RegGuheert
Well-known member
What benefits would those be?Zythryn said:The approach of trying to land rocket stages also has serious drawbacks, yet SpaceX pursued that route anyways.RegGuheert said:...It seems their approach is known to have serious drawbacks, yet they are pursuing it anyway.
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Perhaps the advantages are worth the challenge?
Costs? According to the article, they spent double per car what other manufacturers spent for this line:
But doesn't that expenditure saves them on labor costs? These analysts estimate that Tesla will reduce labor costs by $50/car by spending $550/car on automation:TorqueNews said:"Tesla has spent c.2x what a traditional OEM spends per unit on capacity."
Perhaps this expensive automation buys higher quality? Not according to the Business Insider article linked from the article I linked:TorqueNews said:"So the net labour saving may be only $50 per unit. Yet putting the automation into the plant seems to involve an apparent capital cost that's $4,000 higher per unit of capacity than for a normal plant. If the product is built for 7 years, that's over US$550 of additional depreciation per unit built."
So that leaves throughput. I suppose that is the major topic of discussion, isn't it? The thesis of the Business insider article seems to be that it is the robots themselves that are to blame:Business Insider said:Bernstein adds that the world's best carmakers, the Japanese, try to limit automation because it "is expensive and is statistically inversely correlated to quality."
They put it more bluntly farther down in the article:Business Insider said:In a rare win for humans over robots in the battle for labor efficiency, Wall Street analysts have laid down a compelling argument that over-automation is to blame for problems at the billionaire Elon Musk's electric-car company.
So, is that the final word on the subject? Of course not. Analysts are often wrong, especially when it comes to new technology. But we all know that automation of vehicle manufacturing is NOT new. And the articles are pointing out that what Elon Musk is trying to do with the Model 3 has been tried before and the result was not successful.Business Insider said:Warburton, who spent his career before Wall Street at the International Motor Vehicle Program — a partly academic, partly commercial organization based at MIT — wrote that "automation in final assembly doesn't work."
So we come back to the comparison to the 2018 Nissan LEAF. Nissan now has three different factories EACH churning out as many LEAFs per week as Tesla's Fremont factory is currently able to achieve with the Model 3. But the manufacturing lines at these Nissan factories are each turning out three OTHER models of cars at the same time that they are producing the new LEAF. In other words, the Nissan production lines operate at about 4X the rate of the Tesla line. And my understanding is that these lines are not operating at full capacity.
Of course this is where these other manufacturers have the advantage over Tesla: companies like Nissan have factories which are already operational and partially paid for as well as other products already in production which can share the line. This approach allows these companies to ramp production rates of individual products up and down while keeping their factories running at full capacity.
So what we have here is Elon Musk's assurances that more automation is better, but he has not been able to demonstrate that is the case. In fact, he has demonstrated quite the opposite to date, which exactly matches experiences elsewhere in the industry.
I'm wondering this: If Tesla really did spend twice (per unit) what other manufacturers spend on the Model 3 manufacturing capacity, wouldn't it have made more sense to build two lines (one at a time) using more conventional approaches? I know, that's not the approach that has worked for Elon Musk to date. Instead, he prefers to thumb his nose at the establishment and go in his own direction. But, as I have said in the past, Elon Musk ALWAYS beats his performance numbers, but he also always ends up late and at higher cost. He cannot afford to do that with the Model 3. If he cannot make a high profit here, Tesla is in real trouble.