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Unpacking Tesla's Next Generation Manufacturing Technique For the Upcoming Compact Car: "Unboxing"

Here is a look at how Tesla will manufacture the compact car and how it will be able to make millions of these per year.
Unpacking Tesla's Next Generation Manufacturing Technique For the Upcoming Compact Car: "Unboxing"

Tesla's Unboxing Process for the Compact Car

Tesla needs a new manufacturing process for its upcoming compact car. It can't do it the same way things have been done in the past.

For current vehicles, you stamp it, you do build a body, put the doors on, paint it, take the doors off, put everything inside the car, put the doors back on, and you do final assembly. Auto shops are dictated by the organizational structures and boundaries that exist. If anything goes wrong, you are constrained by red tape.

Henry Ford first invented the auto assembly line in 1922. It's hard to make a change after all that time. When you look at how vehicles are currently assembled, there is a lot of wasted process.

Toyota has called the Model Y an engineering work of art. Tesla needs to make another step change in cost. The Model Y had hundreds of parts deleted with giga castings and structural battery packs.

The battery is on the floor of the Model Y and the seats are attached to the bottom of the car, allowing for parallel processing and reducing assembly time by 10%.

 

The constraints become part of the solution here and Tesla invented what is called an unboxed process. This will allow Tesla to make the compact car in record time and at the lowest cost of any other Tesla vehicle.

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When you have the next generation vehicle, you will have smaller parts of it being worked on by teams. Tesla has said that working on it in modular parts will improve operator density by 44% and space-time efficiency by 30%.

Because Tesla is not doing slow movements and taking it apart and putting it back together, time will be saved.

Tesla will only do things that are necessary using parallel and serial assembly.

Stamping and painting will be done with the left side, right side, and the floor, all separately.

The casting will be done with the front, rear, and other parts, all separately.

All of this then comes together in a final process.

That final process is the unboxed process. You only paint what you need to, and you assemble the parts of the car ONCE - and only once.

The interior is attached from the bottom up or a top-down strategy, so there is more access for robots and people. You are doing more work on the car more of the time.

Once you take all the sub assemblies together, you assemble it once, attaching everything, and boxing it out with the doors, one time.

In the end, you get the same car, but it won't be a Model Y - it will be the next generation vehicle.

This will increase the adoption and scale of EVs, much more than they are now.

There will be a 40% reduction in footprint, meaning smaller factories with less space being used. This will reduce costs by as much as 50%, allowing a compact car to be produced twice as fast as a Model 3/Y and for half as much.

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Will the unboxed process help Tesla make the compact car twice as fast as a Model 3/Y and at half the cost?

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Hi! I'm Jeremy Noel Johnson, and I am a Tesla investor and supporter and own a 2022 Model 3 RWD EV and I don't have range anxiety :). I enjoy bringing you breaking Tesla news as well as anything about Tesla or other EV companies I can find, like Aptera. Other interests of mine are AI, Tesla Energy and the Tesla Bot! You can follow me on X.COM or LinkedIn or watch my short Tesla videos on TikTok to stay in touch and follow my Tesla and EV news coverage.

Image Credit: Tesla, Screenshot

Article Reference: Tesla via Sawyer Merritt

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