Elio Should Take A Lesson From Henry Ford

[Woodman]

Good read

Click on link below then on Henry Ford knew how the lean startup worked

https://todaymade.com/blog/henry-ford-entrepreneur/

 

[charchri4]

Wow that is a very enlightening article! There is a balance between bugs in quality and shipping though and any sort of Ford Pinto gas tank style bad press could be far worse than not shipping when we want them to...

 

[ecdriver711]

Good article, thanks for posting.

 

[Jeff Porter]

Good read

Click on link below then on Henry Ford knew how the lean startup worked

https://todaymade.com/blog/henry-ford-entrepreneur/

Welcome to the forum, Woodman! Glad to have you. Good story and article.

The author called Couzens "reluctant" in the first paragraph. Couzens didn't sound reluctant to me, he sounded aggressive. "Let's get this thing shipped!"

It's a very different business environment 100+ years later. News travels in a few seconds, not a day or two. If you have a product "fail", that fail better be relatively insignificant.

But I do like the mantra: fail fast, improve slowly. The difficult part is walking that fine line, between "it's good enough, ship it" and "any blemish on reliability might kill the company".

 

[Bilbo B]

Back in my Engineering days we used to admit that for every project, there came a time to "Shoot the engineers and build the darn thing". Engineers, as a rule, are perfectionists. They always 'know' that given just one more design iteration, they can make it better/faster/cheaper. I don't sense that Elio is in this position (yet). I've seen nothing indicating they're over-engineering anything. As noted above, failing today, with the internet and 24 hour news, is much riskier than it was 100 years ago. I doubt EM will get to keep iterating until they get to the 'Model T'. Unless "Model T" = "E20". Henry Ford didn't have CAD and Fluid Dynamics Analysis, either. So maybe it balances out.

Many new car models have issues when first introduced. To expect EM to create everything from scratch and NOT have issues is dreaming. But there better not be many issues, and they better not be significant safety issues. After funding, that's my biggest concern. The cost in money and reputation to a major recall could easily wipe out a startup.