Bears and bulls alike following Tesla's gripping nailbiter of a story - the company has until the end of the month to pump out 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week - both agree on one thing: the output of the company's new "tent" structure which Musk erected recently to produce Model 3 vehicles is going to decide whether or not the company hits its production goal that it has touted over the last couple of months.
Photo Credits: Bloomberg
The tent was erected in just a matter of weeks, and came online in early June, to help the company produce more vehicles at a time when they are under the microscope. Until recently, we didn’t know the details as to when it was erected, what the timing looked like and what it is expected to produce. However, a Bloomberg article out today helped shed some light on the details of what is arguably the most important - if archaic - structure that Tesla has built yet.
Not surprisingly, opinions extend the whole gamut, with some manufacturing experts claiming the tent is "basically nuts":
Elon Musk has six days to make good on his pledge that Tesla Inc. will be pumping out 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week by the end of the month. If he succeeds, it may be thanks to the curious structure outside the company’s factory. It’s a tent the size of two football fields that Musk calls “pretty sweet” and that manufacturing experts deride as, basically, nuts.
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Inside the tent in Fremont, California, is an assembly line Musk hastily pulled together for the Model 3. That’s the electric car that is supposed to vault Tesla from niche player for the wealthy to high-volume automaker, bringing a more affordable electric vehicle to the masses.
Analysts at Bernstein are equally unimpressed. Here is a quote from Max Warburton who benchmarked auto assembly plants before his job as a financial analyst: “Words fail me. It’s insanity,” said Max Warburton, who benchmarked auto-assembly plants around the world before becoming a financial analyst.
Ironically, Musk's "Hail Mary" is the polar opposite of Tesla's own vision for its future of state of the art robotics, hermetically sealed manufacturing facilities and millisecond efficiency.
To be sure, the tent is also a far cry from the automation that investors were promised during the early days of Tesla. The company‘s goal, which once was to have a state of the art factory producing vehicles, has now been reduced to a literal tent using manual labor and spare parts to put together cars. Worse, nobody seems to even know whether or not the line is up and running. Welcome to the future?
Musk announced it on Twitter on June 16, saying the company had put together an “entire new general assembly line” in three weeks with spare parts;...