odysseus2000 wrote:Interesting how it is all put together and the relatively slow speed of the line and component installation.
If they have 4 model 3 lines, producing 5000 per week, that is 1250 cars per line per week, about 178 cars per day per line, then each car on full 24-7 production takes about 7x24/178 = 168/178 ~ 1 hour to make.
Guessing it likely takes about 0.5 hours to weld up the metal, paint and dry, leaving about 0.5 hours to put all the components in, test etc.
I think you have a fundemental misunderstanding of how a production line works.
Your assumption is that there is one car on the production line at a time....Hence the eroneous conclusion that a car takes an hour to make.
In practice there will be many cars being built in a serial manner on the line with each car slowly moving forward between workstations each of which completes a small part of the work. Each work station will have a set of tasks that fill a roughly fixed time slot (say 2-3 minutes) before the car moves onto the next work station.
Welding of the body parts will probably be done off line in a separate shop - probably by robots (in a modern plant) - as will some of the sub system assemblies (i.e. electrical wiring systems) or delivered part assembled from a sub contractor.
The production line itself could be anywhere from around 300 to 900 meters in length and a car can take several hours to move from the start of the line to rolling off the end of the line through inspaction.
As redsturgeon said, the line looks relatively undeveloped and haphazard. It takes time to set up efficient supply chains, develop a balanced production line with effective material flows and train workers to the level that is needed to produce cars to modern day standards.
Setting up the line in the time that it has taken Tesla is an incredible achievement but it is not enough to produce top quality cars reliably.