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Elon Musk has six days to honor his promise that Tesla will ship 5,000 model 3 sedans a week by the end of the month. If it succeeds, it is perhaps thanks to the curious structure outside the factory of the company. It's a tent the size of two football pitches that Musk calls "rather nice" and that manufacturing experts make fun of nature.
"I miss words, it's crazy," said Max Warburton of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., who compared auto assembly plants around the world before becoming a financial analyst.
Inside the tent in Fremont, California, is a Musk assembly line hastily pulled together for the Model 3. It's the electric car that is supposed to vault Tesla's niche player for the rich to large volume, bringing a more affordable electric vehicle to the masses.
Tesla had a hard time making the leap. Two years ago, Musk was expecting 100,000 to 200,000 models 3 to be produced in the second half of 2017. Only 9,766 units were commissioned in the first quarter, a production rate weekly of about 750.
From where, apparently, the tent. Musk announced on Twitter on June 16, claiming that the company had put together a "new general assembly line" in three weeks with spare parts; the building permit was issued on June 13, although the company was able to start working on aspects of the project before that.
If this new line is fully operational it is not clear. The company officials declined to comment. Users obsessed with Tesla from Twitter and other Internet forums posted photos and videos and commented or ridiculed the marquee of the parking lot. Apparently, in response to the intense interest, the tent has recently been surrounded by very large trucks that obstruct the view.
When Tesla publishes production and delivery figures for the second quarter in early July, the hundreds of thousands of customers who have been waiting since March 2016 for their models 3, after having deposited $ 1,000, will have a better idea of how long they will have ll be in the queue. "The question is, how much rope Musk will get from customers who have had to wait years for delivery?" Said Jeff Liker, an engineering professor from the University of Michigan who has written books on the Toyota Motor Corp.'s touted production system.
What gives the manufacturing experts a break on the Tesla tent, is that it was set up to house a cobbled assembly line with remains that hang around the brick factory and mortar. This sounds like a move from Ave Maria after months of shutting down and starting production to repair on-the-fly automated equipment, which Musk himself has described as mistaken.
"The existing line is not functional, it can not build cars as expected and there is no place to get people into workstations to replace robots that do not work" said Warburton in an email. "So we have it, build cars manually in the parking lot."
An admission in April that he made a mistake by putting too many robots in Tesla's factories was a humble moment for Musk. The CEO had boasted in the past that his company would build an "alien dreadnought," a sci-fi pin code for such an advanced and robotic factory, that would be incomprehensible to primitive earthlings.
At a fundraiser in February, Musk told analysts that Tesla had an automated parts transportation system that was "probably the most sophisticated in the world." But in the spring, he had been ripped off the factory.
"We had this crazy and complex network of conveyor belts," said Musk CBS this morning in April. "And it did not work, so we got rid of it all."
James Womack, the founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute in Cambridge, Mass., Described Tesla's haphazard approach as worrisome. "The chaos of how Musk goes about it makes it difficult for him to provide the standard, repeatable work routines that allow people to function," said Womack, author of The machine that changed the world, from an influential study of Toyota's production techniques. "He's going to need a second tent for repair and rework."
The word "temporary" may be in Tesla's tent licenses with Fremont, but Musk suggested that it might hold a certain amount of time. He told a Twitter disciple last week that he was not sure that the company really needed a building anyway. He described the new assembly line as "much better" than that of the factory which cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
This tweet spoke volumes about Dave Sullivan, an analyst at the AutoPacific research firm who oversaw the Ford Motor factories. "To say that it is more efficient to build that with pieces of scrap means that someone has really made bad decisions with the factory parts inside, or that 39, there are many other problems to discover with the effectiveness of Tesla.
Fremont is working closely with Tesla to make sure the tent complies with building and fire codes, said Gary West, a city official. Tesla applied for a building permit to erect the tent on June 7, according to municipal records. One permit has been issued for the installation of the equipment and another for a fire sprinkler system is pending. The tent does not have air conditioning, according to the documents of the city.
The tent was provided by a company called Sprung, which refers to its products as "high performance tensile membrane structures" and built the facility that housed the NASA space shuttle in the 1980s. Tesla covers 137,250 square feet. The construction plans show that it is adjacent to the north paint shop of the factory; it is visible from the platform of the BART Warm Springs station.
According to Brian Johnson, an analyst at Barclays, who met with Tesla's investor relations department last week, the inside assembly line will be fully manual and will gradually switch to automation.
"It's absurd," said Bernstein's Warburton. "I do not think anyone has seen anything like this outside of the military trying to repair vehicles in a war zone." I pity any customer taking delivery of any of these cars The quality will be shocking. "
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