Don't we all feel like we live in a Dilbert cartoon?

A good interview with Elon Musk, including an anecdote about optimizing processes that really should have been eliminated in the first place:

"[T]here were these fiberglass mats atop the [Tesla] Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the battery. And it was the one point choking the battery pack production line. . . .

“I tried to fix the automation, like, make the robot better, make it move faster, shorter path, increase the torque, delete the reverse 720 degrees on the bolt cause that’s unnecessary. Go forward fast, not at a 20% rate but at a 100% rate. And instead of spackling glue on the entire battery pack, just put little dabs of glue because the fiberglass mats are sandwiched between the battery pack and the floor pan anyways so all you need is something to hold it in place until you bolt the battery pack into the car.”

And after doing all of this work on automation and acceleration and simplifying Musk finally wondered what the purpose of the mats was in the first place.

“I asked the battery safety team . . . . I said ‘Are they for fire protection?’ And they said ‘No, these are for noise and vibration.’ . . . Then I asked the . . . noise vibration harshness team ‘What’s it for?’ and they said fire safety.”

“So, literally, it was like being in a Dilbert cartoon, okay,” Musk said. He added, “Actually, I feel like I’m in a Dilbert cartoon quite frequently.”

. . . [T]hey put microphones in two cars, one with the mat and one without and found no one could tell the difference. So after all of that, they deleted the mats “and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell that was a complete pile of nonsense.”