The road to the future lies in the Fremont factory. Tesla has become the leader of the electric vehicle revolution, and it will not change in the short term. Even the existence of various Tesla killers is not to be feared. Tesla's future depends on long-term profit levels, and also on the stable large-scale production of Model 3. So, the biggest question today is, what happened to Tesla's factory?
To answer this question, two well-known automotive analysts, George Galliers and ArndtEllinghorst, recently spent two days at Tesla's Fremont factory to fully understand and contact the company's equipment and employees.
So far, few outsiders have been allowed to enter the "big tent" production line, which was built to quickly increase the output of Model3. In the second quarter, about one-fifth of Model 3 was offline from here. "Considering the installation speed of the equipment and related capital expenditures, regardless of the structure of the building itself, this production line is no different from other car factories we have visited." Galliers and Ellinghorst said. Because this production line is specially built for Model 3, it looks simpler than other automobile production lines as a whole. "The production process only involves 43 steps, which only accounts for 25-33% of the traditional car manufacturing process. This set of equipment seems to be permanent and theoretically supports faster production speeds. At the beginning, we were interested in this production line. His suspicion was completely dispelled after the visit."
However, not all parts run smoothly. "The Model3 car body workshop and the highly automated GA3 general assembly line are very interesting, because it uses a considerable level of automation equipment and high-density production equipment, while occupying a large area of ​​the plant. However, the car body workshop production line costs about 65 One unit per second. According to our measurements, we see that the production of GA3 is consistent with the company’s guidelines. We have also seen production line stoppages and stops. It’s not clear how much of this kind of parking is planned. How many of them are unpredictable."
"Because of the warning lights, we can see that the two production lines are constantly encountering some occlusion problems, but this will not affect Tesla's production goals."
Quality control, especially the issue of gaps between panels, is still not very stable. At present, it is still the main obstacle that Model 3 faces. According to these two experts, Tesla has made great progress in this field: "The panel gap is very With conventional manufacturing problems, Tesla has made significant progress. Those Tesla employees who have worked for other luxury brands say that they can now compete with German luxury brands. Our initial feeling is that before and after this problem of BBA The improvement will not be so fast."
Those vehicles that need to be reworked are another problem. "What surprised us was the cleanliness of the car body before entering the paint shop. We saw very limited, it can be said that there were almost no signs of different colors on the car body. There are also wear problems, which are very common. We Trying hard to see more evidence of this, but there is no. Of course, this is not to say that no vehicles will be reworked because of this. What we mean is that the problem here is not obvious at all."
Elon Musk has said many times that every Tesla car has to undergo strict quality inspections. "At the end of the welding process, the chassis will probably receive two to three hundred laser quality inspections, which is similar to what we see on other OEM production lines. And Andon signal systems can be seen everywhere. According to our understanding, this shows that their quality inspections are Continuous operation is in the active state. Employee management seems to be around problem solving. They provide employees with various tools in various areas to monitor and solve those potential problems. On the GA3 production line, every workstation can be accessed Computers and monitors, this also happens on the GA4 tent production line. We see employees constantly checking computer screens, and their behavior seems to us to be completely spontaneous."
The two analysts noticed that Tesla is continuously collecting production process data to help improve. "An important conclusion, we believe this is a characteristic of Tesla, that is, the first step after the completion of the primary assembly line is to install a computer chip. Then the other parts of the installation process will be recorded by the vehicle's computer. In this way, Each car has a complete record of the installation of components, including some other important indicators during the installation process, for example, the torque during the installation process. This allows Tesla to establish a A cyclic system of continuous feedback."
Then, the most important question considered by these two analysts: Can Tesla continue to steadily improve productivity? "After our visit, what we saw and heard, today there is no reason to suspect that the stamping equipment and assembly line here cannot reach a weekly production of 7K Model 3s. It can even achieve a weekly production of 10k, and only need to increase. Very little capital expenditure. We believe that the same applies to the painting workshop. When it reaches 8k or 10k, only a small amount of capital expenditure needs to be increased."
"As far as the body output reaches 8k or 10k, our understanding is that there is definitely an increase in capital expenditures, but we feel that it should only be a matter of tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions of dollars. The current production line can already handle it. With such output, other parts need to improve the design to achieve faster production speed, and only a small part may need to extend the production process."
Tesla wants to complete Musk's annual production of one million vehicles by 2020. If they plan to start operations in a new factory in China by that time, perhaps the Fremont factory does not need to produce 10k vehicles a week.
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