Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
You can't work people 12 hours a day / 6 days a week for an extended period of time. They do burn out.
The tent production line is to add capacity because the normal line isn't working as it was designed. It isn't working because Musk had his people skip basic steps in the development process and implemented a level of automation beyond what any other automaker has attempted. A lot of that automation isn't working so Musk is throwing humans at problems as a short-term fix.
I come from the automotive manufacturing industry and currently work as a manufacturing engineer.
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I'm not involved in automotive production, but automation is my day job.
Having people work out how it's got to be done manually, then implementing that with automation is a method that I am all-too-familiar with. It makes sense to management, but it removes many options in the design of the automation to limit yourself to what humans can do, and the speed that they can do tasks at. But it also makes things difficult in that machines are not really equipped to do things like humans do. Dexterity, recognition of complex geometry, sensing vibration and bad, loud noises without specific sensors, etc etc.
Elon's rumored to be using SCRUM, Agile methods, and Lean manufacturing. All of those are disruptive, and something that no other automaker implements to the degree that Elon is attempting. Or maybe they just don't talk about it, tweet, it, etc like Elon does? Just because the rest of the automotive industry does things following specific steps, and Elon has skipped steps, does not make Elon wrong in the same way that it does not make the existing automotive industry right. There are many solutions to any problem.
I can understand why Tesla, perhaps, is not staffing up. If they are working to get the automation working correctly and the extra people would end up getting layoff notices. But that's making a bunch of assumptions ... which may or may not match reality ..