Can Elon Musk and Tesla reinvent the way cars are made?

FREMONT, Calif. – Just outside the north wing of Tesla's sprawling electric car factory, an unusual structure has taken shape in recent weeks: a tent-like tent. about 50 feet tall and several hundred feet long, its gray stretched canvas membrane supported by aluminum columns.

Its purpose is as remarkable as its hasty construction. The semi-permanent structure houses a third assembly line – part of a desperate effort to accelerate the production of Model 3, the car that Elon Musk, the general manager of Tesla, said to be critical for the financial health of the business and its immediate future. [19659002] Just two years ago, in 2018, Musk saw a decisive moment. Having established the brand with top-of-the-line offerings – the Model S luxury sedan and the Model X sport utility vehicle – Tesla would begin producing more affordable model 3 sedans. With a high-speed and high-tech assembly process, the company's sales would be multiplied by more than five, or half a million vehicles.

That did not happen that way. Tesla was struggling to mass-produce batteries and cars. By the end of nearly three months of production after Tesla began assembling the model 3 last summer, only 260 had left the line, and Mr Musk said that the company had to deal with an extended period of "making hell". The model 3s per month in December, but only 2425 have been completed in the last three months of 2017.

Since then, Tesla has run to iron out defects in the assembly process, mainly by scrapping of Robotic machines complicated with certain tasks, and the hiring of hundreds of workers to replace them. In the factory, it's a frantic race to achieve Mr. Musk's goals, which has wreaked havoc on some employees. But if the bet pays off, it will be a big step towards Tesla's bold ambitions: not only to be a mass-market automaker, but also to reinvent the way cars are manufactured

"We believe in a rapid evolution ". Musk said in an interview. "It's like, finding a way or making a way.If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is needed."

And indeed, Mr. Musk is trying to do things that have never been done. General Motors, Nissan, BMW, Ford and others have produced electric cars, but have been unable to cut costs enough to make them both affordable and profitable. Musk, on the other hand, promised investors and customers that Tesla would be able to produce model 3 in large volumes, sell versions for as little as $ 35,000 and reap big profits [19659007]. Musk sees Tesla moving to producing electric vehicles of all shapes and sizes – pickup trucks, semi-trailer trucks, and a fast and spacious car for families called the Y model. The mission of the company, said Mr. Musk on many occasions, is driving the transition to a no-emissions transportation and to change the world

A recent one-day visit to the Fremont factory revealed how Tesla is trying to break with the standard practices of the automotive industry throughout the assembly lines of the model 3. It looks for ways to shorten the time that robots take to weld parts. It even makes seats, a component that most automotive companies leave to specialized suppliers. And that is what it does when trying to eliminate bottlenecks and defects in the manufacturing process.

In the final assembly area, for example, Tesla originally used robotic arms to install the model 3 seats. But the machine was slow and inconsistent in tightening the bolts that fix the seats and the wiring connection that provides them with power. About a month ago, company officials said the workstation had been modified so that the robots installed the seats and the workers manipulated the bolts and mounted the delicate electronic connectors

. Musk does not have an office at the factory, but Tesla says he's sleeping there – in someone's office or on a couch – while working at streamlining model production 3. At 3 am, the day Tesla made him available for a phone interview, he said that he was trying to fix a small problem in the part of the factory where the model 3 is painted. "The carrier on which the car is is coming out a little too quickly from the paint booth for the sensor to recognize, and it triggers the sensor even if all is well," he says.

Tesla engineers are trying to reprogram sensor so that it can work at accelerated speed. For the moment, he said, "we have someone standing there just by pressing the" O.K. "button to restart it."

The scramble to accelerate quickly put pressure on the company. Several senior executives, some of whom are involved in manufacturing, are gone. While investor optimism has remained high – Tesla's market capitalization puts it side-by-side with General Motors as America's most valuable auto company – its bonds are noted in undesirable territory, and analysts fear that Tesla is quick to generate revenue. continue to use cash and face the prospect of having to raise additional capital later this year.

"At some point, investors will say," If you do not have a viable business model, we will not go "Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said during a recent conference call with customers

The Perils of Automation

Having made fortune as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur – including a nine-figure sum of his early involvement in the PayPal's online payment service – Mr Musk was convinced that technology and vision could together conquer new frontiers, be it in space exploration (with his SpaceX ventu), re) or daily transportation. Replacing fuel tanks with batteries was only a beginning, and he was also determined to redesign their production, building on the progress of automation in the 21st century. [19659004] Automakers well esta Blis master the process with line workers and then find ways to get back to work. Tesla did the opposite. He designed a highly automated production line populated with over a thousand robots and other assembly machines.

Ron Harbor, a consulting firm partner of Oliver Wyman, noted that in his annual survey, the most efficient auto factories a lot of manual labor. "The most automated are at the bottom of the list," he said.

In some cases, Tesla's bet on automation has paid off. A separate production line that makes Model S and Model X has a series of 14 stations, with 17 workers, in the area where batteries and electric motors are married to the sub-bodies of vehicles. For Model 3, this feature involves only five workstations and no workers at all, said Lars Moravy, director of chassis engineering for the company.

For other tasks, the use of robots has turned out to be a headache. For months, Tesla engineers struggled to get a robot to guide a bolt through a hole precisely to secure a portion of the rear brake. They found a solution of exasperating simplicity: instead of using a bolt with a flat tip on its threaded end, the engineers turned to a bolt with a conical tip, called "entry," which can be guided through the hole even if The robot is one millimeter from the dead point, said Moravy.

In a very concrete sense, Tesla sees its production line as a laboratory of untested techniques. In recent weeks, company executives have concluded that they can produce Model 3 subsets with fewer spot welds than they previously used. The car is still held together by about 5,000 welds, but the engineers concluded that 300 robots were useless and reprogrammed to assemble the steel underbody without them.

"It's unusual to do it at this point when the car is already in motion," said Harbor, a veteran manufacturing expert who has visited most of the world's major automobile plants. Normally, you would make such changes at the prototype stage.

In another attempt to push the limits of technology, Tesla sometimes pulls robots from the line and tests them at speeds higher than those specified by the supplier. Charles Mwangi, Director of Tesla Body Engineering

"We are breaking them to see what the maximum limit is," said Mwangi. The idea is to find ways to speed up production without spending capital for new machines. In the future, rather than adding more machines to increase production, "we can simply compose our equipment," he said.

Willingness to experience the production process even as cars come off the line So, Tesla defies the conventional wisdom of the industry. Car manufacturers like Toyota, Honda and GM design production lines capable of producing cars or trucks at a speed of about a minute, and lock the basic assembly process once it is over. they start to produce. While they make adjustments to improve the quality or safety of workers, they usually make major changes or introduce new techniques only a few years, when an old model is eliminated and before the production of a new model begins. quality is stability, "said Mr. Harbor." Once you get a stable process that works, you can go back and make improvements. "

Tesla, on the other hand, tinkers with its production lines on the fly, and the tent is a striking illustration of this approach.] Under the sheer cloth, Tesla hastily rode a third Model 3 production line. Like the other two, he manages the final assembly, when the trims and other finishes are put on the car. (Tesla did not include the tent on the tour of the factory.)

Adding a new chain of d & # 39; Assembly, even temporarily, is a rare and risky move in the automotive industry.A chain installed in a hurry, in an untested environment, might not achieve the quality promised by Tesla.

Two lines assembly already exist inside the factory to manage r at least some of these tasks. Mr. Musk had hoped, partly because Tesla was using robots for tasks that were best left to human workers.

Tesla executives acknowledge that the company has overestimated the rate of car production and designed a production system that has proven to be effective. to be too complicated – a problem that Mr Musk lamented at the June shareholders' meeting.

"One of the biggest mistakes we made was to try to automate things that are super easy for a person, but super difficult for a robot. to do, "he said." And when you see him, it looks super silly. And you are like, wow! Why did we do that? "

Most automakers use a single line to manufacture two, three or sometimes four different vehicles because using a second line would require them to invest in duplicate tools and reduce their margins a third assembly line, outside the walls of a factory? "I've never heard anything like it," says Mr. Harbor.

Musk said the The capital costs of the line in the tent were minimal because the company was using equipment that it already owned. (On Twitter, he called it "scrap metal in warehouses.") [19659002] "It does all the other assembly lines, but with less staff, lower labor costs and much higher uptime." Our unit cost for vehicles is more down on this line than on the other lines, and we find "

If this remains the case then Tesla accelerates production will be revealed in a few months if the company reports a profit, as promised Mr. Musk.

"Constant Pressure to Build"

For many years, the Fremont factory was a joint venture of Toyota and General Motors known as New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. or Nummi. . After the bankruptcy of GM, the plant closed in 2010 and the site was acquired by Tesla.

Today, the four million square foot plant along a busy highway sees a steady stream of deliveries and semi-trailers on the outset. Vehicles. Every afternoon, online workers combine black trousers with a white Tesla logo on one leg on the outside of the factory and descend on crowded parking lots in the sprawling Bayside suburbs

. In interviews conducted outside the factory, several said that they had spent ten to twelve hours a day, sometimes six days a week. They report that turnover is high among line workers and that sometimes supervisors join the line during extended shifts.

Jose Moran, a five-year-old Tesla veteran who worked as a model 3 quality team leader, said that the already grueling production requirements of previous models have been stepped up. "It's a constant" How many cars have we built up to now? "- constant pressure to build, especially with the 3" model, he said. "He becomes desperate sometimes, especially now."

A challenge that workers see is the rapid influx of new workers. The company aims to hire about 400 employees a week to speed up model 3 production. After Tesla's latest announcement in early May, Mr. Musk said he hoped to finally have three quarters of work per day, essentially the assembly line 24 hours a day.

"Everyone I talk to has been here for only two weeks. Said Jonathan Galescu, a model X body repair technician who has been working at the factory for four years

. Harbor, the manufacturing expert, says automakers typically offer new workers several weeks of training before putting them into production. The intake of a large number of new workers can impair quality because they can not properly perform their job or not notice when problems arise.

New employees at the Fremont factory receive three days of training. This includes a computerized virtual training day on how to do their work safely, and a day of instruction on the area to which they will be assigned.

Worker safety at the Fremont factory is monitored for Investigative Reporting, cataloged a series of injuries sustained by Tesla workers. The California job security officer is investigating a recent incident that left a hospital worker with a broken jaw.