Dynamic, stylish, technologically advanced are a few words that would define Tesla’s iconic cars. But have you wondered who’s behind developing and assembling these beautiful machines? It’s none other than Wolverine, Storm, Vulcan, Xavier to name a few. Does that sound familiar? Well, that’s because they are your very own X-men characters at work at Tesla’s largest manufacturing plant.
Employing world’s 10 largest robots, Tesla’s Fremont factory is leading the revolution of mechatronics. These high powered robots have helped the factory workers in avoiding labour intensive tasks of lifting and maneuvering heavy parts and at the same time it has reduced the installation time from four to two minutes.
Henry Ford introduced the assembly line concept and ever since the manufacturers have been on the lookout for the next big thing to improve the production times. Japanese have been successful in improving the processes by introducing six-sigma, lean manufacturing, etc. However the things have now started moving into a different dimension, i.e. the world of robots. Robots improve precision and eliminate errors leaving the brainy work for us. The biggest challenge that remains to be conquered is to be cost effective. True to its CEO Elon Musk’s 'high risk high gain' philosophy Tesla seems to be planning to move in this very direction.
The company is developing a whole new factory called the “Giga factory” with vertical integration whereby it will become a self-sufficient mass manufacturer of electric cars, going beyond the league of conventional fossil-fuel automobile manufacturing. The whole idea is to make sustainable, sophisticated cars available to the common man by using the power of “Economies of Scale” and that too without compromising on style. End to end fully automated processes would further add to waste minimization and reduce errors and who knows how many “sigmas” we might have in future.
To do this the company has introduced several innovative moves like strategic alliances with companies like Panasonic, optimizing the processes by locating all the manufacturing processes under one roof. The development period of new products would be reduced to to 2.5 years so as to keep pace with fast changing consumer preferences and making sure that they have a sizable customer base.
No doubt it’s a Herculean task but, if successful, it would be a total game changer for the entire automobile industry and hopefully we wouldn’t be facing any odd-even car number issues anymore!