Elon Musk explains the value of cross-pollination between industries

It is helpful to have cross pollination of industries. It's been quite difficult to run SpaceX and Tesla, but there has been good ideas. For example, with respect to the car. 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 like obviously the right move in order to minimize the non battery pack mass of the car. So in order to offset a fairly 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 to do that if we had used steel, which is the traditional method. And what's helped SpaceX has been that the car industry is really good at making complicated objects at a low cost. I mean it's actually quite incredible that one can buy a decent car for $20,000. It's nutty how much stuff is in a car. So at SpaceX I hired a bunch of people from the auto industry to run manufacturing which has worked out reasonably well.