Transcription
[Music] Before Tesla moved back in October 2010, this factory in Fremont was the home of NUMMI, which was a joint venture between GM Motors and Toyota. It was at the time where, you know, the auto industry was struggling, and we were able to buy this factory for a relatively low purchase price. And we decided to essentially refurbish the factory from scratch.
I was based at SpaceX making rockets, and the SpaceX factory was really super clean, super light, super open. And so when we were able to acquire the Tesla factory, we said, "Okay, we need to make it similar to SpaceX. We're going to paint the ceilings white, the columns white. We're going to make it bright. We have the ability to have skylights. We're going to have the light from the sky." You know, and the psychology of that is, if you want quality, you need people to feel at ease. You need people to feel like this is a quality place here. I need to make a quality [Music] product.
We constantly try to improve process efficiency. We're utilizing automation to the fullest. We have about 60 robots, the latest technology you can find on the planet, that are able to do very diverse tasks. Robots are extremely good at repetitivity, accuracy of motion, but humans are more intelligent than robots. Therefore, we need to use humans where there's a lot of value for that intelligence. Here, we're in Silicon Valley, right? So you have wonderful universities, you know, Stanford, Berkeley, UC Davis, you name it. So we have a lot of talent. So we want to take full advantage of having highly educated people help us improve the automation.
What is unique about building the Model S as an electric vehicle is a lot of the components are actually very different, like the drive units, the battery pack, the battery modules. A lot of those components do not exist anywhere else. So we need to do a lot more than any other factories that I have been at in terms of subprocesses inside the factory. We do about 95% of our stamping in-house. We do a lot of the machining in-house. We do some coating in-house. We do painting in-house. We do the center displays in-house. So the level of integration is very, very high. And because everything is here, it speeds things up greatly. And that speed has a lot of intrinsic value in terms of innovation, adaptability, flexibility, all of that.
In the future, we have a lot of opportunity to grow and bring more of this product to the market. And so, you know, huge potential here. [Music]