If Tesla succeeds in its next bold step, the all-electric Model S luxury sedan, due to arrive in mid-2012 with a base price of $57,400 before tax credits, it may be because its approach as a new startup automaker is somewhat unique.
Many small car companies have risen and fallen, most relying on craft production of tiny volumes of handmade cars because such methods are cheaper than purchasing large, mass-production machines fitted with expensive tooling. Conversely, Tesla found opportunity in America’s shrinking industrial base, snapping up a former Toyota/GM joint-venture auto plant and modern production equipment at rock-bottom prices to outfit itself much like a full blown high-volume car company.
An ambitious product portfolio—the forthcoming Model S, the Model X sport utility to follow in a couple of years, and a smaller BMW 3-series–like sports sedan are on the boards—will, if all goes to plan, come from Tesla’s factory, purchased with funding from partners Toyota and Daimler, a half-billion-dollar loan guaranty from the U.S. Department of Energy, and a public stock offering in 2010.
In a small corner of the sprawling former New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) plant, from which Toyota Corollas and Tacomas and Pontiac Vibes—among other models—once poured forth, Tesla has created a vertically integrated car-making operation. Here, the company will produce almost everything for the Model S, from aluminum body stampings to plastic dashboards and bumpers. Huge plastic-injection-molding machines and a computer-controlled paint shop with robotic spray booths and curing ovens are just a few of the big-company items Tesla acquired for pennies on the dollar.
Total expenditures for plant and equipment have come to $59 million so far, says Tesla, a drop in the bucket in an industry that routinely spends hundreds of millions to equip a new factory. Tesla will initially use just 20 percent of the giant plant, now mostly empty, for Model S production.
Utilizing modern, heavy equipment is a somewhat unique phenomenon in the annals of startup car companies, equipment such as a five-station transfer press that is four stories tall and as long as a city block. The press, acquired from Detroit supplier Tower Automotive, was once used to stamp out body panels for Chrysler, and was installed at Tesla over the course of four months. Tesla managers demonstrated the working of the press line to the assembled media. As the press’s dumptruck-sized blocks of iron rose and fell on hydraulic cylinders, red-painted robots with carbon-fiber “hands” fed aluminum sheets into the die wells to be stamped at a pressure of 4000–5000 tons. The only thing missing to create actual Model S body-side panels were the stamping dies themselves, being made in Japan and due to arrive at the factory by the end of this year.
In the plastics shop, a robot went through the articulated motions of painting an invisible Model S bumper, while robots in the paint shop went through the computer-choreographed dance of spraying a waterborne base coat onto a non-existent Model S body. More robots—Tesla says there will be about 100 in the plant when production starts, plus 300–350 workers—pretended to weld, rivet, and glue up the Model S’s aluminum unibody. A final-assembly line in a freshly painted and brightly lit area includes an indoor test track with lumpy surfaces for detecting squeaks and rattles.
With limited resources, Tesla has to be clever in how it uses its equipment. For example, the bulky stamping dies will be changed up to 10 times per shift so that the few presses Tesla has can produce all of the aluminum and steel stampings needed to create a single Model S. When the Model X arrives, robots in the body-welding area will already be fitted with flexible tools so that they can weld up either the S or the X as each vehicle comes down the line.
By next August, company managers hope, real cars will be rolling down the lines at the rate of 83 units per day, or around 20,000 per year. It’s a tiny fraction of the NUMMI’s former output but a substantial number for a new car company such as Tesla.
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