Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tesla Factory Tour with Elon Musk!”.
Hey, what’s up guys, i’m kbhd here and welcome to the sequel to the previous video, so the part two, which is the mini factory tour with elon. I want to preface it just with the intro by saying. First of all, it is really difficult to shoot good video in that factory as you’ll both see in here it’s extremely loud and extremely busy. So this is more of just like a walking around and having fun and checking things out, uh. It’S it’s actually, probably just like 15 or 20 of the actual model, s and x factory process. It’S not the whole thing. It’S mostly just elon showing us around, and in fact i didn’t even really say much during this interview was more just like a. I was kind of like a kid in the matrix, just kind of absorbing everything, and then it also kind of cuts abruptly at the end when elon basically gets pulled into his next meeting. But i still thought it was a ton of fun and worth sharing, and also i should mention this entire video shoot. This production would not be possible without my buddy, john, from the tld channel and his crew, who helped with audio who were the muscle with the steadicam. He has an entire behind-the-scenes video of this process on his channel i’ll link that right below. So if you want to check that out after watching this in part, one feel free, but until the next one this is your mini tour of the tesla factory with elon enjoy one that loops back and, like i said just, gives, gives us access to the central Corridor yeah, so it’s really just like lifting it up and over so the car that ends up here came all the way down this previous yeah yeah. Exactly so like these robots are really just to give us that uh like through through access, okay yeah.
So so it’s gon na pick it up and transfer it to the other robot yeah, but i think, like you know, like a design improvement we should do is like really just the one robot just passes to the other robot um just pick it up. Yeah, there’s a third one above us yeah, it’s like it puts it on a table. The table rotates, it’s like like you would do is if we did the sofa, we would just have that giant.
Robot, pass it to that giant, robot, fair yeah hand off yeah. It’S like thousands of like little things like that that help improve production, general assembly kind of operates in kind of a use, so it goes cars coming over. There go all the way down here and then way that way and uh. You can see the car get progressively more complex as it goes down the general assembly line. What does it look like when it starts this side of the assembly line? Oh, we can go there. There you go there.
Let’S go, should we start there? So at the beginning – but here you can get a good sense for there’s like like general assembly, is what i was talking about as being really well suited to people, okay, uh, because you got a lot of weird things that you got to put together. Like you know, like look at some of these um, you know assemblies they’re, like like it’s pretty hard for a robot to like connect this on. That makes sense yeah it’s you know like depending upon how it comes out of the box. It could be like in a little different position, but it’s pretty easy for somebody like. Oh it’s like. I just need to move it like an inch.
You know bolt it in it’s probably really hard to write software to kind of know, to adapt in all these different ways yeah, so you try to order. If you try to have the robot do this, you got ta, have like a complicated vision system and then, like the vision system, folds out, it’s like it’s not quite right. That’S the hard part! We have a robot in our studio that moves the camera around and the hardest part is when it falls yeah.
You need a person there to know what to do exactly so. Hopefully that doesn’t happen. Much um like for parts that are that are complicated and friendly.
Like wiring harnesses are especially difficult. You see how like the wiring, harness kind of needs to snake uh through the car yeah. It’S certainly like, like winding like a snake through the car yeah, you got ta like poke it through holes and and do diverse things.
That’S super difficult for a robot, see like how they’re like putting the uh there’s a part of the air conditioning system there right um, so you use like a little bit of mechanical assistance with the winch and whatnot. But then it’s pretty straightforward for the guys to just like get that in there and then like if they see there’s an issue with the part, then like they say. Oh, this product’s got a problem like we’ll put it over here for to you, know, um to get fixed like this is like semi lines like moving slowly yeah, so like moves along, and then, if you know it gives people like time to get things done like You can like stand on this, and i think you mentioned, like the the speed of the car coming out.
The other side is like one mile an hour or something like that. Yeah, it’s super slow. You want to speed this up right, yeah, it’s not even one mile an hour, it’s even slower than that right now, but for sx, but for for three, it’s like getting close to a mile an hour: okay, okay, um, but walking speeds three miles an hour.
So it’s like only one third walking speed at one mile, an hour all right, but you can see like when you look on the inside of the car. You see like how many little complicated little pieces. There are a lot um.
You know the things that are meant to uh for installation, corrosion protection, um, airbags, uh road noise, like it’s all the stuff that gets put in here yeah you can see like these are like the side, airbags here, okay um, i must feel i think it’s like Pretty cool, like most people, never see like the inside of the car yeah there’s a million things you never see driving the car every day. This is like sorry guys, starting to rough. If you don’t mind being on like on, like you know the internet and stuff, is that cool all right, youtube’s small? I actually don’t interrupt your work, but um.
You know it’s like you see like how like there’s like a lot of tricky pieces and like if, for a person like this, is like doable, straightforward, yeah, you know it takes a bit of training out of speed whatever, but like once once you like um, basically Like like a pro human, can do this super well and it’s like hard for the robots to do that. But when we go to the like the body, welding i’ll show you like, what’s like. What’S a robot good at and you’ll see like there’s tons of robots like tons of people here, tons of robots there um, but there’s so much complexity and variation here um you got ta grab those wires when it comes through, especially here at this door. So so like this is the car with like less stuff in it, and then it goes it’s you know and we’ll see the beginning of it right and then that then it goes all the way around gets more and more stuff added, and does it end at The end well, general assembly ends probably somewhere down there, yeah, okay, so um, but you can essentially see the car get progressively more complex, as we add more parts to it. You know this place. Uh used to employ like about 5 000 people, and now we got like we could.
We got 10 000 people just in this location yeah. So what we do is we have like tons of shuttles and like three cars ride, sharing yeah uh. We got the barrier rapid transit station. Finally, like went, went up um, so just like trying to get people here is is a big challenge yeah. What is this? Oh? This is actually like. This is one of my favorite, dumb, robots, okay, yeah, i’m a fan right now.
It’S pretty cool um. So, like there’s a lot of fancy robots uh that like, but they have like lots of issues they break down all the time. Those these little guys are super great but like they follow this magnetic stripe, see basically it’s like super easy to program. You don’t even need to be a programmer because you just like lay down the the mag stripe and it’ll follow it. Yeah just follows the back stripe and then it’s got proximity sensors in the front.
So if, if it sees an obstacle or seems like something in the way it just stops and then as soon as something moves out of the way it just keeps going, you know just like there’s this like little thing all day, long like a little train like You’Re talking about robots, faulting out and one of the it’s like that’s like, where like actually um doing things manually, can, can actually be more um more efficient, because if you have like a lot of complicated robots, particularly if you have a 24 7 operation like we Have with model 3 uh, then, if robot faults out you’re going to have 24 7, like advanced robot technicians, make sense, and then, if the robot, like accidentally crashes and like breaks a fixture, then it’s like man. Okay, now, right now, we’ve got the line. We’Ve got lined down, that’s what i have to read alert and then i get pulled on my cell phone at two in the morning and it’s like not a lot of time. I fly apart in from germany. It’S like.
We literally had that two days ago. Do you have to when you get new robots? Do you build the robots or do you order them in and program them? So there’s like different classes, there’s many many different types of robots, so the like the giant robot. They were still lifting the car yeah. It’S like that’s that that is a catalog item, but then we have to program the the motions right and then and the end effector, is that it’s custom, so the interface that picks up the car drops it off. That’S a custom made thing okay, so it’s kind of like you kind of like buy this like powerful arm, but it’s just like having an arm stuck in the ground and then you’re like okay.
What does the arm? Do you got to tell it everything to do? Yeah, okay and then you got to put sensors on it and put fixtures, but that’s like kind of like that. Robot over there uh, that’s also one of like the ones that picks up the car, oh uh, by the way these are like named after x-men, oh yeah. I forgot about that um just x-men, i feel like like marvel and x-men is like got ta start to run out of names. Yeah yeah actually turns out a lot of x-men yeah. Okay, so you can see like this is like quite a beast of a robot.
You can’t just buy that robot in this case it’s a fanuc, robot, um and uh. You can buy the robot, but then the end effector, that’s carrying the car is something that’s custom and then you got ta. Do the programming and the like wire in the sensors and that kind of thing so to the the level of precision of this massive robot? Is it to like as far as repeatable action? Is it literally the same path, everything yeah, plus or minus an inch? Oh, no, it’s a centimeter, it’s better than that for a big robot, there’s a little less precision than a smaller robot yeah but say a medium-sized robot will be accurate to 0.2.3 millimeters. Oh okay! What is the most popular paint color coming through here? That’S black black yeah. It actually varies by country um, like uh watch out, there’s a dumb robot coming through oh yeah. This guy’s, like pretty pretty cool like what all right this can go wrong.
I don’t know you trust him more than i do. Yeah. Okay. Okay, all right good job, good job, robot yeah.
I i see a lot of silver and i see a lot of white model x. Just in new jersey, black and white are the two most colors are too much popular colors. Okay, um. The white micro are like black slide is, is slightly more popular than white in the us, but in like europe, it’s way more popular, like white, is a very rare color in europe for a car, okay um in the u.s. It’S like it’s it’s about, even with with black black and white, the two most common colors yeah, and here you can see battery pack. This is like to be like a mating station for the battery pack. Oh, this is literally connecting the battery to the car. Here. You can see it’s like a combination of manual automatic, so it’s like they’re lining it up. It’S like yeah, exactly it’s! So it’s it’s done primarily by the robot system by the automated system, but then you’ve got a person just making sure that the fine tuning is there gotcha.
How do you feel about matt, matte or satin colors about that a lot? I actually like the aesthetics of matte. It’S really tricky to to repair a mat so like, yes, you can polish it out with that um. If you get like a little ding, it’s really hard to then rematch the so it looks like an even mat yeah. You can’t just like you know, that’s fair point, yeah um, so it’s it’s doable! It’S it’s something! Actually we would like to do that in the future.
Um but um like right now, for example, like the paint shop, is really operating at full tilt, so adding any complexity to the paint shop. We’Re definitely wise right now, but right, i think, it’ll be a cool thing to do in the future. But these are the sub assemblies, so you can see like the front, rear drive units being bolted up and the self assemblies then feed the main assembly line. These are a long assembly line, oh yeah.
Well, it’s and it’s it’s integrating uh snx, okay and it’s making about 2 000 cars a week is model 3 entirely completely separate. I guess yes inside the same building but separate whole process. The only place where model 3 and snx come together is in the paint shop, so the paint shop is processing s3 and x um simultaneously down the same line, but otherwise general assembly is separate body, separate, um yeah. Everything else is different, so just the paint shop where they come together, you’ve mentioned you’ve slept in the factory to be able to immediately like diagnose problems and hands-on fix.
What’S not right, what type of things happen that you can immediately fix, or immediately take action on? Actually, last last three months last year, i mostly spent at gigafactory trying to help fix the battery production. It’S a module production and it’s just it’s a lot of little things like looking at at each uh at each little little tiny part each process say. Is the process necessary it’s like because the best part is no part best part a process is no process and occasionally at the design level you think something’s necessary, but then turns out it’s not so just like making sure connect connecting between design, um and manufacturing. Uh make sure to make sure we close the loop on that. Just saying, like hey, is this: if it let’s say it’s a it’s like it’s a lot of real, simple stuff, but it’s like times times a thousand yeah.
So if we have like a automated vault driver going in like what’s the rpm, the torque settings for the vault driver um can we make that go faster, uh usually usually can unnecessary movements um like like, for example, i actually don’t really like the fact that we Lift the cars over and and back ideally, that would be a robot handoff, getting rid of a middle stage, yeah exactly because the middle side what’s wrong with it’s like putting it on a turntable and then the tune table is rotating and the other robot’s picking it Up it’s actually, the problem is like sometimes the tune table breaks down, wow and and so okay. So it’s like okay, let’s eliminate the turntable and just have a robot go to robot um, and then you don’t have like uh turntable breakage to consider. So it’s a lot of minimizing things that can go wrong and maximizing the efficiency of these simple things.
I guess just like, like design necessity of every part of it and every process yeah uh, just the speed at which um, especially the robots, are going um other. Are there any? Is there any unnecessary movement in the production line that that isn’t value-added like we’re actually doing something? Yeah um like replacing elements of the production system that are not not needed or redundant? .