Tesla has revealed its modular ‘unboxed’ EV manufacturing process that will be used in its upcoming Robotaxi in a new patent application.
At Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day, the automaker unveiled a new car manufacturing system, which CEO Elon Musk claimed would be faster, more efficient, and enable the production of cheaper electric vehicles.
Tesla is calling it the “Unboxed Process”:
The general idea is that Tesla wants to be able to work on separate sections of the vehicle individually and only bring the car together at a new “more final” assembly.
It differs from the more traditional car manufacturing model to move the entire vehicle body down a line all the way to the final assembly.
This new “unboxed” process was supposed to enable the “$25,000 Tesla”, but as we previously reported, Musk canceled the two cheaper vehicle programs meant to be on this platform and now, Tesla only plans to build the Robotaxi on this platform for now.
Tesla has now filed a patent for this unboxed assembly method – revealing more information in the process.
The automaker wrote in the patent application:
A modular vehicle architecture for efficiently assembling vehicles. The modular vehicle architecture includes preparing a plurality of individual section of a vehicle in a plurality of sub-assembly lines prior to forming a full body frame of the vehicle. The vehicle architecture further includes joining the plurality of individual sections of the vehicle in a mainline. The full body frame of the vehicle can include a front side, a rear side, a top side, a bottom side, a left side, and a right side.
Here are a few drawings in the patent application explaining the process:
Top comment by AJB
Means the sides and roof can't be welded to any sort of bulkhead or bars across the roof, although I guess with Aluminium gigacastings a lot of that would have been glued anyway..
I imagine the jigs to hold and glue front/rear/roof/sides together are a lot more difficult with a fully painted and fully fitted section of car, rather than a bare unpainted shell..
Also means the wiring loom all has to be in sections, so connectors between each section, rather than putting a full loom in the nearly empty shell then fitting everything around it. Also probably a real pain for things like brake pipes, coolant hoses, etc. Unless they all have connectors at the joins, they'd have to be fitted after the front and rear were fully assembled rather than early on.
And I'm not quite clear what the advantage is, compared to the "traditional" way.
Interestingly, while the patent drawings feature primarily a car, they often reference pickup trucks.
Tesla already uses some of the processes introduced in this patent, like installing the seats on a structural battery pack.
The patent application also mentions “decorating”, which likely refers to painting, in this case, parts before assembly, which is novel.
Tesla is currently building the first “unboxed” assembly line at Gigafactory Texas in Austin. The automaker is likely going to talk more about it next month during the unveiling of the Robotaxi.
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