Aerospace to Automotive
Musk: It is helpful to have cross-pollination of industries. It's been quite difficult to run SpaceX and Tesla, but there have been good ideas.
The Model S is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. Very few cars are all aluminum. In the aerospace industry, that's the default. So it seemed obviously the right move — to minimize the non-battery-pack mass of the car. In order to offset a heavy battery pack, we had to make the rest of the car light but still achieve a five-star safety rating. I don't think it would have been possible if we had used steel.
In aerospace, aluminum is the default. In automotive, it wasn't. We brought it over.
Automotive to Aerospace
Musk: What's helped SpaceX is that the car industry is really good at making complicated objects at a low cost. It's actually quite incredible that one can buy a decent car for $20,000 given how much stuff is in a car.
At SpaceX, I hired a bunch of people from the auto industry to run manufacturing. Which just worked out reasonably well.
The car industry is really good at making complicated objects at low cost. We hired auto people to run SpaceX manufacturing.