With Tesla Model X production still ramping up and only a handful out on the streets for folks to catch a glimpse of, seeing a video of the elusive X in the factory without any clothes on caught my eye. I don’t style myself a voyeur but I am a sucker for this car and the combination of the insane amounts of automation employed in the Tesla factory and the impressive engineering of the Model X when it’s missing a few layers of cover. The video does not provide an exhaustive view of the factory or the assembly lines, but the shots included reminded me just how vast auto manufacturing plants are. Several of the shots pan across seemingly endless fields of assembly areas, robots happily going about their tasks.
In addition to the Model X in the video, I had not previously seen images of the car elevator or anything talking about the transportation network on the second floor of the factory. This video shows a full Model S frame on an elevator being lifted up into a shaft that presumably connects to that network, which is impressive. More than anything, I really wonder if a Tesla Motors factory would look much different when built from the ground up vs the current Fremont factory, which was built in the shuttered NUMMI factory. I suppose we will have to wait a few years to see….
In the video, we get a glimpse of just how many robots and how much automation is being utilized in the factory. Given the Gigafactory is going to be so much larger and a few years newer, I am really curious to see what assembly looks like there. Tesla always seems to reshape the game and I can’t wait to see what the approach to scaled end-to-end battery module assembly looks like when done the Tesla way from the ground up.
I don’t know that I will ever get tired of watching robots work at this crazy level of detail… especially when effortlessly moving full car frames around like they’re moving around toy blocks. Check it out for yourself:
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