Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at various times, has pointed to the adoption of an unprecedented level of assembly automation?an alien dreadnought, he called it?as one of the reasons his company continues to claim it can ramp up production of its more affordable sedan, the Model 3, so quickly. It’s also how Tesla intends to produce more vehicles annually at its Fremont, California, factory than the facility’s previous owners, General Motors and Toyota, ever could. But it?s this tangle of automation that has also brought Musk to what he has called production hell.
“Production bottlenecks? were cited by Musk for the Model 3 delays, and it has now been clarified that automation is at least partly to blame. In a quarterly earnings call today with financial analysts, Musk pointed to a subcontractor that he said ?dropped the ball? on a project involving automation to assemble the Model 3?s battery pack, which uses a new cell format as well as a new pack architecture. He also noted that a team of Tesla engineers has had to rewrite all the software for module production from scratch due to supplier negligence. Tesla claims that it has achieved a rate of about 500 units per week for battery-pack assembly, body-shop welding, and final assembly for ?burst builds of short duration??which we?ll assume are demonstrated in the video clips the company also just released [below]. Tesla chief technical officer JB Straubel reiterated that the Model 3 is ?much easier to build...