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Everyone keeps talking about the cars... when it's really about the car factory: > Ford has 23 global assembly plants that built 6,651,000 cars and trucks in 2

Everyone keeps talking about the cars... when it's really about the car factory: > Ford has 23 global assembly plants that built 6,651,000 cars and trucks in 2016. [...] Elon Musk can imagine a single Tesla factory producing 5.25 million cars per year per assembly line [...]. > If this becomes the way to go for global car makers then Ford has 22 assembly plants it needs to scrap. I wrote scrap rather than sell because if every one of Ford’s competitors is doing the same thing there won’t be any buyers for those old factories. [1] http://www.cringely.com/2017/06/05/the-robots-are-coming/ http://www.cringely.com/2017/06/05/the-robots-are-coming/

Aloha 9y ago
Consider for a moment the logistics of moving 14,383 cars per day out of a single factory, nevermind all the parts needed to build them. (assuming a 15 foot long car, its (ballpark number) 43 miles of cars parked end to end.. per day). The logistics and storage of both material and finished goods are part of why Ford has 22 factories to produce 6.5 million cars.
- mchristen 9y ago
  Well one thing Tesla has going for them is that they have way less parts per car when compared against traditional ICE based drive trains.
  - mentos 9y ago
    as well as the cars can drive themselves out of the factory
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      And one factory that's not gonna do too well when the Pacific plate decides it's had enough of SV's BS and shakes things up.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    Total parts, perhaps, total assemblies - not really.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > 43 miles of cars parked end to end.. per day So two miles per hour? That doesn't actually sound too bad.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    around 560 cars per hour - consider that a normal auto plant runs at 60-100 cars per hour - so what was proposed by the linked post was a 600-1000% increase in production - its largely a impossibility - because imagine for a moment of parking 10 cars per minute (or so) of operation.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      So you hire more people to do the parking...? What's impossible there? That's if we assume they don't just self-park. The hard parts by far are actual production and getting in enough materials. If you can get in a thousand each of every single part, it's easy in comparison to get a thousand assembled cars back out.
      - zhengyi13 9y ago
        Thinking just a little further, once the autonomy of the vehicle is good enough, there's no need to park the vehicle at all - you just tell it to start driving to a dealership or an owner's home. There'd be some additional logistics to figure out how to recharge the vehicle as necessary on route, but that's a very different problem, and probably also amenable to automation.
      - Aloha 9y ago
        its the space to store the cars, as well as the logistics of shipping them out - 14,000 cars comes out (optimistically) about 650 autoracks (railcars) per day - each one of those autoracks is 145 feet long. The scale of what is being discussed is near impossible, as it would mean an plant several orders of magnitude larger then any other ever constructed.. and I'm just focusing on the output - the logistics for the inputs for manufacturing are just as daunting.

Aloha 9y ago

Consider for a moment the logistics of moving 14,383 cars per day out of a single factory, nevermind all the parts needed to build them. (assuming a 15 foot long car, its (ballpark number) 43 miles of cars parked end to end.. per day). The logistics and storage of both material and finished goods are part of why Ford has 22 factories to produce 6.5 million cars.

mchristen 9y ago
Well one thing Tesla has going for them is that they have way less parts per car when compared against traditional ICE based drive trains.
- mentos 9y ago
  as well as the cars can drive themselves out of the factory
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    And one factory that's not gonna do too well when the Pacific plate decides it's had enough of SV's BS and shakes things up.
- Aloha 9y ago
  Total parts, perhaps, total assemblies - not really.
Dylan16807 9y ago
> 43 miles of cars parked end to end.. per day So two miles per hour? That doesn't actually sound too bad.
- Aloha 9y ago
  around 560 cars per hour - consider that a normal auto plant runs at 60-100 cars per hour - so what was proposed by the linked post was a 600-1000% increase in production - its largely a impossibility - because imagine for a moment of parking 10 cars per minute (or so) of operation.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    So you hire more people to do the parking...? What's impossible there? That's if we assume they don't just self-park. The hard parts by far are actual production and getting in enough materials. If you can get in a thousand each of every single part, it's easy in comparison to get a thousand assembled cars back out.
    - zhengyi13 9y ago
      Thinking just a little further, once the autonomy of the vehicle is good enough, there's no need to park the vehicle at all - you just tell it to start driving to a dealership or an owner's home. There'd be some additional logistics to figure out how to recharge the vehicle as necessary on route, but that's a very different problem, and probably also amenable to automation.
    - Aloha 9y ago
      its the space to store the cars, as well as the logistics of shipping them out - 14,000 cars comes out (optimistically) about 650 autoracks (railcars) per day - each one of those autoracks is 145 feet long. The scale of what is being discussed is near impossible, as it would mean an plant several orders of magnitude larger then any other ever constructed.. and I'm just focusing on the output - the logistics for the inputs for manufacturing are just as daunting.