Elon Musk revives his dream of factory ‘alien battleship’, for batteries

• Tesla and CEO Elon Musk spent a lot of time talking about a new battery design at the company’s long-awaited “Battery Day” on Tuesday.
• Musk also returned to a long-standing concern with reinventing manufacturing, what he calls the “machine that builds the machine.”
• In 2016, Musk came up with the catchy term “alien battleship” to explain what the factory of the future would look like.
• Despite Tesla’s checkered history with automating his plants, Musk hasn’t given up on the idea; far from it, it is actually duplicating the concept.
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting and the highly touted “Battery Day” on Tuesday ended up presenting investors with a flood of extremely technical information to deal with.

But amid the flood, CEO Elon Musk revived an idea that he has been pushing for years, and which in the end could be a much bigger affair than the teasers Tesla hosted at the event to promote.

That’s right: Tesla’s infamous “alien battleship”, Musk’s presumed dead factory of the future, is back. And so is Musk’s almost manic devotion to reinventing manufacturing, with Tesla at the forefront.

A bigger battery and a better factory

Tesla obsessives often focus on the company’s stock history. But beyond the financial fireworks, the automaker is a technology and engineering company – the first electric car company to establish itself firmly in the modern era and the first successful American car brand since Chrysler. Technology and engineering were the stars of Tuesday’s show. (So ​​much so that Musk, usually a solo artist, shared the stage with Drew Baglino, who oversees the engineering of the powertrain and power, the heart of every Tesla vehicle and storage system.)

Despite all the immense details in a new lithium-ion battery cell design, the upshot is that Tesla believes it has successfully developed a larger cell than it currently uses: a new cylindrical unit that could provide more power. at a lower cost.

Simply put, if Tesla hopes to achieve Musk’s stated goal of building 20 million vehicles a year, it will require a staggering number of new cells. So the company is aggressively attacking the problem, and the results initially seem promising.

That was the plot of Tuesday. But a more intriguing and familiar subplot to longtime Tesla fans was Musk’s constant preoccupation with manufacturing. He calls her “the machine that builds the machine,” and routinely argues that she, not cars, trucks, or batteries, will be Tesla’s most significant contribution to the future.

This is because replacing gasoline-powered cars with battery-powered alternatives requires the construction of around 300 electric units – for the US alone, the number is approaching a billion worldwide.

A ridiculous problem to solve

Musk has concluded, he said Tuesday, that Tesla needs to make 20 million cars a year at some point, double what the industry-leading Renault-Nissan did in 2019. Tesla delivered about 360,000 vehicles last year and is targeting to 500,000 by 2020. With two factories in the US (one in California and one in Nevada), plus a new plant in China, and two planned factories for Germany and Texas, Tesla could have roughly 2 to 3 million in capacity annual total for vehicle production by 2023..

Industry standards say that Tesla would require 40 factories to reach the 20 million mark. Musk says the way we build vehicles is too slow.

Musk has tried to change that before: In 2016, he envisioned a Model 3 and Model Y factory so automated and different from what exists today, he called it the “alien battleship.”

It was a great failure. Tesla’s attempt to automate its first Model 3 assembly line ruined production to such an extent that Musk’s team had to retreat to a simplified assembly line from around 1910 under a tent in the parking lot of their Fremont factory. . (The move was derided at the time, but it was actually the best solution to Tesla’s immediate hardship. And, to the company’s credit, it designed its new factory in China to make cars much more efficiently.)

Musk is not giving up on the “machine that builds the machine”

Musk, however, has not given up on the idea. A few years ago, he complained about the dominant “Toyota Production System,” developed by the Japanese giant in the 1970s and 1980s and now widely emulated as part of a global supply chain network that has revolutionized car manufacturing. It’s generally referred to as “just-in-time” or “lean” manufacturing, and Musk doesn’t think it can get the job done anymore.

That is why Tesla has been quietly refining the concept of the machine that builds the machine. Along with a host of battery details, Musk said Tesla is now casting the front and rear sections of its new Model Y with a proprietary aluminum alloy. This means that the basic architecture of future Tesla vehicles, assuming the new battery cell design works, would require only three large pieces: the cast aluminum alloy front and rear, and the structural battery in the middle.

So if Tesla can figure out how to automate battery production, almost all of its vehicles could be robotically assembled. He would still need humans for detail work, but he would need far fewer. Fewer humans and more robots would mean a factory that can run at a much higher speed.

And Tesla sees extreme-speed battery manufacturing as a problem that has now been solved, but not for lithium-ion cells. Musk and his team suggested bottling and papermaking lines as models. These intricate contraptions hum at what Musk likened to highway speeds, without stopping. This is how we end up with billions of bottles of soda every year.

His optimism and analogies aside, Musk has been chided for Tesla’s inability to automate manufacturing as quickly as he previously hoped. But that has not diminished his ambition. And that’s why Tesla spent as much time talking about battery and car manufacturing on Tuesday as it did about batteries and cars.