Elon Musk
Analyst · Barclays. Your line is open
There are a number of things. I mean, I’d say generally speaking, the car business is a pretty cost efficient business. I mean, it may not be great at a lot of things, sort of breakthrough technology and that kind of things, but it is pretty good at cost optimization. And so, in order for us to be competitive, it takes a lot of work on all fronts. It is certainly reducing the labor hours and the amount of overtime. In December, even though we were cash flow positive and sort of profitable on a per car basis when all things are considered. The amount of overtime that was required to achieve the 400 cars per week was pretty extreme. So, that has improved dramatically just coming into January and then February. We’ve gone from, I think it was an average of over 60 hours a week to almost 70 hours a week in December. Yes, exactly. It was somewhere between 50% and 70% above 40 hours, and it was like an average 68-hour week that that people worked in December, which was also like a tough thing for people to sustain just on a burnout level. But it also drives the cost to pretty extreme levels, because above 60 hours a week, you actually earn in double time; above 40 hours, you earn overtime. So, now, we have gone down to a point – we are maybe a 50-hour week from something like – like I said, something like almost a 70-hour week at average in December to about a 50-hour week now, and then driving that to kind of the mid-40s in March in addition to reducing the total number of people needed to get the car, so the labor hours per car are dropping dramatically, that may be the single biggest factor , but close behind it are things like logistics and supply parts, so another thing that we had to do that was really inefficient in fourth quarter was we had to fly a lot of stuff. And when you fly something, it can cost as much 10 times what it costs to ship it by sea or rail or truck, particularly if it is heavy. And so, we had to do some dumb things like fly tires from the Czech Republic like (indiscernible) that was, like one of the -- I want to punch myself on the face for that one. At the risk of [bringing], I’ll just give you like a little anecdote. There are a hundred things like this, but as it turns out, we have a supplier for the 21-inch tires that’s in the Czech Republic, and it was taking – we have terms of -- we have 30-day payment terms with them, and when they were shipping the tires, it actually took longer than 30 days to get to us. So the tires would get to us and would be passed you, so that happened like a number of months, and then they put a hold on the shipments because we had not paid on time even though we weren’t getting the tires before we were getting the bill, so then they put the hold on that. Anyway, that was just a big (indiscernible) to fly a bunch of tires from Czech Republic to keep production going. That will give you one sort of extreme example of how logistics can actually go bonkers. And that’s also dropped dramatically in the first quarter, and then in terms of supply parts, as I mentioned, there is a huge number of supplier cost reduction taking place because just as we have inefficiencies, so do our suppliers. One of the biggest challenges we actually had, and I don’t mean to unload on you guys who are on the call, but the industry estimates for the number of cars that we make were quite low. So, for example, there is an organization called IHS, which does the industry estimates on production volumes. They had us down at 1,500 units a year, and so for a number of our suppliers when -- they didn’t look at our forecast, they looked at the IHS forecast and didn’t believe our forecast, and so, it tooled up for some puny number of parts for very low production volume, and then we were caught flat footed, when we said, no, we actually did mean the order that we sent you. We are making 20,000 units a year and not 1,500 units a year. And we’ve had a number of such conversations where our suppliers finally realized that we weren’t kidding about that and took the steps necessary to supply us with the parts. And I think we are starting to get beyond so many things like that and get into a steady cadence of production, and suppliers are starting to take our volume seriously and to offer us prices that are actually competitive in the market. Deepak, is there anything you want to add to that.