Some go to production hell. I went to production heaven.

Couldn’t he run the line faster? First principles, you know, density and velocity. “We could, but we don’t want to,” Demeunyck answers. “Quality is more important than speed.”

With two lines running in parallel, Luqiao will be able to produce 400,000 cars per year, and that’s when professionals won’t add more capacity, because a bigger plant would get unwieldly. It’s better to build a new one, elsewhere. Production experts roll their eyes when they hear Elon Musk talk about a million car factory.

Here is an interesting perspective on (relatively) new players in car manufacturing in China and how their approach differs from that of Tesla in the US.

Back in 2016 there was some talk about Tesla’s Improvisation Debt, and it seems worth positing that there is a significant difference between improvising and experimenting in an unfamiliar environment.

Improvising is the deliberate interplay of mastered concepts to produce outcomes that are unexpected, new, and exciting, which appears to be what is going on at the Geely factory in Luqiao.

Having “no experience to date in manufacturing vehicles at the high volumes” is something entirely different.