Sandy Munro: Tesla Is “Engineering At The Speed Of Thought”

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(For those unfamiliar with Sandy, Sandy Munro is an automotive engineer who specializes in machine tools and manufacturing.He started as a toolmaker at the Valiant Machine & Tool company – a General Motors supplier in Windsor. In 1978, he joined the Ford Motor Company where he improved methods of engine assembly. [For gas cars and trucks]

In 1988, he started his own consultancy, Munro & Associates, in Troy, Michigan, specializing in lean design, tearing down automotive products to study and suggest improvements and innovations.[1][2] Now located in Auburn Hills, Michigan, the company performs electric vehicle benchmarking and consults in the aerospace, defense and medical sectors.[3]

In 2018, he started broadcasting video analyses and interviews on his YouTube channel, Munro Live. This now has over 300,000 subscribers and was successful in raising the profile of his consultancy during the COVID-19 pandemic, when meetings and trade shows were restricted.)

Excerpt:

"Regarding Tesla’s pace of innovation, in another segment of the Q&A (video below), Sandy noted that Tesla was doing “engineering at the speed of thought.” You can hear much more on that in the video below, but here’s a little bit more from that quote: “I equate Tesla to basically engineering at the speed of thought. They move faster — 10, 20, 100 times faster — than any company I’ve ever seen. We can’t believe how many changes they made in two years on the Model Y.” He also talked about Tesla’s evolution with casting, some exclusive info from the companies making the casting machines and molds for Tesla, and more.

One last highlight from that video before jumping to the next one: Sandy included an extremely short presentation before the Q&A. A key part of that was a chart on the Altman Z-Scores of Tesla, Toyota, Honda, Daimler, GM, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Hyundai, Ford, BMW, and Lucid. Tesla was through the roof over at about 15. Honda and Toyota were next best, barely in the “grey zone” (not the “safe zone”), at about 2. Everyone else was in the “danger zone” solidly below 2. This is something James Stephenson has highlighted over on Twitter from time to time for years. Here’s the most recent table from a tweet of his:

According to the link above from Investopedia, “A score below 1.8 means it’s likely the company is headed for bankruptcy, while companies with scores above 3 are not likely to go bankrupt.”

Much more in the article here:

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/26/sandy-munro-tesla-is-engineering-at-the-speed-of-thought/