> major portions of the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand

Reminds me of some other automotive companies when a new car is launched..

Good to see "do things that don't scale" being applied to the very definition of things that need to scale.

I feel the need to correct the record. You do the things that don't scale in order to better realize/appreciate where to put the effort to fix them. Tesla has the equivalent of an mvp/poc production line. You'd be kidding yourself if you think they're not improving it every minute. And you know the improvements they're making are the ones with the biggest impact, in that exact order of priority.

If you try to make the perfect assembly line before you deliver 1 car, you'll be making huge over-engineering expenditures and costly assumptions which result in even greater net production losses.

> still being banged out by hand, away from the automated production line, according to people familiar with the matter.”

The press is up and running:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaInXGBg9G7/

Based on a 3.7 second cycle time, they can bang out 5,837,837 body panels per year (assuming some math an automotive engineer on /r/teslamotors provided that takes into account downtime and typical automotive labor scheduling: 50 weeks/year * 5 days/week * 24 hours/day * 3600 seconds/hour)/3.7 second panel cycle

EDIT: csours: Thanks! I removed my grossly inaccurate prediction of per-vehicle pressed components.

in_cahoots: Original response was to comment that Tesla is still banging out components by hand; this is possible, my rebuttal is that they do have parts of the line that are fully operational.

I’m not sure how this is relevant? Production is only as fast as its slowest component; it doesn’t matter if you can bang out a billion body panels per year if you don’t have enough human labor to put the pieces together.

6 is much too few. You have floorpan, roof (even if the roof is glass you still have to hold it), hood, liftgate/trunk, each door inner, each door outer. Thats 12 big ones, then all of the little ones that stiffen the big ones, and the other little ones that make things like the door pillars. There's probably like 70 stamped metal parts in all.

There are probably a number of press lines and the press lines would be changing dies periodically to make different parts.

That's what stamping looks like. Here's Subaru banging out car doors.[1] About the same cycle time, using automated loading and unloading.

[1] https://youtu.be/r9byGJtbCws?t=63