Tesla has released an impressive new time-lapse video of its production at Gigafactory Shanghai, giving us a glimpse of what Elon Musk has been referring to as Tesla’s “Alien dreadnought.”
A few years ago, Elon Musk decided to have Tesla focus on manufacturing first.
He wants Tesla to have exciting products, but he also wants the company to view the factory as a product. The machine that builds the machine, he calls it.
The CEO said that his goal is for the factory to look more “alien” than a factory. A machine that outputs new electric vehicles with high automation and at a speed unprecedented in the auto industry.
He first introduced this idea with the production of Model 3 vehicles at Fremont factory.
Musk emphasized that the first version of the Model 3 production line will only be a “version 0.5” of the “alien dreadnought,” but the line will get updated with more automation and he envisions a “version 3” in a few more years:
By version 3, it won’t look like anything else. You can’t have people in the production line itself, otherwise you drop to people speed. So there will be no people in production process itself. People will maintain the machines, upgrade them, and deal with anomalies.
Gigafactory Shanghai has the latest Model 3 production line deployed by Tesla and the automaker has made some progress toward its “alien dreadnought” with it.
This weekend, Tesla China released a new video showing the production at Gigafactory Shanghai via its official Weibo account:
While it’s not exactly the completely automated line that Musk described, it is getting much closer to it.
There are sections of the production where you can see eight robots working simultaneously on a single car.
As for the output, the time lapse effect is obviously making it look more impressive than it actually is, but the actual production capacity at the factory has been ramping up at a staggering pace.
At the end of last quarter, Tesla had an annual production capacity of 200,000 vehicles at Gigafactory Shanghai — an impressive ramp-up in just about seven months after starting production.
That’s 4,000 vehicles per week and the pace may have increased throughout the third quarter.
Electrek’s Take
What is interesting with Tesla right now is the pace at which they are deploying new production lines.
New lines are coming up in Fremont still, but it is also deploying new lines in Shanghai and soon in Berlin and Austin.
Every time Tesla deploys a new line, it learns from it and makes improvements that move it toward Elon’s vision of an “alien dreadnought” outputting cars at a high speed.
I think the Model Y line in Shanghai will take another step toward that, and then it will be interesting to see how Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas look next year.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
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