Tesla: Manufacturing Innovation

From your experience of the assembly process, could you walk through the major differences between Tesla and Daimler?

In normal OEM-related manufacturing, you maybe have 20-30% of the assembly plant automated. Tesla does that with 80-90%. In the beginning of my career, I started in manufacturing. After the boy in white part, the paint job is more or less 80-90% automated. Of course, they have thought about automation: how they could do it and how it would make sense to map the assembly plant with that high automation rate, let’s say by comparison to a paint job. The result of those kinds of studies was always that it was not worth doing, you lose flexibility. Elon said “I’m not interested in those experiences, I have my own model and I will go in that direction.” I think that was the big failure.

Do you think it’s possible for Tesla to have that level of automation and produce 300,000-500,000 cars a year?

I don’t think so, because the conclusion that came out of that was that he is reengineering the assembly plant. You’ve seen the pictures, he is still doing a lot of handworking. He is still reengineering his assembly plant with a clear focus to throw out a lot of the robots that he put in with that dream to make that step forward in automation.

There’s been issue with the paint work and some other issues with the body in white. Is there any part of the process that you think doesn’t work for this level of automation?

The problem with the paint was perhaps related to the fact that the paint job itself wasn’t stable enough and the quality control wasn’t good enough in order to reduce the running rate. Additionally, he is not willing to have higher running rates, 10-20% running rates, which is more or less a given. in most of the OEMs, you have some kind of reduced running rate, not 100%, maybe 85-90%, which is quite remarkable. He was not prepared to do so. Where customers complained about the quality issues, those paint problems, were more related to that.

The assembly plant with the highly automated equipment means that he couldn’t put through the capacity. A failure here, a failure there and this robot with some kind of a mismatch or something like that, that reduces their running rate and the efficiency in the assembly plant.

Now, he’s intensively re-engineering the whole plant. So what’s the end game here from a manufacturing standpoint? Do they need to go back to the standard OEM assembly method?