Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

Why do they discuss the speed of the line? Isn't the finalized output a much more useful metric? (e.g. one car per hour)?

If there's a ton of work done at the various checkpoints, the pace is slow but maybe the length of the line isn't very far?

It seemed to me the question was asked in the context of some closing small talk, and got a very Musk answer :) as far as I know, the Tesla assembly lines have nowhere near the amount of robotics of the much larger volume lines of for instance Honda, so very slow by those standards.

Classic speed vs. throughput.

Also a bit of an outdated mental model. Had the privilege of touring the tesla factory recently... one neat tidbit that stuck with me is the host described "the line" more like a river with many tributaries joining in all along the watershed.

So if you wanted to have a non-softball engineering discussion about "the line", you would ask questions like which tributaries are the bottlenecks, how much parallelism is there, are improvements marginal or do you wholesale upgrade entire sublines at once, what's the caching strategy, etc.

I toured the GM Lansing Delta Township assembly plant a few years ago where they make mid-size SUVs like the GMC Acadia, Buick Enclave, and Chevy Traverse. At the time, with a ton of robotic welders, sleds, etc. they were running 3 shifts and turning out 60 cars/hour.

Last year, Tesla sold 50,000 cars. It would take the Delta plant roughly a month to make that many. GM has ~15 equivalent plants worldwide.

I love Tesla and am glad to see the NUMMI plant up and running again, but even their most ambitious sales plans for the next 10 years pale in comparison to business as usual for the major manufacturers.

edit

Curiosity got the better of me, so I looked up the 2015 sales figures for those 3 vehicles from that one plant. Acadia: 96,393; Traverse: 119,945; Enclave: 62,081. So roughly 280,000 SUVs produced at the one assembly plant last year without much fanfare.

The speed of the line is important because it is directly tied to the output in the form of the "pipeline". The question then become how long is the pipeline? 1day, 2days, 20 weeks? In which case you wait x-amount of time for the first car and then the rest is gravy.

I mentioned the length of the line in my original comment...

A better comparison might have been NUMMI's production capacity in it's prime as a joint GM/Toyota plant. They were producing about 26k vehicles/month (312k/year) until May 2010. [1] Apples to oranges - a Carolla is not a Model X - but interesting datum nonetheless.

[1] http://ww.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyI...

Yeah I considered NUMMI but I thought the Delta plant would be better comparison since it was built in the mid 2000's and NUMMI was built in the mid-80s (although obviously upgraded multiple times).

The Delta plant employs ~4,000 employees so you get about 70 cars/employee/year.

If NUMMI was making 310k vehicles per year with 4,700 employees according to Wiki, that would be about 66 cars/employee/year -- which is much closer than I expected.

Last year Tesla turned out 50,000 vehicles and they currently have ~6,000 employees in Fremont -- or about 8 cars/employee/year.

Obviously an unfair comparison since Tesla is ramping production and NUMMI / Delta are both final assembly plants and Tesla is doing a lot of stamping and component production in Fremont but interesting nonetheless.