While Tesla’s Mode 3 has been welcomed with open arms from consumers, it’s been through a lot of troubles in terms of production volumes. In an interview with CBS’s Gayle King, Tesla CEO Elon Musk provided some insight as to where the company fell short in the production process.
Musk escorted King through the company Fremont, California-based factory, and that’s when he started saying that Tesla might’ve been relying too much on robots that are involved in car production process and that the company would benefit from having more humans involved in the process. King opined out loud in some cases, saying that robots probably slowed down production, to which Musk responded “yes, they did.”
During a shareholders meeting in 2016, he brought attention to the factory itself as providing a solution to the problems the company has experienced. “We realized that the true problem, the true difficulty, and where the greatest potential is – is building the machine that makes the machine,” Musk said. “In other words, it’s building the factory.” So far though, the company hasn’t attained the balance between machines and the roughly 10,000 workers at the Fremont factory.
It’s also worth mentioning that robots aren’t the only issue here. During the company’s most recent earnings call, Musk pointed out that issues with battery module production at the company’s Gigafactory in Nevada was the “limiting factor” in Model 3 output.
“We were probably a little overconfident, a little complacent, in thinking this is something we understand,” he said at the time. “We put a lot of attention on other things and just got too comfortable with our ability to do battery modules, because we’ve been doing that since the start of the company.”
