Tesla Factory Tour with Marques Brownlee
Transcript
0:05Elon MuskHey, what is up, guys?
0:05Marques BrownleeI'm Kabhd here and welcome to the sequel to the previous video. So the part two, which is the mini factory tour with Elon, I want to preface it just with the intro by saying, first of all, it is really difficult to shoot good video in that factory.
0:21Marques BrownleeAs you'll both see in here, it's extremely loud and extremely busy. So this is more of just like a walking around and having fun and checking things out. So it's actually probably just like 15 or 20% of the actual model S and X factory process.
0:36Marques BrownleeIt's not the whole thing. It's mostly just Elon showing us around. And in fact, I didn't even really say much during this interview. It was more just like I was kind of like a kid in the Matrix, just kind of absorbing everything.
0:46Marques BrownleeAnd then it also kind of cuts abruptly at the end when Elon basically gets pulled into his next meeting. But I still thought it was a ton of fun and worth sharing.
0:54Marques BrownleeAnd also, I should mention, this entire video shoot, this production would not be possible without my buddy John from the TLD channel and his crew who helped with audio, who are the muscle with the Steadicam.
1:05Marques BrownleeHe has an entire behind the scenes video of this process on his channel. I'll link that right below. So if you want to check that out after watching this and part one, feel free.
1:14Marques BrownleeBut until the next one, this is your mini tour of the Tesla factory with Elon. Enjoy.
1:20Elon MuskOne that loops back and like I said, just gives us access to the central corridor. So it's really just like lifting it up and over.
1:27Marques BrownleeSo the car that ends up here came all the way down this previous.
1:31Elon MuskYeah, yeah, exactly. So these robots are really just to give us like through. Through access.
1:36Marques BrownleeOkay.
1:36Elon MuskYeah. So. So it's going to pick it up and transfer it to the other robot. Yeah, but I think like, you know, like a design improvement we should do is like really just the one robot just passes to the other robot.
1:48Marques BrownleePick it up.
1:48Elon MuskYeah.
1:49Marques BrownleeThere's a third one above us.
1:50Elon MuskYeah, it's like it puts it on a table, the table rotates. It's like if we did this over, we would just have that giant robot pass it to that giant robot.
1:58Marques BrownleeFair.
1:58Elon MuskYeah.
1:59Marques BrownleeHandoff.
1:59Elon MuskYeah. It's like a thousands little things like that that help improve production. General assembly kind of operates in kind of a U. So it goes. Cars coming over there go all the way down here and then all the way that way.
2:12Elon MuskAnd you can see the car get progressively more complex as it goes down the General assembly line.
2:17Marques BrownleeWhat does it look like when it starts this side of the assembly line?
2:20Elon MuskOh, we can go there. Should we start there? Start at the beginning or.
2:23Marques BrownleeYeah, might as well.
2:26Elon MuskBut here you can get a good sense for. There's like. Like, general assembly is what I was talking about as being really well suited to people.
2:34Marques BrownleeOkay.
2:35Elon MuskBecause you got a lot of weird things that you got to put together. Like, you, like, look at some of these, you know, assemblies that like. Like, it's pretty hard for a robot to, like, connect this on.
2:45Marques BrownleeThat makes sense.
2:46Elon MuskYeah, it's, you know, like, depending upon how it comes out of the box, it could be, like, in a little different position, but it's pretty easy for somebody, like.
2:53Elon MuskOh, it's. It's like I just need to move it like an inch, you know, bolt it in.
2:57Marques BrownleeIt's probably really hard to write software of know to adapt in all these different ways. Yeah.
3:03Elon MuskSo if you try to have the robot do this, you gotta have, like, a confiscated vision system. And then, like, the vision system faults out. It's like, it's not quite right.
3:12Elon MuskThat's the hard part.
3:13Marques BrownleeWe have a robot in our studio that moves the camera around, and the hardest part is when it faults.
3:18Elon MuskYeah.
3:18Marques BrownleeYou need a person there to know what to do.
3:20Elon MuskExactly.
3:21Marques BrownleeSo hopefully that doesn't happen much.
3:24Elon MuskLike, for parts that are. That are complicated and fiddly, like, wiring harnesses are especially difficult. You see how, like, the wiring harness kind of needs to snake through the car.
3:35Elon MuskYeah, it's literally like. Like winding. Like a snake through the car.
3:38Marques BrownleeYeah.
3:38Elon MuskYou gotta, like, poke it through holes and do various things. That's super difficult for a robot. See like, how they're, like, putting the part of the air conditioning system there.
3:48Marques BrownleeRight.
3:50Elon MuskSo you use, like, a little bit of mechanical assistance with the winch and whatnot. But then it's pretty straightforward for the guys to just, like, get that in there.
3:58Elon MuskAnd then, like, if they see there's an issue with the part, then, like, they say, oh, this part's got a problem. We'll put it over here to, you know, to get fixed.
4:06Elon MuskLike, this is like semi lines, like, moving slowly.
4:09Marques BrownleeYeah.
4:09Elon MuskSo, like, moves long. And then if, you know, gets people, like, time to get things done, like, hey, you can, like, stand on this.
4:16Marques BrownleeAnd I think you mentioned, like, the speed of the car coming out the other side is like 1 mile an hour or something like that.
4:22Elon MuskYeah, it's super slow.
4:23Marques BrownleeYou want to speed this up, right?
4:24Elon MuskYeah, it's not even one mile an hour. It's even slower than that right now. One point sx. But for three, it's like, getting close to a mile an hour.
4:31Marques BrownleeOkay.
4:32Elon MuskOkay. But walking sea is three miles an hour, so it's like, only one third walking speed at one mile an hour.
4:37Marques BrownleeAll right.
4:37Elon MuskBut you can see, like, when you look on the inside of the car, you see like, how many little, complicated little pieces. There are a lot. You know, the things that are meant to.
4:48Elon MuskFor insulation, corrosion protection, airbags, road noise. Like, it's all the stuff that gets put in here.
4:58Marques BrownleeYeah.
4:58Elon MuskYou can see, like, these are, like, the slide airbags here.
5:01Marques BrownleeOkay.
5:03Elon MuskI must be. I think this is, like, pretty cool. Like, most people never see, like, the inside of the car.
5:06Marques BrownleeYeah. There's a million things you never see driving the car every day.
5:09Elon MuskThis is like. Sorry, guys. Sorry to interrupt. I hope you don't mind being on, like, on, like, you know, the Internet and stuff. Is that cool? All right.
5:20Marques BrownleeYouTube's cool.
5:21Elon MuskI actually don't interrupt your work, but, you know, it's like, you see, like, how, like, there's, like, a lot of tricky pieces, and, like, if for a person like, this is, like, durable, straightforward.
5:32Elon MuskYeah. You know, it takes a bit of training, get up speed. But, like, once. Once you, like, basically, like, like a pro human this super well. And it's, like, hard for the robots to do that.
5:42Elon MuskBut when we go to the, like, the body welding, I'll show you, like, what's, like, what's a robot good at? You'll see, like, there's tons of robots. Like, tons of people here, tons of robots there.
5:52Elon MuskBut there's so much complexity and variation here. You got, like, thread those wires when
5:57Marques Brownleeit comes through, especially here at this door.
6:00Elon MuskSo, like, this is a problem with, like, less stuff in it. And then it goes, you know, and we'll see the beginning of it.
6:07Marques BrownleeRight.
6:07Elon MuskAnd then it goes all the way around. Gets more and more stuff added.
6:10Marques BrownleeAnd does it end at the end? Well, general assembly ends probably somewhere down there.
6:14Elon MuskYeah.
6:15Marques BrownleeOkay.
6:15Elon MuskSo you can. It's interesting to see the car get progressively more complex as we add more parts to it. This place used to employ, like, about 5,000 people, and now we got, like, we got 10,000 people just in this location.
6:29Elon MuskSo what we do is we have, like, tons of shuttles and, like, recourse ride sharing. We got the very rapid transit station finally, like, went up. So just like, trying to get people here is not easy.
6:43Marques BrownleeBig challenge.
6:44Elon MuskWhat is this? Oh, this is actually, like, this is one of my favorite dumb robots.
6:50Marques BrownleeOkay.
6:51Elon MuskYeah.
6:51Marques BrownleeI'm a fan right now.
6:52Elon MuskIt's pretty cool. So, like, there's a lot of fancy robots that like. But they have like lots of issues and they break down all the time. These little guys are super great, but like they follow this magnetic stripe.
7:06Elon MuskSee, Basically it's like super easy to program. You don't even need to be a programmer because just like lay down the mag stripe and it'll follow it. Yeah, it just follows the mag stripe.
7:14Elon MuskAnd then it's got proximity sensors in the front. So if it sees an obstacle or sees like something in the way, it just stops. And then as soon as something moves out of the way, it just keeps going.
7:25Elon MuskYou know, just like there's this like little thing all day long, like a little train. Like you're talking about robots bolting out. And one of the. It's like, that's like where like actually doing things manually can actually be more efficient.
7:42Elon MuskBecause if you have like a lot of complicated robots, particularly if you have a 247 operation like we have with model 3, then if robot faults out, you got to have 24 7, like advanced robot technicians.
7:52Elon MuskAnd then if the robot like accidentally crashes and like breaks a fixture, then it's like, man. Okay, now, now we've got the line. We've got line down. You have to red alert.
8:01Elon MuskAnd I get pulled on my cell phone at 2 in the morning and it's like not a lot of fly apart in Germany. It's like we literally had that two days ago.
8:08Marques BrownleeDo you have to. When you get new robots, do you build the robots or do you order them, Program them?
8:14Elon MuskSo there's like different classes, there's many, many different types of robots. So the, like the giant robot that we still looked in the car is like, that is a catalog item.
8:27Elon MuskBut then we have to program the motions and then. And the end effector is that it's custom. So the end effector that picks up the car, drops it off.
8:35Elon MuskThat's a custom made thing. Okay, so it's kind of like you kind of like buy this like, powerful arm, but it's just like having an arm stuck in the ground.
8:44Elon MuskAnd then you're like, okay, what does the arm do?
8:45Marques BrownleeYou got to tell it everything to do. Yeah. Okay.
8:47Elon MuskAnd then you got to put sensors on it and put fixtures. But that's like kind of like that robot over there that's also one of like the ones that fix up the car.
8:56Elon MuskOh, by the way, these are like named after X Men.
8:59Marques BrownleeOh, yeah, I forgot about that. Just X Men. I feel like you might have to
9:03Elon Musklike Marvel and X Men.
9:04Marques BrownleeYou gotta start to run out of names.
9:06Elon MuskYeah, yeah. This thing actually turns out a lot of X Men, by the way.
9:08Marques BrownleeYeah.
9:08Elon MuskOkay, so you can see like this is like quite a beast of a robot. You can just buy that robot. In this case, it's a panuk robot and you can buy the robot, but then the end effector that's carrying the car is something that's custom.
9:23Elon MuskAnd then you gotta do the programming and the like, wire in the sensors and that kind of thing to the
9:29Marques Brownleelevel of precision of this massive robot. Is it to like, as far as repeatable action? Is it literally the same path every sink, plus or minus an inch?
9:38Elon MuskOh, no, it's.
9:39Marques BrownleeThat's centimeter.
9:41Elon MuskIt's better than that. For a big robot. There's a little less precision than a smaller robot. But say a medium sized robot will be accurate to 0.2, 0.3 millimeters.
9:52Marques BrownleeOkay. What is the most popular paint color coming through here?
9:57Elon MuskThat's black.
9:59Marques BrownleeBlack?
9:59Elon MuskYeah. It actually varies by country.
10:04Marques BrownleeLike, watch out, there's a dumb robot coming through.
10:09Elon MuskOh, yeah. This guy's like pretty. Pretty cool. Like what. This could go wrong.
10:16Marques BrownleeI don't know. You trust him more than I do.
10:18Elon MuskYeah. Okay.
10:19Marques BrownleeAll right.
10:20Elon MuskOkay. All right.
10:21Marques BrownleeGood job. Good job, robot. Yeah. I see a lot of silver and I see a lot of white. Model X just in New Jersey.
10:30Elon MuskBlack and white are the two most colors. The two most popular colors.
10:33Marques BrownleeOkay.
10:34Elon MuskThe white Mac are like black.
10:37Marques BrownleeSlight.
10:37Elon MuskIs slightly more popular than white in the US but in like Europe it's way more popular. Like, white is a very rare color in Europe per car.
10:44Marques BrownleeOkay.
10:45Elon MuskIn the US it's like, it's about even with black. Black and white are two more stone colors.
10:49Marques BrownleeGot it.
10:50Elon MuskAnd here you can see battery pack. This is like a mating station for the battery pack.
10:59Marques BrownleeOh. This is literally connecting the battery to the car.
11:09Elon MuskHere you can see it's like a combination of manual and automatic.
11:13Marques BrownleeSo it's like they're lining it up.
11:15Elon MuskYeah, exactly. It's done primarily by the robot system, by the automated system. But then you've got a person just making sure that the fine tuning is there.
11:24Marques BrownleeGotcha. How do you feel about matte? Matte or satin colors?
11:29Elon MuskActually, you know about that a lot. I actually like the aesthetics of matte. It's really tricky to repair matte. So like glass, you can polish it out with matte.
11:40Elon MuskIf you get like a little ding, it's really hard to then rematch the so it looks like an even matte. You can't just like, you know, that's a fair point.
11:48Marques BrownleeYeah.
11:49Elon MuskSo it's doable. It's. It's something actually we would like to do matte in the future. But like right now, for example, like the paint shop's really operating at full tilt.
12:00Elon MuskSo adding any complexity to the paint shop would not be wise right now. But I think it'd be a cool thing to do in the future. But these are sub assemblies.
12:07Elon MuskSo you can see like the front and rear drive units being built up and the sub assemblies then feed the main assembly line.
12:13Marques BrownleeThese are long assembly lines.
12:15Elon MuskOh, yeah. Well, it's integrating SNS.
12:19Marques BrownleeOkay.
12:20Elon MuskAnd it's making about 2,000 cars a week.
12:23Marques BrownleeIs Model 3 entirely, completely separate, I guess inside the same building, but separate whole process.
12:29Elon MuskThe only place where model 3 and S and X come together is in the paint shop. So the paint shop is processing S3 and X simultaneously down the same line.
12:40Elon MuskBut otherwise general assembly is separate. Buddy's separate. Yeah. Everything else is separate. So just the paint shop where they come together.
12:47Marques BrownleeYou've mentioned you've slept in the factory. To be able to immediately diagnose problems and hands on, fix what's not right. What type of things happen that you can immediately fix or immediately take action on?
13:03Elon MuskActually, last three months last year, I mostly spent at gigafactory trying to help fix the battery production. So module production. And it's just. It's a lot of little things.
13:18Elon MuskLike looking at each little tiny part, each process. Say, is the process necessary? Because the best part is no part. Best part, process is no process. And occasionally at the design level, you think something's necessary, but then it turns out it's not.
13:34Elon MuskSo it's just like making sure. Connecting between design and manufacturing next year, making sure we close the leaves on that. Just saying like, hey, is this. If. Let's say it's a.
13:48Elon MuskIt's like it's a lot of real simple stuff, but it's like times a thousand. So if we have like a automated bolt driver going in, like what's the RPM and torque settings for the bolt driver?
13:59Elon MuskCan we make that go faster? Usually you can. Unnecessary movements. Like for example, I actually don't really like the fact that we lift the cars over and back.
14:12Marques BrownleeIdeally that would be a robot handoff. Yeah. If you're getting rid of a middle stage.
14:16Elon MuskYeah, exactly. Because the middle stage, what the robotics is like putting it on a turntable and then the turntable's rotating and another robot's picking it up. It's actually problem is like, sometimes the turntable breaks down and so.
14:28Elon MuskOkay, so it's like, okay, let's eliminate the turntable and just have robot go to robot. And then you don't have, like turntable brakers to consider.
14:36Marques BrownleeSo it's a lot of minimizing things that can go wrong and maximizing the efficiency of the simple things that go right.
14:44Elon MuskIt's like design necessity of every part and every process. The speed at which especially the robots are going.
14:59Elon MuskIs there any unnecessary movement in the production line that some value added? Like we're actually doing something like replacing elements of the production system that are
15:11Marques Brownleenot needed or redundant.
15:14Elon MuskExactly.