Talking Tech with Elon Musk!

[Music] what's up guys i'm qbhd here and just got back from sunny california where we spent some time with possibly the busiest man alive elon musk but he was super generous with his time and we did this sort of a sit-down chat at the tesla factory and then also did a sort of a factory tour which will be a separate video coming soon but a ton of things we could have talked about since we were at tesla at that time basically our topics ranged from talking about tesla products to our love for tesla to tech

and the future all wrapped into one so this is that chat thanks for watching enjoy all right first of all thanks for uh taking the time sitting down on your very busy schedule i'm sure good to see you yeah good to see you uh this is a this is a really interesting place to be we're kind of in like a bird's eye view of seeing a couple a couple different things happening behind us in the factory these occasionally move which is cool those are empty door carriers so like they were carried doors to cars to

get assembled and then they're on their way back to pick up some more doors nice so uh i think most people know you as the boss the face of tesla uh the decision maker for those who just for some context what is your how do you spend time at tesla what do you do uh yeah that's a good question i think probably a lot of people don't realize i'm like basically in the factory in design or engineering meetings or production um so that's like 89 of the time i think sometimes people think i spend a

lot of time on twitter sure i don't know what gave why why they would think that that's crazy um but uh actually it's like that's like almost nothing um most of my time spent um at least the last several months especially going around the factory um and then working on say uh the paint shop the body shop where we weld up the body um the uh final assembly where we put all the parts together um and and then if i'm not here i'm either i'm at the gigafactory in nevada okay so p100d owner undefeated in

stoplight races for a while now uh rich over here in audio okay model three pre uh pre-order okay waiting for his and brandon behind the camera also waiting for model three okay what what version are you waiting for long range long range and and what color okay that is a that is a good combo i got blue uh rear wheel drive nice nice okay cool so my question is how aside from making great products how do you get people excited about tesla there's a lot of people i know and that i talk to who are

just intrigued and interested and excited about tesla as a company the thing i really focus on at tesla is like we really put all of our money into an attention to trying to make the product as compelling as possible so um because i think that really the way to um sell any product is through word of mouth so if one somebody gets the car they really like it they and and actually the key is like to have a product that people love um and and generally people that um if they're party or touring friends or

whatever um you'll talk about the things that you love but you know if you just like something it's okay you're not gonna care that much but if you get the reactions from the highs and the lows yeah you gotta make sure you really you're gonna you're gonna talk you know and and then that'll generate work turns word of mouth and that's basically how how our sales have have grown like we don't we're not spending money on advertising or endorsements or uh and um so anyone like buys our car they just bought it because they they

like the car and you know it's like it's genuine um no discounts i actually even pay full retail price for my own cars okay um yeah and um yeah and we're really focused on trying to make the cars more affordable which is real really tough like in order to make the cars affordable you really um you need high volume see the economy's a scale and because the other car companies make a lot more cars than we do they got way better economies of scale so as we're gradually able to build up um and do do

more cars higher volume then we can volume force progressively like less money and then make um make the cars available to white wide range people but it's super honestly like the car industry is like a super this is like super competitive it's like one of the it's like insanely competitive so far i think i read a really interesting or i think i heard it actually from an earnings call but something interesting you said is one of the top five most frequent trade-ins for model 3 is a prius right yeah uh which starts at you know

20 something thousand dollars and they obviously have massive economies of scale do you think there's room i mean tesla has model three model s and road stirring up is there room for possibly an even less expensive quality electric car experience um yeah absolutely um i think i think in order for us to get to like let's say ultimately getting like a 25 000 car um that that's uh that's something we could we could do but it's probably if we really work really hard i think maybe we could do that in three years does it come

with time and scale or just yeah it's a bit of both yeah cause like the the key to making things affordable is is like designing it is it's like design and technology improvements as well as scale so if you think of like say um phones um like the very earliest like the earliest cell phones like i'm probably like dating myself here but uh like the original wall street where the guy's like walking down the beach and he's got like the it's like on a giant phone he's carrying like a briefcase kind of thing they're massive

like massive massive phone yeah and like all i could do is phone yep yep and like had like 30 minutes of battery life and that kind of thing um now at that time uh in the absence of technology improvements like no amount of money no amount of scale could have made that phone affordable that'd be a lot of engineering iterations a lot of design iterations um and we're probably i don't know on the 30th version of a cell phone or and and with each successive design iteration uh you can add more capability you can design

you can integrate more things you figure out better ways to produce it so it actually gets better and cheaper but it's like it's like a natural progression of any new technology that it takes multiple versions and a large volume in order to make it affordable gotcha is there anything in the near future of tesla that you're really excited about yeah there's a lot of things actually um we're really like we've got definitely way more product ideas than we have resources to execute we're just talking about this uh with with my team uh just like hey

guys what you know what should we focus on and now in the past we've only done one car at a time um and but as you know as we go into the future we've got to like basically figure out how to walk and chew gum it's like it's like okay how do we do two products at the same time but still have enough resources that both products are great right um and so we're gonna you know we're gonna try to do you know two products um one of them for sure is is like the model

y you know sort of compact suv um comparable price point to the to the model three uh then there's uh the semi the pickup truck and the and the next generator yeah like addiction roast is kind of like dessert we got to talk about that yeah yeah it's super exciting but it's like and i think there's definitely some value to doing it to show that an electric car can be faster than a gasoline car in every way yes so i think there's like you know because it's still this sort of like halo effect of of

of the gasoline sports cars because like in terms of top speed they're still have the best top speed yeah so that halo effect that i was gonna basically every metric possible seems like really ambitious like there's a lot of things that people people like me kind of accept that like i love my electric car but i i know it's not going to put down lap times 30 laps in just because there's yeah so rejection exactly we got to work on that yeah in fact i was actually um i was just talking to the team i

was like uh you know i think we got some headroom there yeah um oh and are we gonna talk about track mode yeah sure yeah because i had a very short experience with trackman with model 3 yeah so i love so obviously roadster is going to be yeah that that halo car and if we're confident it's going to be an amazing car i hope it's that car to beat essentially yeah but then bringing track mode down to model 3 brings that fun experience to a lot of more people that involved exactly yeah so so it's

kind of like um you know like uh like we're like basically a bunch of nerds here so um um obviously i don't give away yeah but like like the you know so we're tracking we want to uh open up a lot of settings it's like you can adjust settings and it's kind of like an expert user mode and and you can sort of um adjust traction control uh adjust like battery temperature um uh um you know breakthrough like you can basically configure a bunch of things um and we'll tell you like hey you know if

you do this it's a bit risky like you're gonna wear out your brakes a little sooner it's like you might blow a circuit you know like like but like it'll be clear like you know uh but let's see this is the risk that you're taking yeah it's kind of like if you have a graphics card on your computer you can like go in there and you can change the settings and you can like overclock things yeah and like okay but you know so that's going to be all that will be in track mode and you'll

be able to see that and mess with it yeah that's cool yeah be cool and you can like try different things and wait um yeah it'd be fun a little more on roadster because i had a i made a video about it just after the event i was sad i couldn't be there but i'm a day one deposit because i was that excited okay uh but i was wondering after you made that announcement one you said i think i quote plenty of space what does that mean oh you mean like it's like like it won't

be cramped inside like you're like basically um if you're if you're a tall dude you'll be able to sit in there i'll tell you it's six more and a half okay so i feel like if you're comfortable in there a lot of people will be yeah and and then like my brother's six four so is he comfortable in it yeah yeah yeah okay yeah all right and france is like six three i don't know he's pretty tall and then my other question was uh the side mirrors this has been a theme in in the past

with prototypes and cars that we've seen before they come out they don't have mirrors regulatory they have to have mirrors is there an advantage to not having mirrors or is there is it just aerodynamic or is there more to it now it's it's actually surprisingly um how the mirrors particularly at high speeds can have um quite a big effect on the drag of a car they're like little air brakes basically like typical car uh side mirrors reduce a highway range by around five percent wow yeah that's it's pretty intense you see in a wind tunnel

like you can see you know when you see like the sort of smoke trails in the wind tunnel you can see just how much yeah they're like they're just like air brakes to be aerodynamic you actually want kind of like a teardrop uh shape so it's like it's it doesn't end in like a bluff right because it creates a low pressure zone behind the the mirror and so you'd have like have a kind of a almost like a cone behind the mirror or or blend it with the body or something like that okay so it's

like they're actually surprisingly draggy now a manufacturer is required to have side view mirrors but i i believe that a uh the owner is not like you're i think you're like okay you can modify things like at least in the us you can if you uh the owner can modify things the rule is about manufacturing not driving very much about manufacturers are very tightly constrained okay um it's actually one thing that makes it very hard to to make a car that looks good and has a good performance and aerodynamics because it's like you got you

got all these constraints and there's so many rules you need to follow um so it's very challenging to make a car uh look good my other question about roadster um the specs are insane they're ludicrous some might say yeah uh so the flat either the only thing beyond later course is plaid so so 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds but more importantly i was interested in is the 200 kilowatt hour battery and the 600 plus mile range is are these numbers assuming an improvement in available technology by 2020 or are they something you can achieve

now but don't have the manufacturing capacity to or is it somewhere in between yeah so um i think it like basically uh it's like two uh model s uh 3100 packs yeah but but you're really just doubling the the internals that the set the cells inside so there's like a lot of stuff that's related to the pack and the packaging and safety and all that sort of stuff that um is uh not related to the cell so you can double the the number of modules inside and at with but it would still be like maybe

an 80 increase in the volume of the the packs like the floor would get four four or five inches higher if if it was current technology so but um but we would we we think we'll probably get um another maybe 20 10 at least 10 maybe 20 improvement because we'll use like think about like an expensive car is we can use the the state-of-the-art the most advanced equipment like it's kind of like with uh with computers like they've come out with a new like graphics card or or cpu it's like initially it's expensive um and

so but then over time that that price drops down and people like wonder is it like do you have like automation do you have people it's like we have both um you know it's like a cyborg but like integrated sidewalk thing yeah actually like one of the biggest constraints for us is is like being able to hire enough people that's what i was gonna ask so like there's a lot of working man parking there's a lot of parking here yeah if you have a lot of robots and a lot of people in the factory what

do people do that robots can't do and obviously there's a lot that robots can do as far as lifting and moving things but as far as precision maybe there's things they can do that humans can't do do you have a ratio off the top of your head maybe as far as people versus machines um you know it varies massively depending upon what part of the production process um right so some parts of it are like 80 to 90 automated and then some parts of it are like uh only 10 to 20 or what are those

what are those parts that humans do better than humans are really good at adaptation um and rapid evolution and like doing like little like finicky things like like that um like for general assembly like one of the mistakes we made uh that was like pretty pretty big mistake was trying to automate uh general assembly which is where you put the parts together you know like some of the things it's like like trying to connect uh a hose that's like sort of dangling around i see and and you're like the robot's like gonna find the hose

grab it like then connect it to another hose at that point it's like really hard yeah like a person can just go all right they're done gotcha yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah and it's like when you see it it's like wow it's super super obvious and then we try to have robots do this and it's like robots like grabbing the wrong thing and like trying to stick it over here and it's like oh the the the hose was here when the rover threw it was here and so now it like tries to

grab air and then like smashes into the car it's like you don't want that we yeah it was a comedy virus uh tragedy of ours like personally you could say like this thing needs to connect to that thing and and then however they they arrive a person can figure it out the robot would be like uh and then as far as uh tesla's overall master plan is what it was originally called so you start with the low volume high priced roadster then you move on model s higher volume lower price to model three as far

as i know that's where the master plan ended yeah that was like part one yeah i mean we went model x in there which uh uh you know it was that wasn't that was like that was definitely an exercise in hubris uh the now the x is an amazing car and it's like um but it's like we kind of got carried away with the art i hear it's very difficult to make yeah we could carry it away without the carrier with arden technology it's like obviously you want great art you want great technology but we

did get a little distracted from our mission which is to like advance the cores of electric vehicles um and and it probably delayed us a little bit with the model 3 as well so i guess my last question in here would be just as far as the tesla master plan part one coming to an end is it now just a matter of steering the ship towards new opportunities you see there's not a lot of companies making a 35 000 electric car and a quarter million dollar supercar and a semi truck and doing them all really

well right do you guys see yourself just keeping a tight ship and picking your your choices here and there yeah that's why we um what i'm saying really like it's it's a it's a tough strategic call between focus and like being wanting to do a bunch of different models like we we i think we want to try doing two at the same time um like we've only ever done one at the same time before do two and then and then um if we get got that if you're good with that then we could just try

doing three at a time like a lot of the other manufacturers they'll do like you know 12 at a time yeah so if they're way bigger than us weird awesome yeah i wish you the best of luck with it and thanks for taking the time to sit down yeah thanks thank you all right cool appreciate it