To compete with China, Tesla will abandon a century-old production strategy

The Chinese offensive is demanding creativity from Western manufacturers, who find themselves obliged to rediscover processes and explore new materials, in order to keep up with the competition. In this sense, Tesla plans to abandon a strategy used for many years in the automotive industry: the series assembly line introduced by Henry Ford.

Tesla has already outlined its plan to obtain a car capable of standing up to Chinese proposals. With a $25,000 model in sight, the electric car manufacturer will first review the manufacturing process.

If in 1923 the series assembly line introduced by Henry Ford was considered revolutionary for the industry, in 2024 it is possible that there will be other equally capable approaches.

Therefore, Tesla will be adopting what it calls an "unboxed" approach. According to Automotive News, this is more similar to building Legos than a traditional production line. For Tesla, this process, still used by many manufacturers, is full of inefficiencies, for the following reasons:

• Moving an object the size of a car around a factory takes up a lot of space;
• Painting an entire machine, rather than just the panels that need to be painted, takes time and wastes energy;
• Working from a large structure means that only a few people can assemble the parts at any given time.

Instead of a car moving along a linear conveyor belt, Tesla intends for parts to be assembled simultaneously in specific areas, coming together at the end.

According to the American manufacturer, the change could reduce the production area by more than 40%, allowing the company to build future factories much faster and with less expense. This approach should result in cheaper cars.

Although Tesla estimates that the success of its production approach could reduce associated costs by half, a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis estimated that the new modular manufacturing process would reduce costs by 33% - not half.

Could Tesla's "unboxed" approach result in cheaper cars?

Although the intention is known, there are not yet many details about this new approach or when it will be put into practice. In January, Elon Musk said that Tesla was "very advanced" in manufacturing a cheaper car and that it should begin production at the end of next year.

At the time, despite having mentioned the new "revolutionary manufacturing system", which he classified as "much more advanced than any automotive manufacturing system in the world, by a significant margin", the executive director did not give details.

The "unboxed" method does not require a large skeleton of a machine to move throughout a factory, taking shape throughout the process. In turn, this implies that the machine is divided into small groups and the various components of the vehicle are worked on simultaneously, before coming together at the end, at a single production point.

According to an analysis by Mathew Vachaparampil, chief executive of Caresoft, an automotive engineering and benchmarking company, his company's engineers spent 200,000 hours building a digital replica of the "unboxed" Tesla, and discovered that Tesla's ambitions Elon Musk are technically possible. In fact, according to Vachaparampil they would make “enormous sense in financial terms”.