{{ The Cybercab is built without a steering wheel, pedals, or side mirrors, designed from the ground up for unsupervised autonomous operation. Musk described the manufacturing approach as closer to consumer electronics than traditional car production, targeting a cycle time of one unit every ten seconds at full scale. }}
intercst
Sure. I believe that.
Musk stated in 2020 that Tesla could reach 20 million vehicles/year "probably before 2030," contingent on excellent execution.
Somehow “excellent execution” got lost under the cloud of Twitter, rockets, tunnels, brain surgery, DOGE, and some others, I’m sure.
LOL…
That would be a production rate of 8640 in a 24 hour period (Tesla factories run 24 hours a day).
That would be 60,480 a week (Tesla builds on weekends).
That would be roughly 3,000,000 a year (allowing for a couple weeks for maintenance and holidays).
Or, roughly twice the number of all the cars they sold worldwide last year.
Did the Onion write this story?
We are too old to appreciate this, but we can observe.
My nephews and niece don’t want to drive. Their ages 28, 25, 24, 23. Side note my niece is enrolling Yale Law School for this August.
The next generation sees a lot of footage of car accidents.
Musk’s market is huge. Technology wise Tesla can deliver.
Ford supported the Germans during WW II. People got over it quickly. Musk’s indisgressions don’t matter.
As Musk notes, he’s running the factory like an i-phone production line, rather than a car factory.
intercst
Which are run 24 hours a day.
Ah, life in Zhengzhou.
DB2
Three million a year?
There are ~350 million people in USA, that means EVERYONE gets ONE robotaxi with in ten years???
There are 16 million new cars sold each year, so he is going to replace 19% of all car sales each year???
There are ~300,000 registered taxi, uber, lift drivers in 2003, but he is going to shove out 10x that number???
All I see from this headline is waste. Cars that will never be recycled, trash that will pile up from disposable products and the lack of caring about a product that pressboard dressers and walmart quality have taught most of America to think is normal.
This is an environmental nightmare and there is NO need for that level of production at all.
Let’s not forget that Musk manufactured 50,000 excess EVs in 4Q25. He can build it, but they ain’t coming.
I think you lost a decimal. At a production rate of 3 MM/yr it would take 117 years to deliver a vehicle to 350 million people.
But Musk’s production rate isn’t really that outlandish. The most efficient auto factories complete a vehicle about once every 60 seconds. If he 's doing it every 10 seconds that’s only 6 times faster.
intercst
I remember touring the Ford Claycomo plant in 1975 or 1976. They were building Mavericks at the time. I remember the tour guide saying they were building 500 cars per shift. I’m guessing it was an 8-hour shift. That’s 62.5 seconds per car. It was interesting to see.
Musk is trying to make his vehicles in larger pieces. Tesla uses massive die-casting machines known as Giga Presses to produce large, single-piece structural components of their vehicle chassis, rather than stamping dozens of smaller, separate parts and welding them together as the Ford plant you visited likely was doing.
intercst
What is the market for this product?
Tesla has not demonstrated autonomy at any meaningful economic scale and I don’t see much demand for a two-seat vehicle.
How often do you see more than 1 or 2 passengers in a taxi? Google tells me that makes up about 90% of the fares. They can always dispatch a larger vehicle when required.
intercst
Not only that, Tesla reengineered the assembly line to what they call the unboxed process
Google AI:
Tesla’s “unboxed process” is a radical, patented manufacturing paradigm shift designed to replace the traditional 100-year-old linear automotive assembly line with a modular, parallel approach, aiming to slash production costs by up to 50%. Instead of building a car sequentially on a long conveyor belt, Tesla breaks the vehicle into smaller subassemblies—front, rear, seats, and battery—which are assembled simultaneously and merged at the final step.
This approach is central to producing future high-volume, low-cost vehicles, including the proposed $25,000 model and the dedicated Cybercab.
Key Components of the Unboxed Process
- Parallel Assembly: Rather than one long line, different parts of the car are built separately, similar to building with Legos, and then combined.
- Structural Battery/Giga Casting: The vehicle uses large single-piece castings for the front and rear, attached directly to the battery pack, which acts as the chassis backbone.
- “No Paint Shop” Approach: The process allows for pre-painting or pre-finishing specific modules before assembly, significantly reducing the size of the paint shop, which is typically the largest part of a factory.
- Improved Interior Access: Because the car is not a pre-assembled “box” yet, robots and humans can install seats and dashboards from the side more easily before the body sides are attached.
Advantages Over Traditional Manufacturing
- Reduced Factory Footprint: The new process is expected to reduce factory space requirements by 40%.
- Significant Cost Reductions: By eliminating over 100 traditional stamping and welding steps, it aims to reduce production costs by 50%.
- Higher Throughput: The method aims for a much faster cycle time, with targets to produce a vehicle every 5 to 10 seconds, compared to roughly 33 seconds for the current Model Y line.
- Lower Part Count: It significantly lowers the total number of parts, leading to lighter vehicles and faster production.
Tesla has already started implementing aspects of this process with the Model Y, utilizing pre-assembled structural battery packs, and it is fully integrated into the production planning for future models at Gigafactory Texas.
The Captain
Tesla hasn’t demonstrated autonomy at a scale to be meaningful economically.
Will Tesla drive the Cybercab 2-seater with a human, leaving 1 seat for a passenger?
His whole point was that Tesla hasn’t shown they can deliver meaningful autonomy and there’s not much demand for a two seat vehicle. The car isn’t usable as an autonomous taxi, and likely can’t be sold to buyers at anywhere near that volume even if they put in a steering wheel. So it’s incredibly unlikely that they’re actually going to build 3 million units of that car in a single year any time in the next decade or more, so his claims about producing at that “insane” rate are literally garbage.
The rising fuel prices from the Israel-Iran War seem to have improved EV sales.
intercst
When does the tranche of Musk’s $1 Trillion pay package requiring 10 million FSD subscriptions expire? I bet we’ll have it before then.
intercst
Sure, even if he has to sell them all to SpaceX and Boring Tunnel company fleets 