According to the latest news from Tesla, the company is about to completely change the way it manufactures its vehicles, in order to drastically reduce production costs.
These could simply be halved. In any case, this is what has just been announced to investors during a recent presentation, to be found on the New Atlas YouTube channel or below.
The idea, presented by chief engineer Lars Moravy, is to say goodbye to the notion of the production line. Until now, the manufacture of a car was linear: at each stage of the process, operators added one or more elements, and the accumulation of these elements ended up by gradually making the famous vehicle appear before our eyes.
But the innovation desired by Tesla, and implemented around the production of the ModelY, consists in forgetting the notion of chain and replacing it with a division into poles. Engine, passenger compartment, left and right part of the frame… The idea is that each sector finalizes the part for which it is responsible, and that the complete assembly takes place only at the end .
“All these teams […] are part of the same organization, summarizes Lars Moravy. They all have to report to the same person. We can’t point fingers at each other, but we have to solve problems together, which is the best way to innovate.”
Bye bye Henry Ford
Fordism, now a century old, will therefore probably not spend the winter at Tesla. “This system has reached the end of its possibilities. Henry Ford invented the assembly line in 1922, it’s been a hundred years and it’s really hard to make changes after such a long time. But when I look at how it’s working now, it seems really silly to me.”
Yup, silly. The word is out. Lars Moravy justifies his remarks by explaining that the current system creates a whole series of round trips that he considers useless and which waste time, energy and efficiency. As everyone successively adds their little touch, it is impossible to have several poles work simultaneously on the same vehicle, he explains. In addition, operators such as robots sometimes have difficulty accessing certain areas of the machine under construction.
With the new devices presented by Tesla, all that would be over. Working separately on this or that part of a vehicle is already ensuring that humans and machines have better visibility and better access to any square millimeter of the car produced.
It is also putting an end to an operation deemed absurd, in which even on the most imposing of vehicles, one could not, for example, work simultaneously on the front and the rear of it, production line obliges.
The consequences would not only be very advantageous for Tesla in terms of productivity, but they would also have a strong ecological interest. “This allows a 40% reduction in the carbon footprint” linked to the production of vehicles, assures Lars Moravy. “It also means that, thanks to this innovation and other elements that my colleagues will tell you about in the near future, we will reduce costs by 50%.”
