Elon has gone back and forth with the level of automation. In early Q1, they got rid of the conveyor belt system, which they were hoping to make work only a few weeks earlier. It felt like it did not impact anything else. A few days later, if I remember correctly, they said they were hopeful of other automation on the line working. Now they're saying automation is much worse. I remember them obsessing over wiring harnesses being installable with robots, at one point. They also said the ability to automate manufacturing is going to be crucial and a long-term differentiator. They were going to test and run machines at a rate higher than specified, but now it looks like there are issues with vision even in the basic scenarios. Where does this leave Tesla with respect to model 3? Can the automation substantially reduce the man hours per car to ~20-30 hours, despite doing a lot of stuff in house.. How different will the design be for model Y? This to me was the biggest takeaway from reading the interview transcript. Hopefully someone probes Elon to talk more about automation during the earnings call.
Please share your thoughts. For reference, in the conversation with Bloomberg, This is what Elon had to say about automation and Alien Dreadnought:
What's the long-term plan for that new assembly line inside the tent? I think the confusing thing for most people is that you now have two apparently different processes producing the same car, one with more humans and one with more automation.
A lot of the hoped-for automation was counterproductive. It's not like we knew it would be bad, because why would we buy a ticket to hell? We don't actually want to go for hell. We just didn't realize it was a ticket to hell. We thought it would be good, but it was not good. That applies to a great deal of the automation. A whole bunch of the robots are turned off, and it was reverted to a manual station because the robots kept faulting out. When the robot faults out—like the vision system can't figure out how to put the object in—then you've got to reset the system. You've got to manually seat the components. It stops the whole production line while you sort out why the robot faults out.
What’s next with “the machine that builds the machine.” What’s your current thinking about the “alien dreadnought” [Musk’s term for a hyper-automated factory]?
Let me just give you a tour of the whole giant machine. It will blow your brain right out of your skull, OK? It is so crazy. There are parts of it that are completely automated, no person there at all. And then there are parts of it which are completely manual, no machines there at all. Then there are parts of it that are partly automated and partly manual.
When you talked about automation before, it was kind of like, you know, cars are going to be moving out of the factory faster than humans can move. So you can't have humans involved in the process. Now you've got humans heavily involved.
You can only move as fast as the slowest thing in the system. I didn't say this would be done immediately. I was just saying that is where it needs to be in the future. And there are definitely parts that move too fast for people.
Part of the problem is that the designing heads were naive about manufacturing. Just because we have something that works great in a simulation does not mean that it works great in reality.
Please share your thoughts. For reference, in the conversation with Bloomberg, This is what Elon had to say about automation and Alien Dreadnought:
What's the long-term plan for that new assembly line inside the tent? I think the confusing thing for most people is that you now have two apparently different processes producing the same car, one with more humans and one with more automation.
A lot of the hoped-for automation was counterproductive. It's not like we knew it would be bad, because why would we buy a ticket to hell? We don't actually want to go for hell. We just didn't realize it was a ticket to hell. We thought it would be good, but it was not good. That applies to a great deal of the automation. A whole bunch of the robots are turned off, and it was reverted to a manual station because the robots kept faulting out. When the robot faults out—like the vision system can't figure out how to put the object in—then you've got to reset the system. You've got to manually seat the components. It stops the whole production line while you sort out why the robot faults out.
What’s next with “the machine that builds the machine.” What’s your current thinking about the “alien dreadnought” [Musk’s term for a hyper-automated factory]?
Let me just give you a tour of the whole giant machine. It will blow your brain right out of your skull, OK? It is so crazy. There are parts of it that are completely automated, no person there at all. And then there are parts of it which are completely manual, no machines there at all. Then there are parts of it that are partly automated and partly manual.
When you talked about automation before, it was kind of like, you know, cars are going to be moving out of the factory faster than humans can move. So you can't have humans involved in the process. Now you've got humans heavily involved.
You can only move as fast as the slowest thing in the system. I didn't say this would be done immediately. I was just saying that is where it needs to be in the future. And there are definitely parts that move too fast for people.
Part of the problem is that the designing heads were naive about manufacturing. Just because we have something that works great in a simulation does not mean that it works great in reality.
