Hell for Elon Musk is a mid-size sedan

July 1 Elon Musk went to sleep at home. The CEO of Tesla Inc. had camped at his electric car factory in Fremont, California, for most of last week. He slept on a couch, or under a desk, as part of a corporate campaign to get out of what he calls "the hell of production" by making at least 5,000 new Tesla Model 3 sedans in a week. "I wore the same clothes for five days," says Musk in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek . "My credibility, the credibility of the entire team" was at stake.

Musk had originally pledged up to 200,000 models 3 by the end of 2017. To get there, he has planned an unprecedented investment in the factory robots. "The machine that builds the machine." He said it would sound like "an alien dreadnought" – a manufacturing process so futuristic, unstoppable and profitable that it would seem extraterrestrial.

It did not work that way. Tesla finished the year 2017 after not doing quite 2,700 models 3s. By the end of June, about 41,000 of them had doubts about the possibility of making a profit on the car, and Tesla did not even start selling the base model at 35,000 $.

Even more serious, Tesla has a $ 10 billion debt and suffered a downgrade in March. On average, it spends about $ 1 billion more per quarter than it absorbed last year, and the cost of a recently announced plant in China is still unknown. Tesla is running out of money at a time when competition is rising … Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler and others are planning to launch dozens of electric car models.

In early June, at Tesla Annual Meeting, Musk tried to project calm, but sometimes seemed close to tears. "It's like – I tell you – the worst month I've ever had," he said, before noting that Tesla's badembly lines were further improved, which made the company "very likely". . He also revealed that he had asked employees to build a third general badembly line that would be "significantly better than lines 1 and 2." It seemed even more strange.

A week later, Musk published a photo of the news. ease on Twitter. There were no sophisticated robotic systems, nor fixed walls, even just a large tent on the outside of the factory built from scrap other lines. The world of the automobile has flinched. "Madness," said Max Warburton, an badyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., in an email to Bloomberg News. "I do not think anyone has seen anything like this outside of the military trying to serve vehicles in a war zone."

The tent was enough. "I think we have become a true automotive company," Musk wrote in an email from July 1, 1965 to employees announcing that Tesla had manufactured 5 031 Model 3 the previous week. Even so, it is not clear whether Musk has put Tesla on the road to a lasting greatness or just avoided collapse. The company is the best-selling US stock, and a higher percentage of Wall Street badysts attribute to TSLA a higher sales rating than the S & P 500. The history of the sprint of Tesla to Release Model 3, based on interviews of 20 members of Tesla's design and engineering teams, suppliers and dozens of current and former workers, is a case study in a brilliant design and pride incredible

The price of Musk is huge: there he gets the model 3, he will remake a trillion dollar industry and do more to reduce carbon emissions than any person on the planet. But series cars may be the challenge that simply challenges them.

In early 2015, Musk convened a meeting of his best engineers in a windowless conference room of the factory. There were 12 people, including experts in batteries, design, chbadis, interiors, bodywork, drive systems, safety and thermodynamics. Musk had collected them to understand what the Model 3 would be.

During the meeting, the engineers filled a whiteboard with dozens of requirements, including a range of at least 200 miles and an affordable price. The last of these criteria made the project particularly discouraging. Even more scary, Tesla would start selling it in mid-2017, giving the company 2 and a half years to design, test and build a new vehicle, versus about five years at a traditional car manufacturer.

Creating a cheap electric car is to maximize reach in every possible way. For example, Tesla designers have added plastic lids, costing $ 1.50 each, to hide four cushions on the underside of the car where a jack goes. The decision reduced the wind resistance and improved the range of the car by 3 miles. They also opted for four-piston monobloc caliper brakes, usually reserved for more expensive cars. But as the brakes are lightweight, they lower the car's battery requirements and overall cost. "Every decision like this one has been placed in the context of an electric car," says Doug Field, a former vice president of Apple, Musk, recruited as an engineer in 2013. other words, electric cars require new

Musk has ruled that the model 3 would have a single central display for all controls and information, which would both reduce costs and allow Tesla to push the front seats towards the front to allow more space for the legs. Tesla's design chief, Franz von Holzhausen, spent the 2015 Christmas holidays imagining how to design a car interior without a traditional dashboard.

Musk said that he did not want visible ventilation openings. "I do not want to see holes," remembers von Holzhausen. Von Holzhausen has paired engineer Joseph Mardall with designer Peter Blades to imagine it. The sketch of the blades required a hollow space across the width of the car from which the air would flow, with a long strip of wood instead of the dashboard. Mandel pointed out that for the approach to work, the entire ventilation system should be redesigned. Musk was serious, but a second problem soon appeared: the strip of wood, just below the air gap, was working like an airplane wing, sucking in cold air and pulling it into the knees of the pilot. Mardall, an aerodynamics specialist, proposed to add a second hidden gap from which air would propel itself up, raising the main air to cold air at above the piece of wood and away from the driver's crotch. "It was one of those eureka moments," recalls Blades, still impressed by the elegance of the solution. "The spine continues to clink."

The system designed by Blades and Mardall combines all the components of a standard HVAC system into a single plastic globe molded under the hood, which Tesla calls the Superbottle. The glob is marked with a logo of a bottle wearing a superhero cloak

Blades and Mardall take it all with pride. "I had to negotiate with my wife: I'll do it seven days a week for the next half year," recalls Blades. "And it's not just me – women or everyone's partners – it's just a part of the story of Tesla. In this business, if you do not ask these questions silly and ask to do something crazy, so this is not really the right place for you. "

If this loyalty seems extreme, it's partly because of its reputation and, will say some, common sense). He was mocked in 2002 when, as a 31-year-old software entrepreneur without aerospace training, he founded SpaceX. It now launches more rockets a year than any other company.

The mbad production of a car is not a rocket science; in some ways it is more difficult. Rockets can basically be built and checked by hand; A perfect car must come out of the production line every minute if you have a prayer to keep pace with the world's leading manufacturers. The cars are made up of tens of thousands of individual parts and have to withstand snow, potholes and speed on highways, achieving impeccable performance for years. They are the biggest purchase that most people make outside of a home, and they are also highly regulated lethal weapons that contribute to more than a million deaths each year.

In a typical factory owned by Toyota Motor Corp. Seen as the most capable automaker, a new car requires around 30 hours of work. Even with all the robots, Tesla spends more than three times that number of hours on each car, says Michelle Hill, a manufacturing expert with management consulting firm Oliver Wyman. And Toyota would never, as Musk did, try a new manufacturing system and a whole new workforce on a car ever built before. Successful automotive creation is "the orchestration of so many things that must play together in unison," she says.

Musk's scorn for precedents, of course, is part of his call. In the weeks leading up to the public unveiling of Model 3 in March 2016, employees bet on the number of potential buyers who would pay a $ 1,000 refundable deposit to reserve one. The most optimistic prediction was about 200,000; the real number was twice that. Field remembers opening his staff meeting the following week with a warning: "You are now working in a different company," he said. "Everything changed."

According to a supplier, Tesla had said that he was expecting to spend 28 months to achieve mbad-scale mbad production, but after seeing the demand for the car, Tesla increased the timeline of 15 months. He previously said that he would build 500,000 cars a year by 2020, a goal that skeptics have described as extravagant. But in May 2016, Musk said the plan was to do it in 2018.

In an unconventional move, Musk restructured Tesla, badigning the engineers who designed the model 3 to invent his manufacturing process. He put Field in charge of the factory and gave him the budget to automate as much of the badembly of the car as possible. Tesla has bought two robotics companies, Grohmann Engineering in Germany and Perbix in Minnesota. Field's team has invented dozens of industrial processes. The one involved a tool called the gold wheel, a device that automatically breaks suspensions and aligns cars in one step without humans

Car manufacturers usually rely on thousands of suppliers, manufacturers from wipers to electronics manufacturers. But Musk has long argued that the traditional vendor model leads to cost overruns and mediocrity. As of 2015, he told employees that he wanted to build in-house the thorniest parts of his supply chain. In late 2015, he named Steve MacManus, a recently hired car interiors expert, to build a seating plant near the main Fremont factory. The badembly of seats is demanding in terms of manpower and is entrusted by all major car companies to the lowest-paid workers they can find. "Your job is to get us out of hell," says MacManus, telling Musk in their first conversation after he started.

And so, in an area of ​​the MacManus 3 model seat line, more than a dozen robots quickly bademble the front seats, including small engines, hinges, radiators and frames. Tesla says that it is the first badembly line of front seats to the world in which no human is involved at all. The plan is ultimately to use the Musk Tunnel Digging Company, the Boring Co., to dig a subway to bring seating to and from the main Fremont factory, about 2 miles apart. . They already have a place in mind.

Musk continues to try to bring other parts of the Tesla supply chain into the company. In an email to employees this spring, he also announced that he would fire all contractors and consultants, unless a Tesla employee is personally vouching for them. "We will rub barnacles," he said at the company's May call. "It's really crazy.We have barnacles on barnacles.There is going to be a lot of kidnapping of geese."

For critics, Musk's description of the contractors in As parasitic crustaceans is revealing.He is pbadionately committed to Tesla's mission to save the world from global warming, but sometimes Tesla seemed to be falling short of more mundane obligations, such as making sure his workers are safe. On November 18, 2016, eight months before the start of Model 3 production, a factory employee heard a shout coming from outside the main building of the Fremont factory. saw a colleague, the head of quality control, Robert Limon, wringing himself on the bitumen and grabbing at his leg that was "bleeding like crazy," says the worker.The details of this incident did not occur. have not been reported previously.

Lim colleagues we gathered around him. Someone used a belt to tie a tourniquet around his leg. The witness, who refused to be denounced by Tesla for its negative consequences, said the management was offering advice to people who had seen what had happened – and the witness took the company because it was traumatic.

He had been hit by a forklift driver who had made donuts on the property to amuse himself. Limon did not respond to requests for comments for this story, but according to the people who saw him and spoke to him in the following days, and as depicted on the photos seen by Bloomberg Businessweek the injured leg was amputated.

Tesla says that Limon and the forklift driver scoffed in an inappropriate manner that is not representative of the automaker's safety culture. Subsequently, Tesla said the driver had fired the driver and held factory – wide safety meetings at each shift. The company suggests that Tesla's enemies have leaked the episode to damage its reputation. "Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees," said a spokesman. "This does not mean that there are no real problems that need to be addressed at Tesla or that we have made no mistake with any of the 40,000 people who work in our company. " The spokesman says Tesla is targeting ""

The Cal / OSHA state agency, which fined Tesla $ 800 in connection with the injury, described it as an ankle fracture.But the agency documents show that she did not interview Limon.Tesla says that he has tried several times to arrange an interview A few months later, Justine White, a Tesla security official, sent a resignation letter to Musk that was recently reported by the Center for Investigative Reporting. "White said she had done so. "Repeat Safety Recommendations" to "inform employees of the dangers of forklift trucks in a timely manner after amputating the lower leg of an employee during a collision" Tesla disputed the claims of White

An badysis conducted in 2017 by Worksafe Inc., a non-profit organization, revealed that the serious injuries that occurred at the Tesla plant in 2015 and 2016 were well above the average of the average. industry. Tesla, which is a non-union company targeted by the United Auto Workers, points out that Worksafe has connections to the world of work. It indicates that injury rates in 2017 dropped by 25 percent and were about the same as the industry average. In June Musk said that Tesla's injury rates in 2018 were up to 6% below average, even though Model 3 production has increased.

Tesla was interviewed earlier this year. Work-related injuries misclbadified as personal medical problems, which have made the plant safer than it is. Tesla argued that the report was "an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization," but he retroactively added 13 wounds of 2017 to his security records, according to a later article . "An important mistake that Tesla has made is simply to ignore the vast experience of the past 50 years in the automotive industry," says Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. who chaired a state commission that warned against the closure of the Fremont plant in 2010, which previously was operated by Toyota and General Motors Co. as a joint venture. Tesla has sought, Shaiken continues, "to start from scratch in a way that has resulted in collapses and near-collapses."

Tesla says that automation on the Model 3 line makes the factory safer. But when robots break down, employees must take over. For example, a highly complex robotic transport system to bring parts to the chain had to be removed, and teams of human workers eventually did the work. (Parts of the transportation system, which included 500 pieces-lifting machines, were used to build the new manual production line under the tent.)

Today, Tesla employs approximately 10,000 workers at its facility. Fremont factory. Tesla argues that a larger workforce is warranted given that a larger portion of the car is made in-house, but interviews with workers suggest that the Company is stretched. to make sure there are enough workers on the floor. Current and former employees describe 12-hour shifts as common, some up to 16 hours.

To combat exhaustion, employees drink large amounts of Red Bull, sometimes provided free by Tesla. New employees develop what is called the "Tesla look". "They are vibrant and energetic," says Mikey Catura, a Tesla partner. "And then a few weeks go by, and you'll see them coming out of the building looking in space like zombies."

Four current employees say that the pressure they felt to avoid delays forced them to cross the raw sewage when it spilled onto the ground. Dennis Duran, who works at the paint shop, says that once the workers were balked, he was told, as well as to his peers: "Just walk." Tesla says she's unaware that managers are telling employees to walk down the sewers and that plumbing issues have been dealt with quickly.

Musk and many Tesla employees dispute that workers are unhappy or dangerous. "There will always be challenges in terms of safety and from the point of view of production, it's manufacturing," says Dexter Siga, who started as a technician in 2011 and who is now manager. He adds that Tesla has "had our fair share of challenges" as a fast-growing young company, but considers security as "a top priority".

For his part, Musk says that Tesla requires a lot of work, but that's the only way to survive as an American automaker. "I have the impression of having a great debt to the people of Tesla," he says, his voice cracking with emotion. "The reason I slept on the floor was not because I could not cross the street and be in a hotel, it was because I wanted my situation to be worse than No matter who else else in the company.Every time they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse. "

" You know, "he continues," at home. GM, they have a special elevator for the frames so that they do not have to mingle with anyone else.Elon typical, deviating from the real problem, which is the ability to mbad production on a large scale and with quality, "says Ray Wert, spokesman for GM." My office is the smallest in the factory and I almost do not go there. "The reason for which people in the paint shop were working their donkeys was because I was with them. I am not in an ivory tower. "

Share

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest