Tesla & Michelin: Accelerating Training & Onboarding
In this interview, a former Tesla employee (Speaker A) describes the chaotic nature of Tesla’s manufacturing line, where daily incidents can cause the line to "explode" and a vast array of failure modes exist. Michael Ungar, drawing on his experience at Michelin, explains that training a new maintainer typically takes three to four years because of the sheer number of rare failure scenarios. This long ramp-up creates a funding dilemma: companies must justify hiring and paying for a person who will not become fully productive for years, especially when the hiring must occur well before a senior employee retires. Both speakers highlight the difficulty of capturing tacit knowledge about these infrequent failures and stress the importance of systematic knowledge capture to dramatically accelerate training and onboarding for new maintenance staff.
