The Cybercab production line is ramping faster than anyone at Tesla expected it to.
That’s the sense I got from watching the video below. Logistics in the target cities are the limiting factor right now for deployment: things like overnight parking, cleaning, charging. Normally Tesla wouldn’t be caught out by something like this, but I think the speed of the Cybercab ramp caught everyone by surprise.
Elon cautioned us earlier in the year that the manufacturing ramp was going to be slow since it was the first brand new way of building cars in over a hundred years.
But I think Tesla hit it out of the park with the unboxed manufacturing process. It has turned out that the process simply worked and delivered what they hoped it would, which is extreme process efficiency.
This might even mean Tesla’s ability to bring the next mass market car to market will happen that much quicker.
Cool things I learned from this Tesla Cybercab engineering walkthrough.
They now have a wireless battery management system. Each of 4 battery modules has its own BMS board which reports via radio to the battery controller. Normally, you’d have a centralized BMS and tons of sense wires going to it. This is a BOM cost savings and manufacturing efficiency win.
No more pyro fuse. Tesla had done away with low voltage fuses a long time ago via power semiconductors, and now they’ve done the same for the high voltage, high current main battery pack. In low speed crashes, the system can isolate the battery, but now still be able to turn it back on if no high voltage faults are detected. This reduces maintenance costs.
No e-coatings on most castings. Tesla’s special aluminum alloys are robust enough to last without coatings.
No refrigerant being routed through the car. All other cars route pressurized refrigerant to cool the cabin. The Cybercab instead just routes Ethylene Glycol keeping the refrigerant and compressor in a sealed vessel. This reduces maintenance expense since refrigerant leaks are expensive to fix. It has the downside of less cabin cooling power, but for a continuously used vehicle or one that has known pickup times, the computer can pre cool long enough in advance to make it work.