Tesla is not like other big automakers, burdened by decades of tradition and certain engrained ways of doing things. The EV maker builds its cars quite differently compared to legacy manufacturers, with its one-piece “giga casting” process as the best example of this, and now it plans to implement a completely new way to assemble cars that it believes will help cut costs and streamline the assembly process.
Tesla to change car assembly
Leave it to Tesla to change how cars are made. Tesla’s $25,000 electric car will reportedly be built unlike any other car has been in the past. Will it work? We shall find out in a couple of years.
It’s called the “unboxed” assembly technique, and it does away with having a car (or a rectangular “box”) roll down a traditional assembly line past various stations where parts are added on. What Tesla plans to do instead is assemble different sections of a vehicle at the same time in dedicated areas of the factory and then bring a handful of large sub-assemblies together in the end.
This is said to potentially halve production costs and require around 40 percent less space than a traditional car factory with the same output. If true, this will play a big part in allowing Tesla to bring manufacturing costs down significantly and produce vehicles cheaper than ever.
Company boss Elon Musk has alluded to this new manufacturing approach on several occasions, but he’s stopped short of providing any concrete details. All he’s said until now is that the way Tesla plans to build its $25,000 model is “revolutionary” and “far more advanced than any automotive manufacturing system in the world, by a significant margin.”
The affordable Tesla is supposed to enter production (or at least be unveiled) by the end of 2024 or early in 2025, and Musk has confirmed that the project is “very far along” but without adding any additional details. However, Tesla has missed its self-imposed deadlines in the past, so the affordable model may actually debut a few years further into the future.
Automotive News quotes Mathew Vachaparampil, the CEO of an engineering and automotive benchmarking company called Caresoft, as saying that Tesla first created a digital simulation of the unboxed assembly method to ensure it’s viable. He didn’t say what the result of that particular test was, but he did confirm that it would save Tesla a lot on manufacturing by implementing this innovative way of making cars.
We don’t know where Tesla plans to implement the unboxed method first, but it will probably be linked to the production of its affordable model. It’s currently building or expanding several plants, so it could be built in Texas, Berlin, or even Mexico, for all we know right now.