Welcome back everyone, I'm Jordan Geesigee and this is The Limiting Factor. A few months back, I did some surveys to see what topics people wanted me to make videos on. Tesla's unboxed process came in at the top of the list, which surprised me because Tesla gave a great presentation of the unboxed process at Investor Day. I didn't feel like there was much to add on the topic. However, when I reviewed the presentation, I found that the time dedicated to explaining the unboxed process was short, at only about 4 minutes long, and also glossed over some key points. So today, I'm going to expand on Tesla's presentation by showing how grossly inefficient and awkward the traditional vehicle manufacturing process is, why the unboxed process is such an improvement and provide more context on some of Tesla's key points.
Before we begin, a special thanks to my Patreon supporters, YouTube members and Twitter subscribers, as well as RebellionAir.com. They specialize in helping investors manage concentrated positions. RebellionAir can help with covered calls, risk management, and creating a money master plan from your financial first principles. In the Investor Day presentation on the unboxed process, Tesla started by using this flow chart to show the four stages of a traditional vehicle manufacturing process, which are stamping, building the body, painting, and then final assembly. Those four stages are parts of one continuous manufacturing line. So whenever and wherever an issue occurs, it blocks almost all production upstream of that point. I say almost all because some production may still occur because there's some buffering capacity between the stages. This is important and we'll come back to it later in the video.
Tesla then showed an animation of the traditional vehicle manufacturing process and explained that in the body shop, stamped panels are put in a framing station to assemble the frame of the vehicle. This forms the box that Tesla is doing away with in their unboxed process. Then the doors are mounted and the entire vehicle is painted. After that, bizarrely, the doors are taken back off so they can be finished separately, and so that the interior of the vehicle can be assembled through the openings in the vehicle frame. That's an awkward process because people have to enter and exit the vehicle frame to assemble it, and when it comes to assembling the underside of the vehicle, that massive frame has to be lifted to provide access. Then the vehicle has to be lowered again. The seats are put in the car, the glass mounted, and then the finished doors finally return to be remounted.
The end result of the unboxed process is that there's a lot of time, movement, and equipment that's unnecessary. In fact, the animation Tesla showed didn't quite do justice to the inefficiency of a traditional process because it was greatly accelerated and simplified to keep their presentation brief and punchy. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at the inefficiencies and pain points of a traditional vehicle manufacturing process. First, on screen is a video of a framing station. Framing stations like this are used to assemble the body of the vehicle. Assembling the body is an awkward task because thin stamped metal tends to be flimsy and rebounds to a certain degree when stamped. And of course, because the vehicle frame forms part of the core of the vehicle, if it's not millimeter precise, the rest of the vehicle doesn't come together correctly. The next pain point with a traditional vehicle manufacturing process is coating and painting. With a boxed process, most or all of the vehicle is coated or painted because it's effectively one giant part. It's also awkward. For example, with immersion coating, the nooks and crannies of the frame can lead to air pockets where the coating doesn't happen or where the liquid can pool, so it has to be rotated through the pool of chemicals.
Third, as Tesla pointed out, the doors are mounted before painting, which is time consuming. Then after painting, they're removed and have to travel to another line to be fitted out with parts like wiring and trim before being returned and remounted to the vehicle. That means redundant operations, extra travel, and the redundant machinery necessary to move the doors around, mount them, unmount them, and then remount them.
Fourth, the animation from Tesla showed the interior dropping in somewhat magically, but that's not reality. Everything in the vehicle has to be shoehorned in with large robots, or humans have to enter and exit the vehicle to mount every part, which is slow and physically taxing because it involves a lot of bending, twisting, and craning of the neck. Fifth, in the Investor Day presentation, Tesla pointed out that with a traditional vehicle manufacturing line, the vehicle frame has to be lifted in some parts of the assembly process to provide access for workers. Some manufacturers do tilt the vehicle to reduce worker fatigue, but as we'll soon see, where humans are used, the unboxed process should, fundamentally, result in less strain and fatigue.
Moving along, Tesla's next point at Investor Day was that Tesla has already started implementing the unboxed process to a small degree with the Model Y. The structural battery pack, motors, chassis, and seats of the vehicle, or skateboard, are built as a subassembly on a parallel manufacturing line, and then joined to the upper structure of the vehicle on the main assembly line. That reduced the length of the final assembly line by 10%. On that note, I've heard a number of people say that the unboxed process isn't possible, or that Tesla will fail, but what this video shows is that Tesla has already been using a partially unboxed process for at least a couple of years now. It is, of course, another thing entirely to make a vehicle using a fully unboxed process, but it's clearly Tesla's end goal, and they've been working towards that goal incrementally and with success.
So with that trajectory in mind, I'm expecting that at a minimum, the process used to create their upcoming vehicles will become increasingly unboxed, which in my view means a greater number of parallel production lines and fewer redundant operations. We'll come back to that point in a moment. Next, Tesla explained at a first principles level why it was more efficient to produce the skateboard of the Model Y on a parallel production line or unboxed process. Running in and around a 5 meter long and 1.5 meter tall box creates a lot of inefficiencies. That's because it basically becomes a jungle gym for the workers when they're moving and mounting parts in and around the vehicle.
By breaking the vehicle down into smaller parts or subassemblies, it creates better spacetime efficiency. In my view, in English, that means four things. First, the workers and robots will have free access to every aspect of the subassemblies, with no physical obstacles. Second, the workers and robots won't have to move as far to access any part of each subassembly. Third, the workers will experience less fatigue because they no longer have to bend, twist, crawl, or crane their necks like they do with a traditional manufacturing process. The subassemblies can be on mobile carts that can be height adjusted to the optimal working height, which will increase speed and reduce strain. Fourth, it may be easier to design and program the robots to work on the subassemblies because all the motions will be more direct and linear.
Fifth, because the six different subassemblies are being worked on at the same time rather than sequentially, it's going to accelerate the speed that the vehicle is manufactured. Overall, Tesla says the unboxed process will increase efficiency or speed by 30%, and increase the number of workers or robots for a unit of factory space by 44%, which means a smaller factory. Before we move on, in my view, the simplest way to think about the unboxed process is that by moving from a large box to multiple subassemblies, you're increasing the actionable surface area, which naturally accelerates the speed that actions can take place. This is much the same way that a chemical reaction can be accelerated by using powder rather than a block of material.
Next, Tesla goes on to say that the end result of breaking the vehicle down into subassemblies is that the flow chart for the production line would go from a linear process flow to a parallel process flow. What are the implications of that? As I said at the beginning of the video, in a traditional vehicle manufacturing line, if anything goes wrong in any of the four manufacturing stages, the whole manufacturing line ends up blocked. That means the manufacturing line can only move as fast as the slowest part of the line. But it's also important to note that, as I said earlier, wherever a slowdown or blockage occurs, buffering can occur further upstream.
That is, partially finished vehicles or parts can build up at the end of each manufacturing stage. The overall line is still rate limited by the blockage or slowdown, but the buffering can provide a smoothing effect so that the production can resume more quickly. How would a parallel or unboxed production process handle slowdowns and blockages? Given that we don't know exactly how Tesla is implementing the unboxed process, bear with me while I speculate. When we look at the parallel manufacturing flow chart, my assumption is that most of the manufacturing burden in terms of robot or man hours is actually going to be offloaded to the parallel processes.
Why? Because that's where most of the thousands of wires, hoses, and mechanical linkages will be fitted together. Then, when it comes to the vehicle assembly process, it's mostly a matter of bolting, plugging, and gluing the six major sub-assemblies to each other. If that's the case, bottlenecks at the assembly stage would be much less likely, and the limiting factor for production speed would be pushed upstream to the parallel sub-assembly lines, which means when there is a production issue, it's localized to a specific production area rather than blocking the entire factory. Yes, that means the rest of the sub-assembly lines would then start buffering production.
However, given that there would be many parallel production lines producing relatively small sub-assemblies, when buffering does occur, the sub-assemblies wouldn't take up as much space as partially finished vehicles. That means more instances of buffering across the vehicle factory and a greater number of parts in each buffer. We've seen this with gigacastings where Tesla can stockpile a huge number of castings during production ramps, because the casting process sometimes ramps faster than the rest of the line. I'm not sure what those employees then do, but I suspect they spend more time refining the efficiency of their part of the production process, go help in other areas of the factory, or reduce their work hours. If the same were true in the unboxed process, if the sub-assembly lines that are running faster than the other lines build a large enough buffer, those employees may be able to lend a hand on the slower assembly lines. What all this means is that the unboxed process should not only accelerate the production rate of each part of the vehicle, it may also smooth and therefore accelerate the overall manufacturing flows through the factory.
The last part of Tesla's presentation on the unboxed process was this animation. It shows that only the parts that need paint get painted, and that the six different sub-assemblies are manufactured separately. Then, the sub-assemblies come together fully tested and only once on the vehicle assembly line. There, the front and rear of the vehicle, the sides of the vehicle, and the structural battery pack with seats bolt together like Legos before the doors, glass, and wheels are mounted to finish the vehicle. Notably, at this point in the presentation, Tesla also pointed out that they're already using a similar process with the Cybertruck. That reinforces the point that Tesla's been working towards the unboxed process for years, and that to a limited degree, it's already been implemented and trialed in vehicles that are on the road today. It's just that for Tesla's next generation vehicles, their goal is to take the final leap and use a fully parallel or unboxed process.
Earlier, I walked you through the pain points of a traditional vehicle manufacturing process. Let's look at how each of those pain points is resolved or reduced with the unboxed process. First, although the unboxed process will still use stamped parts for things like the doors and body panels, the stampings are reduced by about two-thirds thanks to the gigacastings in the front and rear underbodies. That's something Tesla's been doing for a couple of years already, but with the unboxed process they'll take it to the next level. The core of the vehicle will be castings and the structural battery pack, and the sides will just bolt on to tie everything together. So, framing stations will no longer be needed.
Second, the unboxed process eliminates unnecessary coating and painting. For example, the entire car doesn't have to be immersion coated, so individual parts can be coated as needed. And for painting, they can be run through the paint shop in racks that may allow for more efficient painting suites. It'll also reduce energy usage for drying and baking steps. Just because more of the space in the paint shop will be filled with parts that must be painted rather than heating empty air space and parts that may not actually need to be painted.
Third, with the unboxed process, the doors are fully assembled before being attached to the vehicle, so the mounting operation occurs just once. Fourth, with the unboxed process, workers no longer need to enter and exit the vehicle to install the interior. And there's no bulky parts like seats or the dash that have to be shoehorned in through the door openings. Fifth, although the vehicle will still likely be raised and lowered with the unboxed process, to mount the battery pack and seats, most of the assembly operations will likely occur on carts at a comfortable height. That means less workers strain working underneath vehicles. The end result of the benefits of the unboxed process is that Tesla estimates that the factory footprint will be reduced by 40%, which will allow them to build factories faster, with less capex and greater output per unit of floor space.
Tesla also pointed to a 50% reduction in cost of goods sold, but that's for a smaller, next generation vehicle. On a like for like basis, the manufacturing cost savings from the unboxed process appears to be around 13.5%. In summary, the unboxed process is expected to accelerate assembly speed. May smooth and accelerate the production rate of the factory as a whole will eliminate redundant process steps and the machinery required for those process steps and reduce the size of the factory, which all leads to lower production costs. Relative to the other innovations that Tesla's tackled in the past, I view the unboxed process as a lower risk.
Real risky and difficult, but not a moonshot. That's because, as I pointed out in my last video, Tesla's been laying the groundwork for the unboxed process for well over a decade. So a lot of the technologically difficult problems appear to be already solved. With those technologies in place, it should actually be easier and faster to produce vehicles with the unboxed process. Not only that, besides having the basic technology toolkit in place to do the unboxed process, Tesla's already, to a limited degree, used the unboxed process and the model Y and to a greater extent the Cybertruck.
I suspect that's because the Cybertruck doors don't need to be painted so are mounted only once, because the battery pack and seat sub assembly now appears to be a separate sub assembly from the front and rear that contain the motors and chassis, and because the Cybertruck should be much more easily broken down into sub assemblies because it uses Tesla's Etherloop wiring architecture, which allows for plug and play connectivity between the sub assemblies rather than requiring a hardware connection to a main CAN bus cable.
What all this means is that Tesla has done a lot to de-risk the fully unboxed process that's expected to be used in their next generation vehicles. The only question that remains for me is how pure of an implementation of the unboxed process Tesla will be able to achieve for those vehicles, and we should get more insights on that in the next year as Tesla expands production in their existing facilities and breaks ground in new locations. If you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting the channel by using the links in the description. Also consider following me on X. I often use X as a test bed for sharing ideas, and X subscribers like my Patreon supporters generally get access to my videos a week early.
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