Tesla's $25,000 Car Means Tossing Out the 100-Year-Old Assembly Line | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's $25,000 Car Means Tossing Out the 100-Year-Old Assembly Line

bloomberg.com

12 pointshelsinkiandrew14 comments

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Wikipedia suggests that "100-year-old" and "pioneered by Henry Ford" are more folklore than fact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#History

And assembling ships & submarines from large, prefabricated sections was pretty routine in WWII.

(It'd be nice if Tesla can manage this, but no bets.)

https://archive.ph/wekz9

This doesn’t sound like that new of an idea. I’ve read about the big 3 having various sub components assembled and brought into the final assembly factory decades ago.

On a smaller scale, I worked in a factory 20 years ago making some automotive components. Even for that part, there were parts they were made on the side, that were assembled, and those assembled parts were used as inputs to the main production line.

I can’t read the whole article (the archive link wasn’t working), so I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but this seems pretty normal, unless Tesla is taking it to a new extreme in some way.

Yeah, it's a bit confusing what they're doing that's so different. They still have to assemble everything together at the end.

Probably they will ship a flat-packed kit Ikea style and the customer assembles it itself. The final quality of the car wouldn’t be affected though.

From the article:

"Mathew Vachaparampil, CEO of Caresoft, an engineering and automotive benchmarking firm, said his company’s engineers spent 200,000 hours building a digital replica of Tesla’s unboxed platform"

200K hours? This can't be right. If the engineers are paid $50/hour, that is a cost of $10 million just to create a digital replica of the process?

> 200K hours? This can't be right. If the engineers are paid $50/hour, that is a cost of $10 million just to create a digital replica of the process?

I don't think that's so farfetched - It was rumoured that Tesla bought a Nissan Leaf to take apart and see why it was cheap, and there are companies that buy products including cars, to tear apart and write reports on materials, components, production techniques, and costs for other companies (couldn't find the example I remember)

Vehicle breakdowns is a different thing. Monroe and associates is one that breaks down a lot of electric vehicles and they say it costs about $1 million for a full breakdown.

Again, that’s a physical breakdown of a product for other companies that pay tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for the full report. This company claimed to do a digital recreation. I don’t even know what that means.

Wouldn’t a “full report” these days include a 3d model/digital recreation?

No I don’t think the generic report you can buy from Monroe for a million bucks has any digital files. Just words and drawings. I have obviously never bought one, but I saw them flipped through.

As I mentioned above A2MAC1 provides 3D scans of basically every component assembled together as a model.

I looked into it more. Caresoft CEO did an interview with Autoline and in the interview he confirmed they spent 200,000 man hours on this. Reason they put so much effort into it is because there is several Chinese companies that are paying them to learn about these methods before Tesla actually implements them.

I absolutely can believe that. If you believe a competitor has a manufacturing breakthrough, paying 10M to get very detailed information as soon as possible seems very reasonable.

A2MAC1 does those breakdowns, including 3D scanning components.

>It was rumoured that Tesla bought a Nissan Leaf to take apart and see why it was cheap

It would be a bigger rumor if they didn't. Taking apart competitors cars is what every large manufacturer does.

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