At the company’s 2023 Investor Day presentation, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, said the company’s organizational structure is one in which full accountability and manufacturing and automation considerations are part of all engineering and design decisions. We have described how it is designed to ensure a collaborative approach.
“The places I used to work and the top manufacturing companies in the world don’t sit together,” Moravi said. Teams belong to one organization, all teams report to one person, you can’t blame each other, you have to settle. [problems] Together, that’s the best way to innovate. ”
The Tesla team, purportedly united in this way, attempts a kind of ground-up, first-principles reimagining of the part of the car production chain that CEO Elon Musk is so fond of. says Moravi. T – Focuses on current and future automation with manufacturing robots.
“This is the traditional way to build a vehicle,” he said. “Stamp and assemble the body in white. Paint and do final assembly. The interesting thing is that these shops are dictated by the organizational structure that exists. It is determined by the boundaries that exist in the layout.If anything goes wrong in the final assembly, the entire line will be blocked and buffering will occur in between. [system] We are in the final stages of manufacturing optimization. It’s been 100 years since Henry Ford first invented this assembly line in his 1922. And seeing that happening is really ridiculous for a guy like me. ”
Tesla
“We take all these embossed panels, put them together, and then put them in the frame station,” he continued. “We build the car-like body, attach the doors, paint them. Once the colors are decided, the doors are removed and the interior begins to fit inside the car. Then you lift the car, put things under it, lower it, put the seat in the car, and finally glass everything up and put the tripped door back into the car and back into the car Most of the time this is done with a big, huge car, move it around, and do nothing with it.”
“If we’re going to scale the way we want to, we have to rethink manufacturing,” Moravi said. “It’s part of the basic plan. We need to change the cost one more step.”
Tesla started this optimization with the Model Y, he says. It features a “giga casting” designed to remove hundreds of parts. The battery is part of the car’s structure and its casing forms the floor. This allows Tesla to build seats and parts of the interior over the battery, giving workers and robots exceptional access from all angles.
“I really want to hit this,” said Moraby. do, [work on] different parts of the car [separately], like we did with the Model Y structure battery pack, we can do more at the same time. So if you are working on the front or rear of the car, more people, or more robots can work on the car at the same time. Increased operator density. Spend less time doing nothing. I call it space-time efficiency. It has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Operator density increased by 44%. That means more work. The time spent walking to and from the station is reduced, and space efficiency is improved by 30%. You’re not building it in and out of your car with the slow motion of a robot, so when you move to automation it’s a lot easier. “
So for upcoming next-generation Tesla cars, the company won’t assemble the car shell until everything else is done. manufactured and painted. The last line will be very short.
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“It goes something like this,” Moravi said. “We build every aspect of the car individually. We paint only what we need, we assemble the car parts only once. We put them where we need them. The interior is installed from the bottom up.” Or a top-down strategy that gives robots and humans more access, no more moving heavy objects and doing nothing, doing more work on the car.
“Then we take all the tested sub-assemblies and put them together, and then we finally put the car together once and for all. Install and remove the door one last time, same as Cybertruck.
“After all, what does it mean? To scale electric vehicles [by] By orders of magnitude, constraints should be part of the solution. This reduces the footprint by over 40%. That means you can build factories faster with less capital expenditure, more output per dollar. It also means that with this innovation and some of the things that other engineering colleagues will talk about in the future, he can cut costs by as much as 50%. This is her two-to-one concept that I heard Elon and I discuss on the earnings call. “
Check out the video below for a nice animated presentation.
Parallel manufacturing for Tesla
sauce: Tesla
