Really curious about what the production bottlenecks are for the Model 3. Is it batteries? Would be thankful to anyone able to point me to further info on this =)
These come in 3 categorys- full stop (machine breaks/quality so bad production cant continue), solvable (machine can produce at reduced rate) - and hidden (quality problem shows down the line).
Hidden are the meanest problems, because you have to traverse back up the tree to the producer of the problem- solve the problem, which may result in new problems - migrating back down the production line.
Try to not see it as a binary problem of release- not release, but more of a very complex longterm graph traversing problem.
Tesla is still producing cars completely manually.
This is why Musk bought the automation company Grohmann. But after he demanded they work 100h weeks (instead of their previous 35h weeks), and said unions would be unnecessary, almost the entire company quit and left.
That's the current bottleneck, automation of assembly.
So I can hardly believe that 100h per week were actually demanded.
This story of the 80-100h demands was actually in German news at the time, plus of course the complaints of making Grohmann dependent on a single car company.
Musk's cult doesn't work as well when workers are used to real protections.
Tesla executive Klaus Grohmann was ousted last month after a clash with Chief Executive Elon Musk over the strategy of Grohmann’s firm, which Tesla had acquired in November, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Currently, a complete automated battery poduction line designed and built by the former Grohmann company, is being shipped to Nevada, after installation in March it is expected to double the battery output to 5000 per week.
This is blatantly false. Back in November they were doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xor2ubHr8Ag
The current bottlenecks are in the battery production at the Gigafactory, they screwed up and had too much faith in a contractor doing the battery pack assembly lines.
https://insideevs.com/musk-says-biggest-model-3-bottleneck/
> “To date, our primary production constraint has been in the battery module assembly line at Gigafactory 1, where cells are packaged into modules.” “We had to rewrite all of the software, from scratch. We managed to write 20 to 30 man-years of software in 4 weeks.”