Agile manufacturing
Justice explains that the key to speed is being modular. The engine can be switched from a gasoline engine to an electric engine in the time it normally takes to change a tire. The car body switches from a convertible to a pickup truck. This enables quick development. The chassis holds all the modules together: it’s the lightest chassis in the world to achieve a five-star crash rating equivalency. The car is safe because the team designs safety tests for the all the car’s parts before they are made. They take this practice from test-driven development in the software world. The team reduces the cost of making changes wherever possible—costs in tooling machinery and complexity. This means they don’t have to wait three to seven years for the next version of their product: they are able to make changes to any part of the car every seven days. They use distributed collaborative teams. This helps increase team velocity. Morale is a multiplier for morale across the team. They organize their teams using Scrum. They do all their work in pairs. This avoids time spent in training that’s not productive. It drastically reduces the need for documentation. The people doing the work share knowledge while working, without having to up-train someone afterwards. The tools they use are free, like FreeConferenceCall.com, Dropbox, GoogleDocs, YouTube, Skydrve, Facebook and LinkedIn. None of these tools existed ten years ago.