Rivian has gained one of Tesla’s top engineers to offer his expertise on battery cell production as Rivian’s new Director of Manufacturing Engineering.
Victor Prajapati first worked as manager of manufacturing engineering at American solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, before joining Tesla’s team in 2017.
Unfortunately for Prajapati, he joined the EV giant’s team during what Tesla CEO, Elon Musk refers to as “production hell,” otherwise known as the beginning of Model 3 production. More recently, Prajapati became a senior manager in charge of the cell manufacturing engineering at Tesla.
Fortunately for the automaker, Prajapati’s talents led to an important project that helped get Tesla out of the depths of production hell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he “Managed one of the critical bottlenecks for Model 3 production during “production hell” ramping the line from <10 cars/week to 3,000 cars/week following an S-curve, managing a team of highly talented engineers and working with all of Tesla resources.”
Check out a list of some of Prajapati’s accomplishments at Tesla below:
-Helped build the Cell Manufacturing Engineering division at Tesla
-Lead team to deliver 3 manufacturing lines (protoype, pilot and full production)
-Lead the acquisition of Hibar
-Built a manufacturing engineering team at Tesla to interface with Panasonic to quickly analyze the pareto of bottlenecks on the manufacturing line, once identified provide line side support to get to root cause and relieve bottlenecks.