Drives & Controls June 2022

26 n AUTOMATION June 2022 www.drivesncontrols.com How automation nearly killed, then saved, Tesla I n 2018, Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy. Elon Musk’s ambitious venture had invested billions of dollars in a new factory filled with robots that hardly worked and couldn’t meet production quotas. Today, Tesla is the sixth most valuable company in the world and its heavily automated production processes are reckoned by some to be ten years ahead of its rivals. How did the company build itself back from the brink and turn robotics from a strategic failure to a success? This article examines howTesla’s automation strategy has evolved. In 2006, when Tesla was still a start-up, the company published a“secret”four-stage plan for mass-marketing electric vehicles: n build a sports car; n use the money it generated to build an affordable car; n use that money to build an even more affordable car; and n while doing this, also provide zero-emission electric power generation options. The first stage of this plan worked successfully. Tesla’s early electric roadster models were a commercial and critical success, but they were luxury vehicles produced in low volumes and relied on manual labour to maintain quality. Tesla was sidestepping many of the challenges of automotive mass production. In 2016, Elon Musk decided it was time to move on to the second stage and develop a more affordable, high-volume car, making Tesla a“real”car company. The company launched a wildly successful presale for its sedan-style Model 3 vehicle, attracting 325,000 orders worth $11.4bn. To fulfil these orders, Tesla promised to make 5,000 cars per week by 2018. Putting this into perspective, the company was committing to building a new and relatively untested car, packed with innovations, at a rate of one every two minutes. To complicate matters, Elon Musk was also set on completely changing how these cars were built – which is where automation comes in. Tesla’s production strategy for the Model 3 had two core facets: n The“alien Dreadnought” This was the internal codename for a machine that could build a machine. To meet Tesla’s uncompromising production goals, Musk settled on an equally uncompromising production strategy – full automation. The goal was to remove every human operator and to stop only when the facility looked like an alien spaceship. The logic was that increasing the volume and speed of vehicle production required moving from“people speed”to“robot speed”. Using first principles, Musk reasoned that if mechanisms could undertake tasks faster, more consistently and more accurately, then Tesla should aim for as much automation as possible and do so as quickly as possible. n Build hardware like software Musk had been a software entrepreneur and his approach to hardware was influenced heavily by agile software development. Silicon Valley essentially runs on the lean start-up approach. Rather than building something alone in a dark basement, the goal is to get a product into customers’hands as quickly as possible and iterate it to meet their needs. This is ideal for software because it’s quick and easy to update a product and redistribute it. For Tesla, following this approach meant cutting development cycles, forgoing trial production runs, and diving straight into full- scale production of a cutting-edge product at the edge of feasibility, at volumes 100 times larger than it had experienced before, using an untested approach to production. Unfortunately, the software rules do not apply to hardware. Production hell In late 2016, Musk set about converting an old GM/Toyota factory in Fremont, California into his alien Dreadnought. The Model 3 engineers were given free rein to redesign the site for Tesla’s journey to becoming one of the world’s most successful car-makers has been marked by extreme lows and highs. Jack Pearson, the co-founder and commercial director of Remix Robotics, recounts how the company used automation to claw its way back from what Elon Musk called its “production hell.” Elon Musk’s original vision for Tesla’s Fremont factory was for a“alien Dreadnought”plant with almost no human workers, where machines built machines. Image: Tesla