Car Manufacturing Process Overview [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Those workers went on strike a few years after that, in 1939, and won. That ended the "Chrysler Speed Up Initiative".
But on a high level, both videos look like the same process. You can find many steps, like the stamping, the welding, the final assembly, that look nearly unchanged in 85 years, save for some automation with robots, and some quality-of-life improvements in the assembly, where people don't have to lug around heavy parts.
- The paint doesn't "dry" per se, it is baked on. Usually at least twice - once for primer, once for mid, top and clear coat. Sometimes more than twice - 1 prime, 2 mid, 3 top and clear.
- Clear Coat is incredibly important for surface finish durability, it's not just for appearance
- Quality is baked in at the process level, not just inspected at the end of the process.
- Everything is much more complicated than portrayed, and there's way more going on, but it is only a 5 minute video after all.It's much more relaxed, with little commentary - and really shows every step. Having done some very rudimentary work around manufacturing and testing, it's pretty incredible to see how much work - jigs, robot programming, test software etc - goes into the manufacturing machine.
What a tragic car. Discontinued in 2021. The material costs of carbon fiber are dirt cheap, so in theory it ought to beat aluminum for car structure. But once you get away from simple tubes, which can be fully automated, layup ends up being most of your costs. (Not helped by the fact that i3 carbon parts were made on the opposite side the of the planet and shipped to Germany)
BMW's business case for the car had to be "once we make enough of them, costs will come down", but that never happened.
The i3 was an interesting car so, and BMW for some reason fumbled the head start the car got them.
My guess is that the answer is the paint process. There's some range of allowable difference in paint hue going from one car to the next, even if they're marketed as having the same color. That range is much smaller for a given single vehicle. If the doors are even a slightly different hue, you're likely to notice.
The space of the options for that "door module" is large enough that it usually gets ordered from the manufacturer some time after the car body gets assigned to particular order (near the start of the painting step) and these modules have to reach the final assembly line in particular time and in particular order. All is well when the whole manufacturing and logistics chain works in the same order that the car orders entered the production. But in practice there is a lot of things that can cause the ordering to become desynchronized, which leads to interesting logistical challenges (especially because if there is a need to do something out of order the order discontinuity is essentially never neatly aligned to size of the containers that the subassemblies are stored and transported in).
The same thing also applies to other subassemblies that have large option spaces, but probably the only other thing with somewhat huge option space that is not manufactured directly by the automaker are completed dashboard modules.
Also, in the traditional approach the rolling chasis and the body tend to be manufactured by separate assembly lines and then "married toggether" pretty late in the whole process. But this is usually done in the same plant, so there is less of an possibility of things getting desynchronized.
After machine milling them roughly to spec there are employees that angle grind, sandpaper and polish every critical surface of these 10 ton chunks of metal.
That said, then there are niches where the automated THT assembly apparently makes sense and all the NRE costs seem to be offset by lower per-unit costs of the PCB material itself. Prime example is mid-range to high-end home AV equipment (Japanese branded if not made in Japan outright), where the large mostly empty single-sided FR-2 boards with truly ridiculous amounts of obviously machine populated wire-links and discrete THT radial components are particularly striking.
Industrial robot usage and other manufacturing innovations are a big reason they are leading the industry in manufacturing cost and speed. Other manufacturers are starting to emulate a lot of the things they are doing with structural battery manufacturing, casting big parts, etc. The likes of VW and others are (by their own admission) behind and struggling with the number of parts, amount of manual work, etc. It might not be as automated as Elon Musk would like but it is pretty impressive.
It will be interesting to see what they do with their upcoming cheaper model. He seems to be hinting at the notion that further manufacturing improvements are going to be a big part of that.
It's not clearly shown in this, but the majority of the work is manually adding parts.
They talked the big talk at Investor Day this year, and Elon said it again this past week that "The revolution in manufacturing that will be represented by that car will blow people's minds". [1]
I'm cautiously optimistic. The more we learn about Cybertruck, the more we learn they're seriously moving the yardstick forward.
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/12/06/elon-musk-tesla-sandy-munro-c...
From what was said, the second best in the industry right now is about one vehicle every 60 seconds.
Elon has said many times that just like Starship and Raptor, the product itself is not nearly as revolutionary (or difficult) as the production system to produce it at scale and speed.
Don't think it will work on your CyberTruck - Tesla repairs are astronomical in normal fender benders.
Interesting that they don't show engine manufacturing at all. That's been automated since the early 1950s.
Compare to toilet paper production... Your family perhaps consumes 100 rolls of toilet paper per year, and perhaps 0.1 cars per year (typical lifetime of a car is ~20 years).
So there is 1000x the benefit to any time saving by automation on the toilet paper production line than on the car production line.
There are only a few problems that would lead to a scrap job - for instance if the body of the car is damaged to the point that they would have to cut and weld new panels, that vehicle would be scrapped.
But even for scrapped vehicles, all of the components are removed to re-build that vehicle.
Basically anything besides serious body damage can be repaired. But you are correct that it is hard to fix problems. Most parts are added in one minute or less - including the engine assembly! But it takes much, much longer than one minute to remove an engine.