Most of the car is built by hand. Robots move the vehicle along the production line, perform a lot of the body and frame spot welding, and stamp aluminum panels. Most of the work is done by people.

Right now the car is still evolving--both design and manufacturing is changing (literally) daily. It doesn't make sense to use robots yet.

Source: I toured the factory last week.

I think most of the factory is automatic from watching the Tesla Factory video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToVqccRd6Hg

I'm not sure though.

Lots of humans in the build process. They might have robots making battery packs but all the engineering on those is done and dusted, probably a decade ago.

Generally people don't start building/buying robots to do this stuff until the economics forces it. That probably doesn't happen until they sell a million or more cars per year.

EDIT: This is factually incorrect as Tesla does employ a lot of automation. But there are still plenty of people in the loop as well.

There are no factories in the world that do not have human labor as an expense on the P/L sheet. Automation/robotic-ness is not a yes or no question or even a single floating point number. "the build process" is not a well defined constraint, perhaps automatic screw machines and contour/turret lathes were "fully robotic builds" a century or so ago.

Given those restrictions, from a mfg background and looking at the pix its basically more or less similar to other automobile plants, not particularly under or over capitalized. Their "secret sauce" is not their shop floor. Note I'm not in any way implying there is anything wrong or imperfect with their shop floor, I'm merely claiming that the production floor is not their "secret sauce".

This is probably by design. If you're going to push the boundaries in numerous areas of technology, it would be pretty dumb to push your luck and in addition to everything else, try to hyper automate a factory. If anyone would try a hyperautomated factory, I would guess it would be one of the giant incumbents, probably Ford, probably on a known and simple/cheap model. I would expect the worlds first "never touched by human hands" automobile to be something very similar to a Ford Focus rather than a Tesla.