00:31:02 · Ty Morse
[00:31:02] S0: If you're gonna make like a thousand of these drones, you may be happy to have a less refined design process, because you don't want to set up, you know, if you're making a million cyber trucks, maybe you have like one stamping breast that costs a fuck ton of money, and you install that. But if you're doing a thousand drones, you might be willing to have, you know, this piece, you know, this part could be one part, but you're gonna make it two parts because it's just more efficient to do that on a thousand pieces. When you think about designing a product that can scale, what is the process of going from, this is the first iteration and what is it like shippable, but then here's how we're going to basically like systematically eliminate complexity, so that it's just simpler and simpler.
00:31:42 · Adam Bry
[00:31:42] S1: This is why I think it's really important to... Context is so important and I force myself to do this, I encourage everybody at the company to really think specifically about what problem we're trying to solve here. So, for example, R10 that you're holding there was a brand new product for us, brand new product line. We'd never had like a specific optimized indoor drone for public safety and for confined space inspection. We also know just based on the dynamics in that market today, like, you know, we're not going to be building like 10,000 of these things a month, like that market is just not that place. Think eventually it'll probably get there because we don't have any history here, like we're also not gonna wanna come out of the gate by shipping too many and getting ahead of our skis in terms of like the actual maturity and delivering the results that our customers expect. So the set of trade offs that we make when we're developing R10 is very different from what we do when we're developing like the successor to X10. Like the successor to X10, our current flagship drone needs to come out of the gate with better reliability than this thing, which is already like a hard and mature platform. It needs to come out of the gate with more manufacturability at higher scale than this thing, and so the development process that we run for the successor to X10 is necessarily like way more rigorous in manufacturing and reliability than what we do for like a new program that's targeting lower volumes, and this is kind of an Elon ism, but I think that there's just no substitute. The only way to learn like the really hard lessons in manufacturing and reliability is to have done it with prior products, like there's just no shortcut on that stuff. So, when we're developing, you know, the successor here, we're just deep in the data of what's happening on our manufacturing line, what quality issues have there been in the field, what have we learned from that, how can we shortcut all those things in the design process, You know, what's... Where are we spending the most money in our supply chain in the factory that can be optimized out? And I'm very excited about what we'll be able to do here, but it's a very different process from a brand new product that's gonna start at lower volumes. When you
00:33:41 · Ty Morse
[00:33:41] S0: think of manufacturing, and just coming up to speed and knowing what you shop for and what you shouldn't, what have been the biggest things that you didn't expect and just absolutely smacked you
00:33:50 · Adam Bry
[00:33:50] S1: in the face? A lot of manufacturing, and actually a lot of product development, comes down to trying to reduce entropy. Like, the natural state of the world is the atoms are all going in their own little direction, Brownian motion takes over. And so, trying to squeeze down to the exact right configuration of like bits and atoms that will deliver the capability you want, repeatedly over and over, is extremely difficult. The most challenging, when things are in our own factory, we act... We can solve any problem. We've got great teams, and it may not always be pretty, but like we can roll up our sleeves, we can deploy a lot of like brainpower and manpower to come in here and basically do anything that we need to do. The really tricky ones are the things that happen outside of our direct control, that happen upstream in the supply chain where supplier out of the goodness of their heart, just decides to like slightly change one of their processes or slightly change one of their materials in a way that to them seems innocuous, but couples to something either that happens in our factory or in the worst case, couples to something that happens like downstream with with customers. And so I would say those are the ones that are the trickiest to solve where you haven't changed anything about your process, but something about the product is behaving differently from you expect. And the answer to it, the only answer really is you've just gotta go deeper and deeper in your supply chain and get more and more detailed in the level of analysis and control that you exert over all the components that are going into your drone, which is kind of, there's no shortcuts to that, like it just takes a lot of like, thought and ultimately like, manpower upstream.
00:35:30 · Ty Morse, Adam Bry
[00:35:30] S0: You know, were watching this video yesterday of, I think like a SWAT team breaking down someone's door, and then they launch a drone, and instead of someone walking into an apartment, they just have a drone fly around in the apartment and, like, not risk someone getting shot at. This is like a very chaotic environment. So has there been any really great examples of some situation where you did not plan for, like, you did not expect and things went horribly wrong? [00:35:56] S1: Well, So this was an example of R 10 flying in like an indoor tactical situation. Yeah, I mean, These... The R 10 gets the shit beaten out of it. I'm like, you know, we've had bad guys, like, grab it by the gimbal head and throw it out the window, and break its neck, so to speak. We've had people go after it with baseball bats, we've had drones get shot. To me, that's like all great news, right? Like, the alternative there is a police officer or a citizen is is getting the the, you know, the violence aimed at them. So, I actually love it when our drones are victims of violence, because it it means that the, like, chances of a person being a victim of violence are much lower, like that's kind of the whole point, like these things, we're building thousands a month here, know, who cares at the end of the day? And our terms and conditions with our customers actually take this into account, like, you know, if a drone gets injured or killed in the line of duty, we're happy to replace it.
00:35:56 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
[00:35:56] S1: Well, So this was an example of R 10 flying in like an indoor tactical situation. Yeah, I mean, These... The R 10 gets the shit beaten out of it. I'm like, you know, we've had bad guys, like, grab it by the gimbal head and throw it out the window, and break its neck, so to speak. We've had people go after it with baseball bats, we've had drones get shot. To me, that's like all great news, right? Like, the alternative there is a police officer or a citizen is is getting the the, you know, the violence aimed at them. So, I actually love it when our drones are victims of violence, because it it means that the, like, chances of a person being a victim of violence are much lower, like that's kind of the whole point, like these things, we're building thousands a month here, know, who cares at the end of the day? And our terms and conditions with our customers actually take this into account, like, you know, if a drone gets injured or killed in the line of duty, we're happy to replace it. [00:36:48] S0: How often are you trying to refocus the entire team towards here's what the customer is actually experiencing? Totally, that's a huge huge part