Photo: Vimeo screenshot
Tesla is way behind on its Model 3 production schedule, with the delays at the Fremont factory holding the headlines over the past few weeks to the despair of the hundreds of thousands of reservation holders hoping they would get their cars as quickly as possible.
Things went as far as some reports suggesting certain parts of the manufacturing process were performed manually by workers, something Tesla denied initially but Panasonic CEO seemed to confirm earlier this week.
That's because the main "bottleneck" appears to be connected to the battery pack assembly that takes place at the Gigafactory in Nevada, where Tesla is working together with Japanese specialist Panasonic on building the battery cells and compiling them into modules, then packs.
This latest very exhaustive statement from Tesla actually contains a passage that could confirm the manual labor story as well. The company says that "key elements [of the battery production process] of which were done by manufacturing systems suppliers, had to be taken over and significantly redesigned by Tesla. We have redirected our best engineering talent to fine-tune the automated processes and related robotic programming, and we are confident that throughput will increase substantially in upcoming weeks and ultimately be capable of production rates significantly greater than the original specification."
Note there is no deadline for when that's going to happen. However, the company does provide one for when production should hit the 5,000 units per week it was supposed to by the end of this year. According to the so-called "update letter," that's going to happen toward the end of Q1 2018, which represents almost a three-month delay.
Tesla released two videos showing the Model 3 production line at work - the body shop welding station and the final vehicle assembly area, to be more precise. There is no info whether the robots are still working at one-tenth of their intended speed, but it surely doesn't seem very fast. The following paragraph seems to suggest that:
"Several manufacturing lines, such as drive unit, seat assembly, paint shop and stamping, have demonstrated a manufacturing ability in excess of 1,000 units per week during burst builds of short duration. Other lines, such as battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly, have demonstrated burst builds of about 500 units per week and are ramping up quickly."
Despite all this - and somewhat ironically - Tesla is keen to inform us that the number of Model 3 reservations has continued to grow over the past quarter, even though it's not giving us any new info on the actual figures. To be fair, we expect it to grow even if Tesla doesn't stick to these new deadlines either, but that might chance once other manufacturers start selling truly competitive models as well.
That's because the main "bottleneck" appears to be connected to the battery pack assembly that takes place at the Gigafactory in Nevada, where Tesla is working together with Japanese specialist Panasonic on building the battery cells and compiling them into modules, then packs.
This latest very exhaustive statement from Tesla actually contains a passage that could confirm the manual labor story as well. The company says that "key elements [of the battery production process] of which were done by manufacturing systems suppliers, had to be taken over and significantly redesigned by Tesla. We have redirected our best engineering talent to fine-tune the automated processes and related robotic programming, and we are confident that throughput will increase substantially in upcoming weeks and ultimately be capable of production rates significantly greater than the original specification."
Note there is no deadline for when that's going to happen. However, the company does provide one for when production should hit the 5,000 units per week it was supposed to by the end of this year. According to the so-called "update letter," that's going to happen toward the end of Q1 2018, which represents almost a three-month delay.
Tesla released two videos showing the Model 3 production line at work - the body shop welding station and the final vehicle assembly area, to be more precise. There is no info whether the robots are still working at one-tenth of their intended speed, but it surely doesn't seem very fast. The following paragraph seems to suggest that:
"Several manufacturing lines, such as drive unit, seat assembly, paint shop and stamping, have demonstrated a manufacturing ability in excess of 1,000 units per week during burst builds of short duration. Other lines, such as battery pack assembly, body shop welding and final vehicle assembly, have demonstrated burst builds of about 500 units per week and are ramping up quickly."
Despite all this - and somewhat ironically - Tesla is keen to inform us that the number of Model 3 reservations has continued to grow over the past quarter, even though it's not giving us any new info on the actual figures. To be fair, we expect it to grow even if Tesla doesn't stick to these new deadlines either, but that might chance once other manufacturers start selling truly competitive models as well.
Google News