A German publication, Captain Gadget, managed to get authorization from Tesla to film the Model X assembly line at the Fremont factory in California. The result is rare footage of Tesla’s highly automated assembly line and rarely seen sections of the factory.
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Earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the automaker plans on securing a location and a local partner for a manufacturing facility in China by the middle of the 2016. A foreign company needs a local partner in order to establish a manufacturing capacity in China.
Now we learn through a recent report from Chinese media that the California-based automaker is reportedly considering a factory location in Suzhou near Shanghai (see map above).
According to the report, the Suzhou government held a meeting on March 13 to discuss a project related to Tesla and executives from the company visited the region during the following week.
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Goldman Sachs analyst Patrick Archambault and his team recently met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Autopilot Program Director Sterling Anderson and CFO Jason Wheeler to visit Tesla’s Fremont factory. Today the team released a report of their visit (via Valuewalk) and reiterated a “Neutral” rating on the company’s stock after the share price increased by ~12% this week.
Most notably, Archambault writes in his report that they see Tesla as now being about 80% vertically integrated, which is rare in the automotive industry where companies are focusing on the assembly process and engine manufacturing.
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According to a new report from the Reno Gazette-Journal, Tesla acquired several permits for multi-million dollar interior construction work at the Gigafactory located just outside Reno, Nevada. One of the permit is for a $10 million project of “architectural interiors”.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in the Netherlands today for the opening ceremony of Tesla’s second plant in Tilburg. The company already had a ‘final assembly factory’ in the city (see picture below), where the company completes the assembly of the Model S’s going to the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.
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To prepare for Model X production, Tesla this past July halted production at its Fremont facility for two weeks in order to upgrade its assembly lines, modernize its production floor, and of course, ultimately increase overall production.
“This represents the single biggest investment in the plant since we really started operations and enables us for higher volumes,” Tesla spokesman Simon Sproule told Bloomberg earlier this summer. Indeed, the total cost of the enhancements reportedly checked in at a cool $100 million.
Earlier this week, Tesla put up blog post detailing all of the nitty gritty details regarding its somewhat recent factory upgrade.
During the pause in production, we upgraded the assembly line, added capacity to the body shop, enhanced powertrain assembly, and revamped facilities for our employees. The result of this retooling phase, which complemented ongoing upgrade work, is a much-expanded operation that allows us to produce more cars, faster, while increasing automation and providing a more inviting work environment.
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In the powertrain department, we’ve added conveyors and advanced robots that have given us the capacity to process 1 million battery cells per day, up from 800,000. In body-in-white, we’ve added new welding equipment and improved our production uptime by 5 to 10 percent, thanks in part to a 13-car buffer that guards against bottlenecks. We’ve also added 24 new tire and export docks to the perimeter of the main building, increasing the speed with which we can deliver cars overseas.
Of particular interest is Tesla’s investment in advanced robots, some of which, the blog post notes, will soon be able to install battery packs on cars. Interestingly, Tesla notes that over the summer, it installed 10 of the largest robots in the world.
What’s more, Tesla has taken to affectionately naming its new in-house robots after X-Men characters.
Rather than refer to these robots by technical descriptions, we named them after X-Men characters. Xavier stands at the entrance to the trim line, lifting cars down to the floor from an electrified rail, while Iceman, Wolverine, and Beast do more heavy lifting nearby. Storm and Colossus can be found at the end of the chassis line, and Vulcan and Havok work as a team to lift cars back onto the rail. To us, these robots are like superheroes, so we figured they deserved superhero names.
Having seen what some of Tesla’s beloved robots can do on various YouTube videos, it’s hard to disagree with that. Interestingly, Musk noted during Tesla’s most recent earnings conference call that it’s often “way harder to make the machine that makes the machine than it is to make the machine in the first place.”
The entire post is well worth a read and is chock full of interesting information (and videos!) about Tesla’s recent factory upgrade.
Great find from @mgillet onTwitter. This appears to be a Tesla dashboard at the headquarters showing significant growth in charging over the past few months. More importantly, we some highly anticipated charging stations ‘coming soon’. Probably most exciting for Tesla is the Oregon and northern California stations that will close the I5 corridor meaning the West Coast will be covered. Also two stations on the California/Arizona border will allow trips to/from Phoenix and LA/San Diego.
You’ll notice that two stations, one in Colorado and one in Texas, are lit up even though Tesla hasn’t pushed to the Supercharger Station website Map, below.
Texans will get two more Supercharger stations in Eastern Texas linking them to Arkansas and Louisiana. East coasters will get a couple in Northern New Jersey as well as Virginia and North Carolina allowing folks in Vermont/New Hampshire to travel to the Carolinas and vice versa.
Some fun facts:
Compare with the current map as of today, 10/21/2013:
