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>By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is less than a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 full-time
by eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is less than a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 full-time Reno-based workers, according to a new hiring forecast from Tesla.
Unless those workers will be putting in thousands of hours per week (impossible, I know), this implies some truly prodigious productivity statistics: that by using the best available manufacturing techniques, they can double the world's battery production on 260,000 hours/week of labor.
- RoboTeddy 10y agoAnyone know how many full-time workers are employed in battery factories currently? With that figure we could estimate the Gigafactory productivity multiplier for labor.
- digikata 10y agoI think a lot is only possible when you aren't tying you own hands with re-using/preserving already built capital equipment.
- toomuchtodo 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
- digikata 10y agoI'm not sure I'd class the Gigafactory as a disruption in the "Innovators dilemma" sense. I think some of the genius of Musk is that his bets actually minimize the big unknowns in a physical realm while at this point in the business dimension, the demand for Tesla's new model is known to sufficient certainty that this factory is needed to fill the capacity. The core battery tech isn't new, but the machinery and the automation of the process is.. but that's a much smaller risk than say trying to build this factory on a "disruptive" new battery tech.
- marvin 10y agoAlso, Tesla is building out an energy storage business that can (according to Tesla's conference calls) eat a practically unlimited amount of battery packs with decent margins. So they also have some insurance there in case car demand should be lower than anticipated, or car production should hit delays.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago> Unless those workers will be putting in thousands of hours per week (impossible, I know), this implies some truly prodigious productivity statistics: that by using the best available manufacturing techniques, they can double the world's battery production on 260,000 hours/week of labor. Tesla acquired a renowned German manufacturing automation firm [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if the Gigafactory is heavily automated as well. [1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/08/tesla-acquires-german-engineering-firm-create-tesla-advanced-automation-germany/ https://electrek.co/2016/11/08/tesla-acquires-german-enginee...
- simonebrunozzi 10y agoPart of the manufacturing has been built by Panasonic, in partnership with Tesla, based on their existing expertise on how to produce batteries at scale.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoYes, Tesla is leaning very heavily on Panosonic as a manufacturing partner at both the Gigafactory and the Solar City plant in Buffalo, New York.
- tonylemesmer 10y agoI've heard somewhere (possibly in a BBC TV report) that batteries are passed through a hole in the floor from Tesla to Panasonic enclaves because neither company wants the other to know fully about the processes required to finish the final product. Hence the joint venture on one site. edit: ok, the article[0] doesn't mention secrecy as the motive but yes a hole is involved. And the motive for a single site is to reduce transportation costs. [0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36893104 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36893104
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoVery impressive to see all those jokes about "fully automated luxury blah blah blah" starting to come true!
- 10y ago
- gph 10y ago>that by using the best available manufacturing techniques, they can double the world's battery production on 260,000 hours/week of labor. Mostly true, but to get a complete figure you might also factor in labor hours from upstream vendors which supply parts and/or raw materials. Increased battery production also means increased raw material extraction/processing/transportation. Still impressive though. There's probably less than 50k workers involved in producing the world's battery supply.
- flexie 10y agoRelated; the factory is said to be 1.3M square meters when completed. So each employee will have 200 square meters for himself and his robot coworkers. Except of course that they are probably not at work at the same time. So maybe 600 square meters.
- adrianN 10y agoSo if the workers are equally distributed they never see each other except at the entrance and during lunch. Nice.
- lmm 10y agoSquare meter numbers sound bigger than they are because they're, well, squared. 600 square meters is less than 25 meters square.
- mikeyouse 10y agoI refer to it occasionally since I toured it once upon a time but General Motors built a new assembly factory near Lansing, Michigan that was the most advanced facility in the world at the time. It's 320,000 sq. meters and employs about 3,800 people across three shifts, so call it 1,300/shift to make the math easy. That's about 1 employee per 250 sq. meters. Except that the machines and robots that build the modern world are enormous. They take up a huge percentage of the area of the factory. The work that the humans actually performed was typically in small teams of 4-5 people as they wound cabling through the frame, ensured everything was aligned properly, performed a few welds that their 5-axis welders couldn't efficiently reach, etc. It was fascinating to see where the robotic investment wasn't worth it at the time.
- lsaferite 10y agoI find the fact that some of these jobs are still not effective to be done by robots fascinating. At what point will we automate those jobs as well? Is it just the cost/benefit ratio is wrong currently? I cannot believe that it's strictly impossible to make a robot that can do all those task.
- gutnor 10y agoIt definitively put stuff into perspective. 6500 jobs is a big number in human scale. That's more people that you know. But that's 0.05% of the manufacturing jobs in the US alone. 0.05% of the manufacturing power of the US fitted with the latest tech match the output of the whole Lithium-ion battery sector. Obviously that's 1 specific field and product and you can't extrapolate to everything else, but really you can't help but think that even maintaining current employment in manufacturing will require staggering increase in manufacturing output of the US. If Trump is even a bit serious about trying (and has the congress support for it), it would require a colossal disruption of the market either through regulation, taxation, investment, ...
- makomk 10y agoIf I remember correctly, Tesla are supposedly unusually keen on automation. Possibly more so than the economics actually justify, even - or at least, there were some doubts amongst industry experts as to whether the ways in which they automated tasks actually made sense, given the cost and speed of the robots they were using compared to a human.
- Qwertious 10y ago"or at least, there were some doubts amongst industry experts as to whether the ways in which they automated tasks actually made sense, given the cost and speed of the robots they were using compared to a human." That makes sense, considering that Tesla's approach seems to be to get the tech set up first, and then make it economical with R&D breakthroughs later.
- PeterisP 10y agoIt's all a front set up to provide a plausible reason for building the infrastructure that our upcoming AI robotic overlords requested from Elon.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago6500 people need to live somewhere. They need to eat. They need haircuts. They need medical services. And all those other people need the same services too. I could keep going but you get the idea. Jobs create more jobs which create more jobs.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoWhat's your source on that? I don't understand why it takes so much labor. I would have thought automation to be massive.
- jlmorton 10y agoWell, let's put it another way. At 50 GWh, I believe the Gigafactory will be producing at least 2.5 billion individual batteries annually. If you divide that by 6,500 employees supporting the manufacturing, it comes to about 385,000 batteries produced per employee per year.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoOk, but assembly lines, robots, automation. They don't have to necessarily employ the truck drivers/transport/distributors. So what is the biggest labor item?
- sowbug 10y agoSpaceX (another of Elon Musk's companies) has achieved similar feats in the realm of space flight. According to his biography <https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/0062301233> https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/..., Musk is particularly good at identifying supply-chain components that can be economically produced in-house. The Gigafactory looks like the same general strategy, and if it pays off as well as the SpaceX case has, they have a good chance of achieving their production goals.
- Aeolun 10y agoMost supply-chain components can be economically produced in-house. You just need the capital to build a 5B factory, which is a whole different kind of problem in my opinion.
- caseysoftware 10y agoWhat happens when he starts combining companies? Space X launches the rocket that takes solar-powered self-driving machinery to Mars which starts building solar-powered settlements. By the time we get there, we're not fighting for basic survival, we're just moving in...