Tesla has acquired Minnesota-based Perbix, a maker of factory automation equipment.
“With the acquisition of Perbix, Tesla further advances its efforts to turn the factory itself into a product – to build the machine that makes the machine,” Tesla said on its website.
It seems the company plans to grow its presence in Minnesota, as the announcement links to a careers page with seven open positions.
On last week’s earnings call, Musk outlined problems with battery module production that are delaying the company’s Model 3 deliveries. He said the company redirected its best engineers to fine-tune the automated processes and related robotic programming and believes the reconfigured system will be capable of production rates significantly greater than the original specification. At one point Musk described robots working in a high-speed blur.
Perbix and Tesla have worked together for the past three years. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.