As the full story lays out, production experts commented that its highly unusual to be shipping production cars without the line being fully installed. It’s not that the process should be autonomous, it’s that workers are literally hand-muscling parts of the body into place and aligning them by hand while they hand-spot-weld them.

As someone with 15 years of high-volume manufacturing experience (not in automobiles, though), I’d agree that it’s very odd to be shipping units to customers or claiming to be in mass production before your final tooling is installed on the line and qualified, even if it might change later.

> I don't have access to the full story so might be missing some context.

https://outline.com/AbbLRj

Thank you. This should be the link in the title. Better still, we should reassess https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938 and ban direct links to pay walled sites.

There are still numerous ways to circumvent the paywall [0], or else linking to WSJ would be against the guidelines [1]

[0]: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The factory that one starts shipping a product with is never the same as the factory 100, or 1000, or 10000 units later...