Now Musk’s building Teslas in a giant tent to avert production crisis
With just five days left for tesla to hit its production targets, chief executive elon Musk has pitched a radical solution.
a 1,000ft-long tent has suddenly risen from the car park of the electric car maker’s factory. it houses another production line for the Model 3 sedan.
But Musk’s unusual tactic has been met with disbelief from some analysts, with one saying: ‘Words fail me. it’s insanity.’
production lines for cars, particularly high-end vehicles such as the tesla, are normally found in meticulously clean air-conditioned factories.
But Musk, 46, is racing to meet expectations of investors and produce 5,000 of the vehicles per week by the end of this quarter, after a series of delays which have hampered production.
he said the white, 53ft-high structure – which covers more space than two football pitches – was put up in just two weeks next to tesla’s Fremont plant in California.
the production line was built using scrap from the company’s warehouses, Musk claimed.
the tycoon – who earlier this year sent a car into space on one of his spaceX rockets – wrote on twitter: ‘Needed another general assembly line to reach 5,000 a week Model 3 production.
‘a new building was impossible, so we built a giant tent in two weeks.
‘it’s way better than the other general assembly lines that cost hundreds of millions!’
however, some have warned that the plant is at risk of fire – the temperature in Fremont is around 33C – and it is feared the dust and dirt could affect the quality of the cars.
the Model 3 is tesla’s first electric car to be aimed at the mass market, with prices starting at £26,000. it has received almost half a million orders from customers but the company has struggled to hit its production targets – causing it to burn through mountains of cash.
Musk, who is worth around £15bn and is dating pop star grimes, has said tesla must make 5,000 Model 3s per week to become profitable and has vowed to hit that number by the end of June, with the company reaching 3,500 earlier this month.
earlier this year Musk admitted some of tesla’s problems had been linked to an over-reliance on robots. he had previously boasted about the level of automation at the company’s factories but later said: ‘We did go too far in the automation front and automated some pretty silly things.’
the new assembly line in the firm’s car park is built for the final stages of production.
Once the major pieces of the vehicles have been put together and gone through the paint shop, they are then assembled inside the tent using a series of gantries. at the end, the finished cars are rolled down to ground level.
Max Warburton, an analyst at stockbroker Bernstein, said: ‘it’s preposterous. i don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this outside of the military trying to service vehicles in a war zone. i pity any customer taking delivery of one of these cars. the quality will be shocking.’
But abhay Vadhavkar, a director of the Us-based Center for automotive research, said: ‘i think it’s kind of clever and ingenious that they’ve come up with a structure they can put up very, very quickly.’