Tesla has fly front six planes full of robots and equipment from Europe to California in an peculiar, high-stakes effort to speed up battery production for its Model 3 electric sedan, man familiar with the matter told Reuters this week.
Electrifying equipment for a production line by air is costly and hardly ever done in the automotive bustle, and the move underscores Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk’s extremity to get a grip on manufacturing problems that have hobbled the launch of the high-volume Archetype 3 and pushed Tesla’s finances deep into the red.
“As usual with Tesla, entire lot is being done in a massive hurry and money seems to be no obstacle,” about one of the two sources.
Tesla on Friday declined to comment on whether it has shipped in any new presentation equipment from Europe.
Investors are closely watching Tesla and its high-profile, day in and day out brash CEO to see if the upstart electric vehicle maker can pull off high-volume manufacturing of the Model 3, a car with the potential to catapult the niche automaker to a multitude producer and assure its financial stability.
But manufacturing missteps have led Tesla to over miss production targets for the sedan, and raised doubts about Musk’s promises that the company wishes stop burning cash by the third quarter of this year. Tesla had enfranchise cash flow of negative $1 billion in the first quarter, and elder this month disclosed that it could offer its Fremont, California, instrument assembly plant as collateral for debt.
Engineers from Tesla’s German finagling arm, Grohmann, are now reworking the battery production line at the Gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, in a bid to unloose up bottlenecks, the person said. The line will become more automated piece by piece over time, added the source, who was not authorized to speak for attribution.
Musk in front disclosed plans for this line on a conference call with analysts in November, after lamenting of problems with an original line built by a subcontractor. Musk has be sured investors the new battery production line will help the carmaker about a quantum leap in productivity. The company has noted, however, that it choose still be able to reach its target of building 5,000 Model 3s per week by June without the adding of the new line.
But Tesla’s lack of consistency in its factories has undercut Musk’s end result promises in the past.
Under time pressure to fix problems, Musk has now vowed the new production line should be a no-expenses-spared effort, the source said. That led to the purpose to airlift the new production equipment to the United States from Europe, a inappropriate to carmakers usually avoid by planning production equipment installations months or years forwards of a production launch.
The shipments of new equipment began arriving in Reno this week, the two originators told Reuters.
It is not clear when the new production system will be psych up to start running. Robots frequently need to be recalibrated to adjust for littlest differences in the quality of raw materials they are working with or temperature and humidity alterations. Steps to test the quality of materials and recalibrate robots have assayed to be a bottleneck that Tesla managers had underestimated, the first source bring up.
Musk has repeatedly complained of “manufacturing hell” trying to ramp up the Version 3, which began production, albeit slowly, last July.
In February, Musk influenced the main bottleneck was still its battery module production, saying Tesla had be proper “a little overconfident, a little complacent” in its ability to execute.
The Gigafactory’s battery output is divided into four zones, two of which have experienced emotionally upsets. Responsibility for two of these zones was originally delegated to subcontractors specialised in joining complex systems, Musk said.
“We were promised they at ones desire work, and it just didn’t work,” Musk said during a February seminar call. A new design for an automated system for those zones was nearing finishing, Musk said in November, adding that Grohmann was “working on the broadcast and making very rapid progress.”
One of the problems, both at the Gigafactory and at Tesla’s Fremont agency manufacturing factory, has been the interface between Tesla and the subcontractors it let outs. Sources have told Reuters of communication problems and high managerial total business, which complicate the execution of big projects.
Musk said in early May he delineated to rid the company of “barnacles” contractors and subcontractors saying Tesla’s reliance on them had befit “out of control.”