Eric Demay

Ok guys, this is a great story. It’ll take maybe two hours to get through everything, but you don’t have to do it in one stretch, and it’s highly worth it anyways.

Step 1: This American Life

Listen to the This American Life episode on Nummi, a car plant in Fremont, CA where, in the 1980s, “Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved”. The piece in itself is fantastic radio journalism as always. It also explains [and makes you wonder] why GM, 20 years later, was struggling to survive: why did it ever use what it had learned at Nummi?

Step 2: Wired

This is followed by a fanstastic Wired article titled How Elon Musk Turned Tesla Into the Car Company of the Future on 39 yo Musk—yesterday’s co-founder of PayPal now leading Tesla Motors, a new electric car company based in Palo Alto. This startup is Silicon Valley’s answer to Detroit’s inability to go beyond fuel-based engines and build on something sustainable, both economically and environmentally sound.

Musk’s story is jaw-dropping: his perseverance, his sheer ability to move things forward no matter how difficult they seem, is unparalleled. His ex-wife notes: “Elon has huge steel balls, […] He truly does.”

But the best part is about the Nummi factory and how after years of decline and ignorance from GM, Toyota finally sold it to Tesla. And now the startup will get its first shot at mass-producing its first car: Toyota’s electric Rav4. It’s a great story really, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, unlike many car startups, this one might just stick around and eventually become a household name.