Ilon Musk in 2015Tesla Inc. has long attracted the attention of journalists, entrepreneurs, regulators and ordinary mortals. No wonder - because it produces very modern electric cars, which, among other things, also have an almost automatic control system called Autopilot. Ilon Mask, the head of the company, knows how to talk about her and her products, so that the new items are bought up like hot cakes at the festival.
However, not so long ago, the company began to play the role of a newsmaker, not because it achieved yet another success, but for other reasons. The problem is that the car factory in Fremont, California and the battery factory in Clark, Nevada, almost stopped all work processes. According to Mask, the suspension was needed in order to
prepare for a new stage of evolution - a significant increase in the level of production, not only of electric vehicles, but also of batteries for them.
Moreover, the increase should be not tens, but hundreds of percent - the volume of production is planned to be increased three times in the near future. By the end of June, the company must produce at least six thousand Tesla Model 3 per week, which is three times more than the factories conveyors have issued so far. It is necessary to increase volumes constantly, as the company simply does not have time to put on the market the promised amount of electric vehicles.
Attempts to improve something did not start now. Back in 2016, Musk hired Audi Peter Hockholding, Audi's executive director, to automate production. Then the edition Businuess Insider
wrote that the new top manager plans to robotize production lines in order to increase the volume. A year later, Musk wrote that the existing industrial solutions do not allow increasing the speed of assembly of electric vehicles. Therefore, it was decided to appeal to the developers of industrial manipulators working on Tesla assembly lines with a request to increase their speed. Ilon Mask said then that the creators of the robots "were simply shocked by the fact that no one had ever asked them before."
But as it turned out, the bet on robots was not quite right. The head of Tesla Inc acknowledged this, stating that "the role of man was underestimated." In addition, he said, the system of robotic production was too unreliable, so the production processes decided to completely rebuild. Scaling up what worked (and quite successfully) at the very beginning turned out to be ineffective, so everything had to be changed.
Musk realized that increasing the scale of production of electric vehicles is a difficult, if at all possible, process, and the methods of conventional automakers are far from always being used. And although roboticism is paying off, this is not exactly what Ilon Mask and his team relied on two years ago. As a result, Tesla began to receive problems due to the imperfection of automatic assembly lines.
Experts who monitor how things are going with Mask, believe that he and his staff need to learn a lot. In addition, these same experts believe that Musk makes a large number of errors that were characteristic of a number of automakers in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, General Motors in the 1980s spent millions of dollars in vain on attempts to automate the production of automobiles. All this turned out to be in vain - the robots (at least at the time) could not replace people by 100%.
Tesla Factory in Fremont, California, USATrue, Musk does not leave it behind and has repeatedly argued that he can do what he says, despite the apparent complexity or even the impossibility of implementing the idea. Yes, he made mistakes, with so many companies and enterprises as he does, it is not surprising. But in general, he managed to realize his own plans, which eventually led Tesla Inc to fame and relative success.
But back to the problems of automakers of the end of the last century. Why do experts call precisely the 80s, demonstrating the mistakes of automakers? The fact is that at that time GM, headed by Roger Smith, often made a mistake in choosing the right solution in an attempt to successfully compete with companies such as Toyota and some others. And just then the automation was not the best solution. For example, robots that painted cars on the production line, or rather, had to paint them, squirting paint on each other, and not on car bodies. As a result, the painting was of poor quality. There were problems during the assembly - the robots released a lot of defects.
In addition, it also happened that the massive robotic doors of a gate producing finished products could simply close, crushing a brand new car ready for sale.
If there was a problem on the production line, then it was necessary to stop the entire conveyor before the system started working again in normal mode. GM employees did not have the necessary knowledge and experience, so they went about their business until a specialist in industrial robots arrived at the enterprise.
As mentioned above, GM has spent a lot of money on their conveyors. But the investment has not returned. Moreover, frequent production stops have driven the company into a solid minus. The fact is that the builders of the system created the infrastructure of the enterprise on the assumption that the assembly line will work continuously. This is certainly not the case, but at that time no one imagined that failures would be so frequent.
After 30 years, robots have become more sophisticated. Nevertheless, they cannot work independently even now. And Tesla production lines, like the GM conveyor systems in the 80s, work well only when all elements of the system can function. There is no “safety margin” due to the lack of duplication of system functionality.
According to Ilona Mask, there should be only a few developers-people to solve the problems of the conveyor, if necessary, he believes that people in the production are not particularly needed, their tasks were taken by automata. But not everything works the way the Mask would like. If one robot breaks, then other systems also stop - everything that depends on it.
At the moment, about 5,000 people work in the production of electric vehicles, which is similar to GM's conveyors with their 3,700 employees in the 80s. The situation is repeated, only the actors and technology are different. Interestingly, Tesla's plant in Fremont, California, previously belonged to the joint concern GM / Toyota, which was called NUMMI. This company had 2470 employees in 1985. Production was large-scale, digging produced more than 64 thousand cars. By 1997, she had 4,844 employees and 357,809 commercial vehicles.
Tesla has even more employees. In 2016, the production of Tesla employed about 7-8 thousand people. The exact number of them is unknown, but according to
some media , we can talk about 10 thousand people. In the same 2016, Tesla enterprises produced 83922 electric vehicles. This means that the real level of production was two times lower than planned. The same problems experienced in the 80s of the last century and GM - production also lagged far behind the estimated level.
But all is not so gloomy. Tesla gradually solves its problems, eliminates some of the problems. This year, the number of man-hours required for the production of one vehicle decreased by 33% compared with the beginning of 2016. In any case,
so say the representatives of the corporation.
In principle, the company is difficult to blame for the existing difficulties, since its production cycle is very different from the processes characteristic of the traditional automotive industry, plus the scaling of the automobile production capacity is a very difficult task. In such companies, there must be a very tough discipline, and employees must know their duties by heart, and strictly follow all procedures provided by the company.
Ilon Musk, who has earned a fortune on software and Internet services, is trying to modernize existing practices in the automotive industry. This, of course, causes problems, since not every process in this area can be optimized or modified. John Schook, one of the specialists close to production, tells about Mask's aspirations to speed up the creation of electric cars: “Everything here must be fast — the car, the development process, the startup process.” At the same time there are problems like “let's start building, before we complete the design process”. As a result, the first copies of electric vehicles, for which buyers pay real money in full, are beta versions.
In the field of software development problems can be solved by quickly releasing patches and updates. If something goes wrong, it's unpleasant, but not at all deadly. But with cars everything is different, because the car just can not be rebuilt and not improved, if we bear in mind the already released models, and not those that are just preparing to release.
Problems arise already at the stage of delivery of materials and parts - after all, how can a supplier provide the necessary part if he does not know specifically when he needs to make a delivery and what may change in the process. One of the major suppliers to the question of who is the worst customer said it was Tesla. The supplier described his partner literally as a “client from hell”.
Whatever it was, Tesla and Mask can not be written off. Using the example of several of his companies, he showed that he can go against the opinion of the majority and still flourish. At the time of the emergence of Tesla, no one imagined that there might be another major car manufacturer in the world, and not just ordinary electric cars. Having appeared, the company began to develop very quickly, reaching a huge production volume in a few years. What now looks like problems may be only temporary difficulties of the transition period.
Tesla has created its own production cycle, including its own batteries, has established a sales line, bypassing dealers, has developed several models of electric vehicles for consumers with different income levels. Now the company is working on creating an autopilot, and not the version that works in electric vehicles now, but a fully automatic system capable of driving the car instead of the driver.