An Overview of Tesla's Fremont Automotive Plant – #CleanTechnica Exclusive

March 31, 2019 by Kyle Field

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Tesla recently invited CleanTechnica at his car plant in Fremont, California, for an exclusive tour that took us behind the scenes of one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the world. The factory is the heart of Tesla's automotive business.

From the outside, the plant itself stretches for several blocks, with many smaller facilities in the blocks and miles around the plant to have fun in Tesla entertainment. For example, the Tesla seating plant is only 2.6 km away. We also visited this factory and we will have much more to say about where Tesla manufactures all the seats of its vehicles – and why it is so special.

Tesla picks up Fremont, and even a quick tour of the region shows how quickly the company is growing and that it's beneficial to consolidate all of Tesla's tasks into a single Gigafactory site. After months of planning, CleanTechnica Zachary Shahan, Chanan Bos and I walked through the doors of the factory on a cold March morning and organized everything.

The actual plant is nearly a quarter of a mile, a little over a kilometer long, and stands like the Great Wall of Ice. Game of thrones across the property. Its white walls are accented by the occasional presence of red pops and big TESLA logos that shout to the world and the highway near what's happening inside.

Upon entering the factory, we found ourselves in an open concept office space, with random workgroups referring to pods Harry Potter, like the "chamber of secrets", along the sides. There was also the usual assortment of meeting rooms and meeting rooms. Unfortunately, we did not see any of Willy Wonka's loompas oompa running around, nor magical unicorns bombing under a rain of 2170 batteries. (Maybe next time.)

It was just a group of people who worked tirelessly to move the company forward: vehicle design, building new secret hardware chipsets for autopilot and updating the latest autopilot version. Everything is in the working day at Tesla. The desk looked clean and well labeled, with a thick dose of coffee punctuating the otherwise bland office odor. Aware of the company's thirst for coffee, Tesla even has its own roasted coffee, which would have been available in some caffeine stations buried in the depths of the plant.

General Assembly

Team CleanTechnica We put on our personal protective equipment and headed to the actual factory, where we were quickly greeted by the familiar sounds of forklifts, conveyors and engines, punctuated by the occasional appearance of a weld shot from the nearby body shop. Jumping on an electric cart, we headed to the Model 3 General Assembly and took a few minutes to examine the Model S assembly lines.

The General Assembly is where the painted body of the car comes for all the fun things humans interact with. This includes wiring, carpet, dashboard, monitor, center console, seats and the like. Hundreds of parts and subassemblies are bolted to vehicles as they are descended on a linear, automated production line in a selective manner to eliminate ergonomically incorrect tasks and the need to lift parts heavy or delicate, or simply to speed up the process.

Automate or not automate

In the model 3 general assembly lines, the balance between automation and man's efforts had been clearly defined, with Tesla seeking to make the assembly process not only faster and more predictable, but also more friendly for humans. In general, Tesla has found that machines are effective at working with parts of the same size and location, such as metal, bolts, batteries, batteries, hard plastics, etc. When it comes to working with fabrics, belts, threads, etc., humans are better.

There is a strong case for the use of robots where the lifting, placing and bolting of parts can lead to repetitive injuries. The installation and fixing of the heavy dashboard in the car is a good example. The machines can easily and quickly place the dashboard in the car and lock it in a predictable manner, at any time, without having to wonder if each lock has been tightened properly. Tesla actually tracks every part and bolt used in a vehicle, as well as the torque specifications that were used when attaching them to the vehicle.

Tesla's manufacturing operating system was built entirely in-house and evolved over time as the company grew. It currently supports almost all of the company's manufacturing equipment. The custom operating system has allowed Tesla to refine its equipment and processes. This clearly has a cost because every change needs to be verified and developed internally, but the added complexity of internal complexity is flexibility. Tesla can quickly propose a new improvement or modify its products, equipment or central lines and implement it even before another manufacturer can gather a formal proposal to send to a supplier.

Agile manufacturing in real life

It is common to hear about this flexible and agile design methodology in just about any company with a computer service, in fact, I work mostly in a factory is unknown outside of Tesla. Again, people are talking about what they call in the "extreme manufacturing" industry, but with nearly two decades of experience in traditional manufacturing with five years of applied computing, it has been awesome to see actually work.

Tesla is not perfect, so do not read this as if we say that Tesla has such an integrated automotive industry that no one could do it better. It's hardly that. Temporary engineering workstations were installed in the middle of the production line to troubleshoot the equipment. When we were there, I noticed that several partially finished vehicles had been removed from the production process so that the problems of body remodeling were corrected before going to paint. The factory, like all the other factories I've visited, is a living, breathing entity.

The lesson we learned is that, while Tesla is far from perfect in manufacturing, it is progressing at a pace unprecedented in the history of automotive manufacturing. The variability of a normal production line in any other factory in the world is compounded in Tesla by the stream of continuous improvements to the process every day, every week. This does not only apply to the manufacturing process – to the machine that builds the machines – but also to its products. We have heard and seen this game many times throughout the day.

Tesla is constantly improving. Every day, its seats are improving compared to yesterday. Every day, its software improves, repeats, evolves. Its welding has been refined, the chemistry of its batteries is constantly refined, the designs of battery modules change, the chassis, safety, direction, power output, etc. That's why Tesla does not have a model year for its vehicles. They are constantly evolving. Every day, or at least every week, Tesla produces a different car from the one produced a week ago.

Everything and everything in the company and in the car is under discussion. There are no so-called sacred cows that can not be touched. This drove him to launch the $ 35,000 Tesla Model 3 standard line, which resulted in a very public statement that Tesla would close many of its retail stores and move to 100% online sales. . it would reduce prices throughout its range at the same time. A few days later, Tesla pulled back slightly, raising vehicle prices by a few percent. Overall, a healthy balance is achieved, but the path to get there is often bumpy, stressful and uncomfortable – especially if you're not used to this style of work.

The stamping press

Tesla transports all of its vehicles, from aluminum rollers to complete vehicles, in its factory. It all starts with the huge tandem line of the Schuler press servo. This is the stamping press responsible for felling the body panels of the Tesla Model 3. While there are 35 such presses in Europe, the Tesla Schuler is the first of these high-precision high-speed presses in the USA.

The Schuler press is so big that it is hard to catch it at a glance. We walked around the Schuler press and saw a change in the dies used to cut pieces. Matching die sets are used in the Schuler to stamp uniform aluminum body parts even faster than the manufacturer's specified throughput, thanks to the many improvements Tesla has made after the press has been commissioned. (Watch the 4-second video above for a visual about it.)

The Schuler is perhaps the first of its kind in the United States, but Tesla did not use that as a pretext to slowly increase production. Instead, the Tesla team installed and commissioned the Model 3 servo press with savings of approximately 25% compared to Schuler's fastest installation ever. And that was only the starting point. Tesla then examined each element of the press, making small adjustments and changes along the way.

After the press, Tesla completely reworked the carriers to integrate more features in less space. To do this, the company has replaced the two output conveyor belts delivered with the press by four shorter strips, better adapted to the available space.

Changes like this and more have allowed Tesla to increase press throughput from 12 strokes per minute to 14 strokes per minute, an improvement of 16%. This translates into higher throughput with extremely expensive equipment and less capital to increase production. By putting this in context, Tesla can now produce body panels and stampings from the Schuler press twice as fast as its stamped Model X press line and at a staggering four times faster than the old lines. Model S. production

Once out of the punch press, the body panels and stampings are then manually inspected by a team of workers. Any imperfections are eliminated or reported for correction before being archived. The racks of finished parts are then stored in an adjacent building until the body shop is ready to weld them together to the bodywork of a car.

A selected set of finished parts is selected for quality assurance tests, where they are analyzed by a vision system that compares them to a digital model. The multiple levels of quality control are designed to eliminate defects in the press section, resulting in a better product for customers and a lower total manufacturing cost for Tesla. Quality is one of those parameters we can all count on.

Body shop

After the press section, we headed to the heart of the beast. The tour was so distorted that my head began to swim, and before I could find my bearings, the process engineer who would be our guide emerged with a smile. He explained that he would take us on a ride to the bodybuilder, which, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the store where Elon and the other Teslateers are going to get ripped off.

In fact, Tesla turns body panels into fully assembled bodies. Each section of the shop is composed of densely packed robots that seem to come straight out of the latest technologies. Transformers movie. In each section, an army of these robots attacks a specific set of tasks that grab parts of the body and inspect, adjust, weld or glue them together in a finished vehicle frame.

Tesla told us that the Model 3 body line is 90% automated and has more than 1,000 robots, which is not hard to believe after visiting the factory. This figure makes sense when you see all these robots in real life, building cars, moving parts and welding. While the Model 3 bodies are assembled, a team of 47 robots work hard in a dozen online scanning stations measuring 1,900 points in each body to ensure that the cars coming out of the chain meet the rigorous standards of You're here. Take this, the gaps in the panel.

Supporting the philosophy described earlier in this article, where automation is well suited to tasks involving rigid parts and repetitive tasks that may be inconvenient in terms of ergonomics or cause problems. Important quality variations, the body shop is fully automated. The body panels are introduced into the process from storage racks and are quickly assembled as pieces of a Lego Technic set, with welding slag arches flying through the air (behind the guards) punctuating the process .

As we moved into the body shop production line, beautiful polished metal bodies emerged from the swirl of robots, evoking a grateful smile from our group. The Transformer Robot team has been extremely effective at turning a mass of body panels into an assembled object that looked strangely like my own Tesla Model 3 on the parking lot.

A seat under another name

We walked down the street to meet Tesla's interior and seating experts at the company's headquarters plant. Tesla's decision to manufacture its own seats was another major hijacking of traditional automakers. This is yet another example of Tesla's ability to perform challenging production tasks internally. This results in a unique level of vertical integration in the manufacture of its seats.

The decision was initially made in response to a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo. Four major seat builders build seats for the automotive industry, but found that they needed superior quality, lower cost and greater flexibility than suppliers could provide. Tesla has acquired in-house seats by hiring some of the best manufacturers in the automotive and seat manufacturing industries.

Their Model 3 factory was originally designed to accommodate two-seat assembly lines with a total production capacity of 10,000 seats per week (5,000 per line). However, since the launch of its first assembly line, Tesla has been able to extract 7,000 seats per week from the first line. This is particularly relevant when we look at the high percentage of shared components between model 3 and the recently unveiled Y model.

This translates into a 40% improvement in single-line throughput and has allowed Tesla to continue to increase auto production without having to install the second line. However, this day is surely approaching as the production of Model 3 continues to increase. CapEx is also positively affected, with Tesla likely to reach the same rate on the second line, effectively purchasing two lines and earning third line production capacity free of charge, thanks to improvements in the first two lines. Zach will soon publish a complete article on the wonders of the seat factory.

Stay tuned here CleanTechnica for a full summary of everything we experienced at the factory, including fantastic video footage.

Related: Tesla Vertical Integration Unleashes Hidden Flexibility and Innovation – #CleanTechnica Field Visit

Keywords: California, Fremont, California Fremont, Tesla, Tesla factories, Tesla Fremont factory, Tesla model 3, Tesla model S, Tesla model X, Tesla seat factory