How about the employees at all of the subcontractors each of the incumbent manufacturers uses for completed components?
Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it's actually pretty meaningless on its own.
Being boring, and looking at sustainable production costs and what consumers are willing to pay is far closer to what matters than the shorthand of looking at employees per car.
At first that seems right. But there is a big BUT. Even Tesla has outsourced a lot of components. A lot of the components except the drivetrain is being outsourced. There are only 2 manufacturers for airbags in the world. There is only 1 good quality manufacturer in the world for the in car rearview mirror. There is only 1 manufacturer for the Homelink system with its best features developed by an Audi engineer I personally know. (All the Homelink systems in the premium cars are this only one system and I know the 2014 numbers sold to Tesla at that time.) The brake system in the Model X is from Bosch. And so on.
So Tesla is at the same level of outsourcing like every one else. So actually you can compare the numbers.
It's a very important metric. The number of man-hours per item is a good stand-in for production costs. It isn't perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works.
I'm interested to hear of how much staff time is put to new production/development and how much is dedicated to maintaining the current fleet. I have to believe that Toyota walks away in that area too.
I think this is different between companies but not in the way you are suggesting.
For example, concerning the subject we are discussing in the first place, Tesla because of the specificity of their cars probably have to produce themselves a huge part of the components of the car whereas Ford, Volkswagen,... are now to a point where a huge amount of the parts of their car are similar and can be outsourced to contractors that will decrease costs by producing only one type of components in huge quantity and provides to multiple constructors (who looks more and more like assemblers nowadays).
So I agree that it is in fact not easy to compare manufacturers on this metrics but I would believe that it's actually suggesting that Tesla does a lot more in-house than conventional car manufacturers.
> It isn't perfect, materials are outside the math here, but it works.
Not sure but we might be having an apples-to-oranges comparison here:
If man hours pr item are significantly better for one but the other has much lower materials cost pr item (motors, sales etc) or enormously lower fixed costs then it is not so easy to say anymore.
Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it's actually pretty meaningless on its own.
Being boring, and looking at sustainable production costs and what consumers are willing to pay is far closer to what matters than the shorthand of looking at employees per car.