Source: Yuanchuan Research Institute Author: Wang Lei
Photo/Original Editor/Zhu Hao
At the beginning of this year, Bloomberg released a set of data, Tesla's Fremont plant with a weekly output of 8550 vehicles to beat Toyota, BMW, Ford and other rivals to become the "most productive factory in North America".
You know, the factory has a history of 60 years, in the 1970s and 1980s was notorious, the production line is full of tobacco, alcohol, sex and drugs, and was once considered to be GM's worst "quality, production efficiency, attendance" factory, sometimes because of insufficient attendance, managers even need to drag drunk workers out of the bar opposite the factory.
This continued until the 1980s, when Toyota, which was preparing to make a big splash in the United States, and GM, which wanted to learn lean production, hit it off and formed a joint venture called NUMMMI, reopened the plant, and under Toyota's careful tuning, the nearly obsolete factory was revitalized, reaching an all-time high of 420,000 units in 2006.
However, the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 forced GM to put the NMMI factory on the shelves, when the annual capacity of 500,000 vehicles cost more than $1 billion to build, but finally sold to Tesla, which had just been listed at the time, for only $42 million under the mediation of the California government.
Tesla Fremont factory
Musk, who picked up the big bargain, came back and recalled: "When I first stepped into the factory, it felt like a small child wearing the shoes of his parents."
This metaphor is very vivid and accurate, because tesla at that time only had one Roadster car on the shelves, but as time went on, when the Model S/X/3/Y four cars were successful, Tesla's "body size" and "shoe size" became more and more incongruous, so in the past three years, one after another behemoths have risen in Shanghai, Berlin and Texas.
The Texas factory, which officially opened last month, covers an area of 12,000 acres, equivalent to the size of 1,120 standard football fields, and if erected, the factory is taller than the Burj Khalifa, which is known as the world's tallest building, and is worthy of the name of "the largest factory in the universe".
According to Musk, the factory is not only a production space, but also one of Tesla's most important products, which is "the machine that makes the machine", which can not only be "mass production" like Tesla's electric vehicles, but also upgrade iterations, which is also the secret of Tesla's manufacturing.
01/Prototype: From the second floor of the workshop to the Nevada Desert
Although the Fremont factory was bought by Tesla, this does not mean that Tesla pursues "take-ism" in production and manufacturing, on the contrary, from here on, Tesla has embarked on the road of self-research.
Unlike traditional OEMs, Tesla has emphasized machine-centricity and automation from the beginning, and after taking over the NUUMMI factory, Tesla spent a year and a half training more than 130 production robots, allowing them to perform a variety of different tasks simultaneously in the stamping, welding, painting and other workshops.
In the whole Fremont factory, the most mysterious place is the second floor. Here, Tesla began to vertically integrate different links in the industrial chain, from batteries, battery modules and automation systems to high-voltage wiring harnesses, displays and fuses, all of which began to develop themselves.
Greg Reichow, tesla's former vice president of production, once explained that when an industry is in the early stage of development, self-developed key parts have three major benefits, first: avoiding red tape in the outsourcing process, and developing faster; second: shortening the cycle of product upgrades and improvements; third: personally doing it is more conducive to accumulating knowhow, thereby building a deeper moat.
In the year after the release of the Model S, Tesla sold 22,000 electric vehicles worldwide, but Musk is clearly not satisfied with this, according to his Master Plan released in 2006, Tesla's next step is to launch a more affordable model, and the biggest bottleneck to achieve this goal is the battery, the most direct way is to reduce unit costs by expanding the scale effect.
In November 2013, Musk announced that he would build a super battery factory called Gigafactory, "Giga" literally translates as "giga" or "billion", representing a huge scale. The following year, Tesla officially announced that it had joined hands with Panasonic to build a factory in Nevada, with a simple purpose, on the one hand, to ensure supply, and on the other hand, to reduce costs.
When Tesla purchased batteries from Panasonic, Musk complained all day long that Panasonic's slow expansion speed and high cost were one of the obstacles on Tesla's way forward. In order to control the cost and production rhythm of the battery, Tesla simply pulled up Panasonic and jointly invested in the factory, which cost about $6 billion, so that the most core suppliers can produce under the nose.
The factory also initially reflects Tesla's vertical integration and highly automated production concept.
For example, there is a lithium mine 300 kilometers away from the factory, which makes it easier to obtain the raw materials needed to produce batteries; the straight passage in the workshop for producing battery cells is more convenient for driverless AGV vehicles; in addition, the factory also produces drive systems including electric motors, which are more than 90% automated, and after testing, they will be sent to Fremont, a 4-hour drive away with the battery pack.
Chris Lister, Tesla's vice president of production at the Nevada plant, said: "It's like having ten factories in one factory. ”
In 2017, the Nevada factory was officially put into operation, and in August of the following year, after the completion of the first phase of the factory's production capacity, Tesla essentially became the automaker with the largest battery production capacity, with an annual production capacity of up to 20GWh, and almost at the same time, Tesla won an 860,000-square-meter plot of land in Shanghai Lingang and prepared to build the first overseas super vehicle factory.
If Nevada is Tesla's small test knife in production and manufacturing, then the Shanghai factory is an extreme exercise of efficiency.
02/Shanghai: The ultimate exercise where efficiency comes first
There is only one key word in the Shanghai factory: efficiency, which is not only reflected in the speed of construction, but also in all aspects of plant design, logistics system and production process.
In the design of the plant, as we all know, the production of a car is composed of four major links of stamping, welding, painting and assembly, and the production line of an oem is around these processes, Fremont is too scattered in the workshop layout because of the long history and other reasons, and the connection between each other is not close enough, coupled with the difference between different plants, resulting in increased logistics costs, but also reduce production efficiency, which Musk absolutely can not tolerate.
The Shanghai factory decisively abandoned this decentralized layout, but concentrated the four workshops in a huge space, which significantly improved the circulation efficiency of parts and land utilization.
In terms of spatial layout, another major feature of the Shanghai factory is the addition of a new die-casting workshop, which has a number of 6,000-ton giant die-casting machines produced by IDRA, which can be used to produce the rear floor of the Model Y, which will directly compress the complicated process that originally took 1-2 hours to weld more than 70 parts to a process that only takes a few minutes, eliminating hundreds of robots.
The most amazing thing to the outside world is the feat of "starting construction that year, putting into production that year, and delivering in that year". In fact, musk originally expected Shanghai to put into operation within two years, but in fact, the entire project took only two months to complete the land leveling, six months to set up the plant structure, perhaps the efficiency of the "infrastructure madness" is too amazing, Tesla Berlin factory assembly line is also handed over to a Chinese supplier responsible.
Early layout of Tesla's Fremont factory
In the supply chain, global car companies have always taken Toyota's lean production as a benchmark, Tesla is no exception, this production model is characterized by punctuality and full participation in improvement, through the upstream parts, on-site production details and terminal consumer market fine management and forecasting, to reduce unnecessary waste and inventory.
To reduce inventory, Tesla's Shanghai factory employs an efficient material docking system. In the periphery of the factory, densely arranged more than 80 docking container loading and unloading doors, only 10 meters from the production line, a steady stream of containers into the factory to some extent to assume the function of mobile inventory, in this way, from the Yangtze River Delta and other places purchased parts can be sent to the production line in time, and then achieve zero inventory.
With extreme efficiency, the Shanghai Gigafactory has rapidly ramped up in production within two years after its completion, surpassing Fremont in the third quarter of 2021, and by the end of 2021, the total output of the Shanghai plant will exceed 470,000 units, accounting for more than half of the global total production, of which 160,000 vehicles have been exported to overseas markets.
Shanghai factory as Tesla's first overseas automaker since its establishment, in addition to shouldering the historical responsibility of prying open the Chinese market, it is also an opportunity to verify whether it can mass-manufacture the super factory, after the success of shanghai verification, Tesla soon began to build larger factories in Berlin, Germany and Austin, Texas.
03/Ultimate: An all-round complex
In 2017, Musk publicly stated that his own admiration for the Gigafactory came from Henry Ford's Assembly Line Revolution in 1913 and the Rouge River Factory that was born later.
Rouge River Factory is the most versatile factory since the invention of the automobile, there are more than 100 buildings, an area of 540 football fields, in addition to the engine, chassis, tires and other parts workshop, there are power plants, coal smelting plants, steelmaking furnaces, rolling mills, etc., and even including more than 100 kilometers of rail, the number of people more than 100,000, the scale is equivalent to a small county.
Here, Henry Ford played the vertical integration model to the extreme, controlled all aspects from raw materials to the whole vehicle, on the assembly line, on average, every 49 seconds can take off the production line of a Model A, and reduced the price of a car to more than $500, Ford through this efficient production method and volume pricing strategy to seize a huge wealth, becoming the first generation of "car king".
Decentralized layout of the Fremont plant
Tesla Texas factory "Under One Roof" layout
The Texas plant, which opened last month, follows Rouge's example, and while homemade parts aren't as all-encompassing as the original Rouge, the efficiency of vertical integration is one street ahead.
As can be seen from the above two figures, the Fremont factory is irregularly shaped, the Texas factory is a symmetrical octagonal shape, the former's spatial layout is very scattered, the latter's space utilization rate is obviously higher, the production links are more, but the connection between the different links is more compact, in Musk's words, that is, "everything is under the same roof", which can achieve "one end of the factory input raw materials, the other end of the output of the whole vehicle." ”
Specifically, in the Fremont plant, the die-casting workshop has only a small corner, but in the Texas factory, it has become as large as the stamping workshop, and this change is directly related to Tesla's technological breakthroughs in recent years.
In August 2020, Tesla began to install a 6,000-ton die-casting machine at the Fremont factory, when it could only produce the rear back plate of the Model Y body, but in less than two years, the technology progressed, and the front and backplanes of the body could also be "pressed" out, greatly reducing the number of body parts, which would undoubtedly increase the demand for the die-casting machine and the area of the workshop.
According to public information, the Fremont plant currently has two die-casting machines, Shanghai has three, the annual production capacity of 500,000 Berlin factory has eight (only two for the time being), and the recently opened Texas factory is about to use 8,000-ton die-casting machines for the production of Cyberteruck, the number increases, the tonnage increases, so it also directly leads to the doubling of the die-casting workshop area.
In addition, the Texas factory will also produce batteries and packs at the same time, and the area is no less than the four major processes, which is because Tesla is about to produce 4680 batteries here. 46 and 80 represent the diameter and height of the battery, and the extra "0" represents the cylindrical battery. This battery uses omnipolar ear technology (also known as "electrodeless ear"), which can effectively increase the current level during charge and discharge and reduce heat generation by increasing the contact area between the positive and negative poles and the external conductor.
Musk said at the opening ceremony that the main task of the Texas factory in 2022 is to climb the capacity, and with the blessing of efficient workshop layout and a series of new technologies, the Texas factory is expected to impact the unprecedented goal of producing million vehicles per year.
04/Epilogue
A hundred years ago, Ford led the era of traditional fuel vehicles, but with the division of labor and development of the supply chain, the vertical integration model of the package gradually disintegrated, replaced by a pyramid-style supply chain hierarchy, and now, in the new era of electric vehicles, the vertical integration model is making a comeback, Tesla is undoubtedly one of the leaders.
But does this pattern have to be the only solution?
Maybe not necessarily, at least in China, there are many players in the field of electric vehicles, some people can not have a soul to do for people, some people do not build cars but want to give car companies "turnkey", some people want to cut through the chassis, various modes emerge in an endless stream, leaving more choices for different players.
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