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.