The volume of cells that we are able to produce. This is a major bottleneck of electric cars. It is not just some minor problem, it is a great fundamental problem.

This is also why tesla can churn out hundreds of thousands of cars with battery only, and with range of hundreds of miles, and where practically all other manufacturers in this price range are only able to do hybdrids with small batteries. This is not coincidence, this is because tesla has a gigafactory and those others do not and are subject to volume problems in the outside battery production chain.

So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory.

> What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume.

> So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory

So, Musk identified a problem (manufacturing batteries at scale), found a vendor with a solution (Panasonic) and sold it under the name Tesla.

Do you see my point now?

> Do you see my point now?

Not really, what is your point?

Every car manufacturer uses parts sourced from other companies - software, parts of engines, whole engines, whole gearboxes, complete modules, raw materials... That's how the industry works...

> Every car manufacturer uses parts sourced from other companies

> and engineered a real solution

So, which is it? Did he outsource the parts like every other company or did he engineer a solution?

I assume that you have undertaken some engineering tasks in the past, and so then you have surely experienced that research, proper selection and setting up the sourcing chain for the parts is a big chunk of decisions that go into engineering a production line or even a single project/machine. Research that ultimately affects the choice of mechanical and otherwise building of the machines itself, because it depends on which parts are viable to source.

So not sure why you would focus on that superficial difference here, like what are you trying to prove? I don't understand your point. Elon Musk has a lot of results behind his companies to prove that he can engineer and a good ratio of technical terms and numbers he can spur off the top of his head in an interview to prove that he is not even mainly marketer, his brain is in engineering, he knows the technical stuff deeply down to revision numbers and decimal points and can give you an educated opinion on technical matters. So this shows you that he is indeed an engineer, not sure if that's your point even though?

Musk and Jobs having strong visions and making them happen so that we can all benefit is denigrated as "reality distortion field"?

Renting COTS tunneling machine, digging a plain old and quite unimpressive 1-mile-long tunnel, and calling it something fantastic and extraordinary is a good example of said reality distortion field.

Let's put it in perspective: London is covered by a network of small tunnels dedicated to cart mail around by autonomous vehicles. The tunnels were opened almost a century ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

That was a term Jobs’s staff used about him.

Can’t we call it passion and vision instead of “reality distortion field”?

Passion and vision are a part of it, but the reality distortion field encompasses everything good, bad, and ugly about musk that he offers to the public, unsavory tweets included.

Can we not use the word 'passion'. In a world where subway job applicants need to have a passion for sandwiches the word has long since passed its sell by date.

Can we have passion and vison that doesn't need reality distorted and instead follows truth and the laws of physics and logic in our universe?

But are they actually building their own ?

Haven't seen anything covered about what they've built or how it compares with anything else on the market.

Yeah they are.. they have a few, their first was just off-the-shelf technology, the second is a hybrid, and their third one is apparently fully designed by Boring Co.:

https://tunnelinsider.com/everything-we-know-about-the-borin...

The pictures are jokes since it's proprietary to the company, but the names and descriptions are real. There were some spy shots of the gantry being used to set up 'proof-rock' awhile back:

https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-the-boring-company-tunne...

With the Tesla EV, you have to market to the public how the car is better because you're selling it to the end customer. With the Boring company, you don't have to prove to anyone but yourself, or the governments or the project investors that your bid is good.

A line of that article says this:

> He also drew upon the 67-year-old contracting company’s expertise to get going, with an ultimate goal of developing ways to dig tunnels faster

Not evidence I agree, but not entirely inconsistent with improvements.

So you think the article is saying they have made improvements because it's the "ultimate goal" or something? This is kind of funny to me. The tech industry thinks it has a monopoly on the idea of improving efficiency or something?