In a new time-lapse video released by EV giant Tesla, we see a glimpse of what CEO Elon Musk refers to as Tesla’s “Alien dreadnought” at Gigafactory Shanghai.
Musk is known for his outlandish ideas and the CEO has been vocal about his goal of wanting the factory to look more “alien” than a factory. He wants the factory to be seen as a product, or the machine that builds the machines in his words. A machine that will ultimately produce electric vehicles at a speed that hasn’t yet been seen on the auto market.
However, this isn’t the first we’ve heard of this idea from Musk. The idea was originally introduced Tesla’s Fremont factory with the production of its Model 3s. Musk stated the first version of the Model 3 production line will only be a “version 0.5” of the “alien dreadnought.” However, he expects a “version 3” in a few years following automation updates to the line.
According to the CEO “By version 3, it won’t look like anything else. You can’t have people in the production line itself, otherwise you drop to people speed. So there will be no people in production process itself. People will maintain the machines, upgrade them, and deal with anomalies.”
In the video posted by Tesla’s official Weibo account we can see eight robots working together on one car. It does fall a little short looking at the automated line described by Musk but it definitely shows progress toward it’s “alien dreadnought”.
Of course the production capacity is slower than what appears in the video thanks to the time-lapsed footage. Regardless, the factory’s pace has been increasingly impressive with Tesla’s annual production capacity at Giga Shanghai hitting 200,000 vehicles at the end of last quarter.