The Tesla factory...
America's largest industrial plant.
Behind me is one of the largest hydraulic stamping presses
in north America.
It's actually seven stories high.
For this cutting-edge facility
to build electric cars...
Suddenly, science fiction isn't tomorrow, it is today.
...engineers had to look to the past...
This beautiful machine, it's one of the world's
first electric cars.
Brilliant engineering.
...to make the impossible possible.
... Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
since the industrial revolution,
factories have often been portrayed
as dirty and dangerous places...
Churning out products at the expense of the work force.
But one American factory is challenging this view...
...the Tesla factory.
Located in Fremont, California,
this state-of-the-art automotive manufacturing facility
is kick-starting a new technological era.
And Tesla's Alexis Georgeson has witnessed the birth
of this giant industrial machine.
The processes here, in this factory,
are designed to be as efficient as possible.
It's a 5.3 million square-foot facility.
This American car manufacturer
revolutionized the industry
with the world's first electric sports car.
But producing hundreds of thousands of electric cars
for mass consumption
required an even greater scale of engineering.
That's one of the biggest challenges ahead,
as our CEO Elon Musk has said,
is really building the machine that makes the machine.
Starting production in 2012,
this machine is the biggest factory
in the western hemisphere.
The 5.3 million square-foot factory
employs 6,000 workers and state-of-the-art robots
to transform raw materials into high-tech vehicles
in just a few days.
Here, the staff and some of the world's mightiest machines
come together to cast, stamp, paint, and assemble
component parts into 2,000 cars every week.
That's before they go through the final lap
on the factory's dedicated test track.
But making this many cars in a factory this big
would have been impossible without mass production.
We're rethinking the way
that the automotive industry
has approached production in the past,
through first principles of physics
and through vertical integration
and just really treating this
as an engineering problem, first and foremost.
Once upon a time,
there was no such thing as mass production.
Sword, please.
Everything was made by artisans.
Thanks, peasant.
Though charming and unique...
Tada! hmm.
...the process was inconsistent...
What a chopper.
Mine's a tiddler.
...expensive...
More.
More!
...and slow.
With this approach,
making mass quantities of products was impossible.
What's this?! Gah!
But a revolutionary change was on the horizon.
Architect and historian Benedetto Camerana
is in the iconic city of Venice, Italy,
to reveal where mass production got its start.
In the middle ages, the Republic of Venice
was a political power
with a strong reputation for war and conquest.
The strength of the venetian empire
was based on naval muscle and commercial trade.
Both needed ships and lots of them.
Naval boat building had been carried out
in different shipyards
sprawled throughout the city.
That could take weeks to produce a single galley.
And that was not fast enough.
In the 12th century,
the Venetians developed a game-changing solution.
And this is it...
the Venice arsenale.
Here, they completely re-imagined the way
that ships were built.
For the first time in history,
each individual component of a ship was mast produced...
Across a centralized row of specialized workshops.
The ships were moved around the dockyard
to different workshops.
Each focused on pre-fabricating
the different elements of the ship.
Hulls were made and launched as shells.
They were then towed across the shipyard and equipped
with ready-made masts, rudders, and anchors.
At the final workshop,
they were rigged and set up with oars and armaments.
At its height, they could assemble a galley per day here,
which is truly incredible.
At the arsenale,
venetian shipbuilders invented the production line.
And bringing this production line into the 20th century,
engineer Giacomo matte-Trucco
designed another one-of-a-kind factory
in Turin, Italy,
for the car company fiat, called the lingotto.
When it was completed in 1923,
this was the largest car factory in the world...
five stories high.
For the first time, all aspects of production
came together in a single building.
Specialized workshops were
placed strategically on each floor,
producing parts that would be fitted to the vehicles
as they progressed through the 1,600-foot-long factory.
Raw materials would arrive by rail
to the ground floor of the building.
Here, they would fashion the car components.
On the second floor,
the engines and bodies of the car were made.
One story up, gearboxes and steering were added.
The fourth floor specialized
in brakes and upholstery.
And on the fifth floor, finishing touches were made.
Finally, the completed cars would emerge on the roof...
the most iconic feature of the building.
All the cars coming off the lingotto production line
came here, a purpose-built rooftop test track.
For nearly 60 years,
this phenomenal test track high above the Turin skyline
would have been witness
to the birth of hundreds
of thousands of cars.
For over 50 years, the lingotto factory produced
countless vehicles until 1979.
But its tremendous legacy lives on.
At the Tesla factory in Fremont, California,
the principles of mass production,
first applied at the Venice arsenale
and further developed at the lingotto,
are getting a 21st-century makeover.
We move cars from one end to another.
So much of the factory is vertically integrated.
We're actually producing so many components here, in house,
rather than shipping them from other parts of the world
or other parts of the country.
While the production line principles remain the same,
compared to factories of the past,
the Tesla factory is practically unrecognizable.
We wanted this, first and foremost,
to be a beautiful working environment
that really was a testament to the quality of the products
that we were building here.
So we came in, we repainted the entire space,
we put sunlights in the roof.
We wanted a lot of natural light
and a place where workers could come
and be proud of the craftsmanship
and the space where they were creating these products.
But to create a truly futuristic factory,
filled with cutting-edge robots,
the engineers had to draw
on the great innovations of the past...
The robot is correcting itself to achieve its objective.
...to deliver more impossible engineering.
The Tesla factory.
As the largest industrial plant in America,
this cutting-edge electric car company
has one of the most advanced production lines on the planet.
The 5. 3 million square-foot factory
takes raw materials in at one end,
and in as little as three days,
transforms them into cars.
6,000 workers interact
with the most futuristic technologies
to produce a staggering 2,000 electric cars a week,
all of which go through the final lap
on the dedicated test track.
But to produce vehicles on this vast and ever-growing scale,
engineers had to design with extreme economy.
How do we streamline this?
How do we ramp production?
How do we keep the costs down?
And how to do we make this manufacturing process
as efficient as possible?
To be ultra efficient, the engineers looked
to one of modern history's great breakthroughs...
...robots.
Science communicator Kate Mulcahy
is in southwest England
to find out how a scientific investigation
into brain function
actually led to a breakthrough in robotics.
Oh, lord, alive!
As I attempt to cross this beam,
signals are being sent to my brain
through my eyes, my inner ears,
and my sensory systems.
This feedback helps me to correct my weight distribution,
and, hopefully, I won't fall.
Each time Kate feels herself losing her balance,
he senses warn her.
This sensation is something
that scientists call negative feedback.
Yes!
For decades, scientists tried to incorporate
this negative feedback into robots
so that they could direct themselves.
And in 1948,
American-born neuroscientist William Grey Walter
had a breakthrough
and invented a truly pioneering robot.
And here it is!
Each machine contains two valves,
two relays, two motors, and two sensors...
one for light, and one for movement.
So, essentially, it's a two-cell nervous system,
which, when you think about it,
compared to the billions of nerve cells
that are in our brain, isn't that many.
But it still did something really amazing.
Grey Walter called his device the tortoise.
The tortoise's sensors are designed to sense the light
and move towards it.
So...
You can see it heading towards the light bulb right now.
The tortoise uses a photo-electric cell
to detect the light.
That's the sensor you can see on top of it,
moving back and forth.
When it registers the light, it stops the steering
and moves towards it.
Because there are different light sources
in the room,
the tortoise regularly stops to check its position
before adjusting its direction
to move closer to the brightest light.
So, that's negative feedback.
Just like when I was balancing on the beam
and adjusting myself,
the robot is correcting itself to achieve its objective.
Now, if we put obstacles in its way,
things get really interesting.
The shell of the robot now acts as a bump sensor.
So it's making decisions based on two sensors...
one is sensing the light,
and the other is detecting the obstacles.
Though it may look simple,
this is actually complex behavior.
The tortoise has a different solution
ever time the experiment is run,
and each path it takes involves
a multitude of different
corrections and movements.
Every reaction they make
is a result of sensing the environment around them.
Then, they react and create a new path.
Amazing!
For the first time, a machine could demonstrate
a complex decision-making process,
and this discovery paved the way
for a revolution in robotics.
Autonomous machines have come to replace humans in many realms,
from the domestic to outer space.
And they've revolutionized the industrial world.
But at the Tesla factory in California,
engineers are integrating robots and workers
to a much greater degree
than the factories of the past...
Making it one of the most automated facilities on earth.
Some robots here even resemble Grey Walter's
breakthrough tortoises.
We've solved a tough logistics problem
in the factory, too, with the use of robots.
So our cars actually move around several sections
of the process of production
on these little smart carts.
Their robots that actually
follow these magnetic strips in the floor,
and they move from one section to the next,
following these little strips.
Also using negative feedback,
these robotic vehicles use sensors
to spot people or objects in their way
and wait until the path is clear.
Incredibly, they take themselves out of rotation
when their batteries run low
and put themselves back when fully recharged.
And this simple guidance system
allows their routes to be adapted instantly.
But these carts are relatively primitive
compared with most of the factory's robots.
The robots behind me are kuka robots.
They're actually trained to do up to five tasks.
They rivet, they weld, they glue, they move pieces
from one part of the line to the other.
So they're incredibly smart robots.
Hundreds of the kuka robots
perform amazingly complex but repetitive tasks
with incredible precision...
And without ever getting bored.
But when it comes to heavy lifting
and carrying 5,000-pound cars dynamically,
engineers at the Tesla factory
had to develop even more serious heavyweights...
So most conventional robotic arms
that you'd find on the market
wouldn't be able to lift weights
nearly as close to this one.
...to make the impossible possible.
The Tesla factory.
As the largest industrial plant in the western hemisphere...
...this technologically- advanced facility
uses cutting-edge robots to help produce an astonishing
2,000 electric cars every week.
But for robots to actually lift and rotate 5,000-pound cars,
engineers had to rely on a breakthrough innovation.
This is one seriously impressive robot.
This is the Fanuk M-2000ia/1200
multi-arm manipulator.
Now, this robot is so strong,
it's capable of doing four times the work
of a conventional robot.
It's able to lift a really impressive 1.2 tons,
and it's used on the Tesla assembly line.
But its bigger brother,
which is also in use on the Tesla assembly line,
can lift a huge 2.3 tons.
Now, that's really useful
if you want to move a car in a single lift.
So most conventional robotic arms
that you'd find on the market wouldn't be able to lift weights
nearly as close to this one.
On top of that, this robot is capable
of running 24 hours a day
and seven days a week.
Yes! it's working!
Traditional ways of moving heavy weights,
such as lifts or hoists,
can only go up and down, whereas this,
because of its six different axes,
allow this robot to move with unbelievable accuracy.
And it's exactly this that Tesla uses
to save them both time and money,
and to ensure that cars
can keep rolling off their production line.
And all of that make this
a truly incredible feat of robotic engineering.
12 of these heavyweight robotic arms
use the six different axes
to provide both flexibility and sheer power
to keep the car production going.
Named after superheroes, the likes of Wolverine
and ice man continually lift up these heavy cars
without breaking a sweat.
Robots are incredibly valuable
in the automation of this process
at helping us to ramp production
and to make this process as seamless as possible.
But robots aren't the only remarkable machines
required for a 21st-century car factory.
To produce hundreds of thousands of electric cars,
Tesla's engineers must continually satisfy
a very modern challenge.
All of this is an effort to indulge
as many electric vehicles and get them on the road
as quick and seamless as possible.
The state-of-the-art Tesla factory is capable
of producing electric cars in the kind of quantities
once reserved for vehicles that use gasoline.
But to produce electric cars quickly, efficiently,
and economically,
engineers had to invent
a completely new way of building them.
The way that other manufacturers
have built electric vehicles in the past
was to basically gut
internal-combustion engine vehicles
and put battery packs wherever they would fit.
But we've built the car from the ground up.
And this new process starts with the basics.
Behind me are giant coils of aluminum.
This is the start of production for these vehicles.
It's the raw material that comes through this end of the factory.
They're 20,000 pounds of aluminum coils.
Traditionally, most automobiles are made with steel.
But because the batteries that power electric motors
are so heavy...
Manufacturers had to use a different material...
...aluminum,
which is more commonly used in the aerospace industry.
Aluminum is incredibly light weight,
very durable, and safe.
We've really designed these cars from the ground up
to maximize safety and efficiency,
and aluminum helps us do that.
But how can you turn aluminum sheets
into car body parts quickly
and accurately enough
and still make production cost-effective?
To do this, engineers had to look
to another manufacturing breakthrough
from the past...
And his methods were picked up and used by Henry Ford
and other pioneers of the automotive industry.
...to make the impossible possible.
The Tesla factory in Fremont, California,
is the largest industrial plant
in the western hemisphere.
This futuristic facility
produces over 2,000 electric cars
every week made of aluminum.
But to shape the vehicles with this material,
engineers had to rely on an inventive
manufacturing process from the past...
the industrial press.
Today, bicycles are everywhere.
But when they first appeared, they were strictly for the rich.
Historian Chris sweet is on the trail
of the industrial innovation
that brought bicycles to everyone.
Late-19th century bikes were luxury items,
costing up to $100 each.
That was as much as an average worker would make in six months.
But all that changed here, in Chicago.
In the late 19th century,
entrepreneur Adolph Schoeninger
revolutionized how bicycles were made.
Because early metal bicycles were manufactured
using a cumbersome process,
Schoeninger hoped to improve the building technique.
Traditional method of making bicycle components
was known as drop forging.
It involved taking a chunk of metal
and heating it till it was malleable,
like this chunk of Clay,
and forging it into shape by repeated pounding.
It was a long, labor-intensive, and expensive process.
That is what Schoeninger wanted to change.
And this is what he did.
He came up with an industrial press
to shape cold steel.
Imagine this sandwich maker is our press.
You put in a sheet of cold steel...
Press it.
Out comes a three-dimensional bicycle component
ready to be assembled and painted.
By pressing bicycle components
with an industrial press instead of forging them,
Schoeninger slashed the prices of its bicycles,
finally making them affordable to the general public.
Soon, Schoeninger's western wheel works
was turning out 70,000 bikes a year,
with markets as far away as Europe,
transforming Chicago
into the bike capital of the world.
And his methods were picked up and used by Henry Ford
and other pioneers of the automotive industry.
The mass stamping of parts revolutionized manufacturing
in America and around the world.
At the Tesla factory, engineers have super-sized
Schoeninger's revolutionary industrial press
to shape the cars.
This is one of the largest hydraulic stamping presses
in north America.
It's actually seven stories high.
We can only see four stories.
Three of them are actually underground.
There are five main sections of this press,
each one weighing up to about a million pounds.
The giant stamping press uses a variety of heads
to turn the flat sheets of aluminum
into all kinds of ultra-lightweight
car body parts.
And cold-forming the aluminum helps preserve
the physical strength of each component.
You need a machine that can exert a ton of pressure
and force down on those panels without a lot of heat.
That's what this hydraulic press is capable of doing.
We take those sheets of aluminum that you saw,
and they're actually stamped between four to five times
as they move down here.
This powerful press is capable of exerting
around 9,000 tons of pressure per square inch,
the equivalent of having 3,000 cars
pressing down on your thumbnail.
The seven-story-tall monster press
can create strong, complex shapes quickly
and at a much lower cost than other techniques
like hot forming or machining.
This is an incredibly important machine to us
to help stamp the individual parts
for model S and model X.
They're electric vehicles,
and they're already very heavy cars
because battery packs weight a lot.
So it was important that the other parts of the vehicle
be as light-weight as possible for efficiency.
The aluminum panels make the range and the safety
very, very possible in these cars.
But these fresh-pressed panels
must also be painted.
So how do you efficiently paint 2,000 cars a week
without waste?
This would have been impossible
without the innovation of electrostatic painting.
To reveal the origins of industrial painting,
physicist Suzie Sheehy
is visiting an inner-city graffiti workshop
where the inefficient use of paint is clear.
Spray painting is a brilliant way
to cover a surface area
with an even coat of paint.
But as any graffiti artist can tell you,
it's pretty messy and inexact.
As the paint particles are released
from the pressurized canister,
they have a tendency to go everywhere,
all over your hands and the floor.
That's leads to a lot of wasted and scattered paint,
which is both costly and inefficient.
During the depression of the 1930s,
Harold Ransburg was working at his father's house ware factory
when he saw how much industrial paint
was simply getting wasted.
This salt shaker is exactly the kind of article
that Ransburg was trying to paint.
So if I try and paint it...
...you can see there's a lot of mess
and a lot of wastage,
and I haven't even really achieved a very good finish.
And you can imagine on an industrial scale
how expensive that would be.
So with lab assistant Harry green,
Ransburg experimented with electrical currents.
Because negative and positive charges attract each other,
Ransburg and green introduced
an electrical charge to the painting line
in order to attract all the paint to the product
without waste.
And in 1938,
Ransburg spent all the money he had, $35,
to buy a high-voltage transformer
typically used in hospital X-ray machines.
I'm gonna use a Van Der Graaf generator instead,
but the principle is more or less the same.
This generator uses a moving belt
to build up an electrical charge in a hollow metal globe.
To if I connect this up, that will give a positive charge
to the shaker
and then the paint, which is still neutral,
is gonna become attracted to it...
at least, that's the theory.
All right. So, if I just ground the paint tin.
Switch it on.
Let's see.
Oh, that's great.
So it's actually coating all around the sides.
It's actually pulling the paint all around,
onto the back.
It's got a really good coverage,
and, actually, there's a lot less paint wasted, as well.
Called electrostatic painting,
Ransburg's pioneering technique
transformed industrial painting across the world.
You might not realize it,
but electrostatic painting
is used to decorate all kinds of everyday objects...
from shop fronts to railings,
lamp posts to bicycles.
We are surrounded by the fruits
of Harold Ransburg's innovative approach to painting.
80 years on,
the Tesla factory has taken electrostatic painting
to a level that Harold Ransburg
could only have dreamed of.
In a state-of-the-art paint shop,
each car is attached to an electricity source
and grounded.
Robots spray positively-charge paint
that is electrostatically attracted to the car.
Primer, color, and, finally, a clear coat
are efficiently applied with very little waste
to create a completely flawless finish.
But mass producing electric cars effectively and efficiently
isn't the only challenge the factory faces.
To surpass the high expectations of the car-driving public,
Tesla's engineers had to overcome
the historic problems of the electric car...
20 miles an hour.
I'd say that's about as fast as I'd like to go.
...to create even more impossible engineering.
In California, Tesla's engineering innovators
are in the process of creating the factory of the future,
attempting to turn the more-than-century-old
automobile industry on its head.
They're using advanced robotics and technology
to bring back the electric car
and transform it from a niche item
to an everyday mass-produced product.
Everything about the 5.3 million-square-foot facility
is designed for speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
But technical advances aren't the only challenges
the factory faces.
It must also turn out a vehicle that the public,
who are used to the speeds and distances
that internal-combustion engines provide,
will actually want.
Hmm.
In 1908, Henry Ford had a bright idea...
Aha!
...to bring the internal-combustion engine
to the people.
The revolutionary technology changed the world...
Demand for gasoline went through the roof.
I'm rich!
Cities swelled as new suburbs
within reach of the workplace grew.
Hi, honey! I'm home!
Modern life quickly centered around
the internal-combustion engine.
And people could go faster...
And further than ever before.
But once upon a time,
the combustion engine had a surprising rival...
the electric car.
This is a pope-waverley.
Built in 1901,
it's one of the world's first electric cars.
And this particular one was used by Harrods for deliveries.
Physicist Suzie Sheehy is taking a ride
on this classic piece of American engineering.
It's a little-known fact that at the turn of the century,
about a third of all cars were electric powered.
When the automobile was first invented,
there were three main forms of propulsion...
internal combustion, steam-driven,
and the popular battery-powered engines.
Now, this beautiful machine, in its day,
would have had a range of about 20 miles
and a top speed of a whopping 20 miles an hour.
But having driven in it for a while,
I'd say that's about as fast as I'd like to go.
But electric cars were soon eclipsed
because automobiles running on gasoline
developed a longer range, became more reliable,
and got much faster,
leaving the electric car in the dust.
But Tesla's designers and engineers believe
they've overcome the problems that held the electric car back.
To see how, rally race driver Alex Roy is
taking the model S out for a test drive.
Earlier generations of electric vehicles
didn't have the benefit
of batteries with decent power density.
It is the first time that you have an electric vehicle
that's a genuine sports car.
With the model S...
You can do this.
And that is Ferrari-level acceleration.
It's...
It's impressive.
The beating heart of the design
is the powerful electric motor.
And it couldn't be more different
from a traditional internal-combustion engine.
The standard gasoline engine has hundreds of moving parts.
But the motor on the model S and model X
only has one moving piece... the rotor.
Powering it are nearly 7,000 small lithium-ion batteries
packed into a tray that fits in the floor of the vehicle.
And to produce these batteries,
Tesla is doing something extraordinary...
...creating an even bigger factory,
the size of which has never been seen before
on planet earth.
It's still under construction.
We're building it in phases so that we can actually start
production of battery cells and packs inside
while we continue construction outside.
That factory will, once complete,
be the largest building in the world by footprint.
Called the Giga-factory,
this enormous solar-powered facility in Nevada
will take the mass production of batteries for electric cars
to an unprecedented scale.
Within a couple of years,
we'll be putting hundreds of thousands of battery packs out
every year.
These powerful batteries,
combined with radical automotive design,
allow the electric car to drive much further distances.
But to compete with the hundreds of miles
that gasoline-powered vehicles can go on a single tank of gas,
Tesla's engineers had to give the electric car
yet another source of power.
It's an absolutely brilliant piece of engineering.
And, suddenly... Science fiction isn't tomorrow,
it is today.
...to make the impossible electric car...
Possible.
The Tesla factory...
as the largest industrial plant in America,
this facility has produced and sold
over 200,000 electric cars worldwide.
But making a battery-powered vehicle
that can drive as far and as fast
as gas-powered cars
would have been impossible
without giving it more power.
Anyone who's ever ridden a bicycle...
Whoo-hoo!
...knows how much power is wasted
when you brake.
The kinetic energy from the bike's forward motion
is thrown away
as the brake pads rub against the tires,
converting that energy to heat.
Just how much energy is lost becomes painfully obvious
when you start pedaling again.
Determined to use the energy normally lost in braking,
Tesla's engineers have coordinated the motor
to work with the brakes.
When the brakes slow the vehicle,
the motor also acts as a generator
and converts the otherwise wasted energy into electricity,
returning it to the batteries.
This energy recycling process is called regenerative braking.
Regenerative braking is a technology
that grew out of racing.
And in formula 1, regenerative braking was
developed to make cars go faster.
In a Tesla, that extends the car's range,
and it's one of the reasons
the Tesla has a range of 300 miles
as opposed to earlier generations of electric cars,
which were restricted to 250, 200, even 150.
All this means electric cars
can now match the distances of gasoline-powered vehicles.
If you didn't have a regenerative braking system
dumping power back into the battery,
I would imagine you'd have somewhere between a, you know,
10% and 30% drop in range.
It's an absolutely brilliant piece of engineering.
And, suddenly... Science fiction isn't tomorrow,
it is today.
These trailblazing engineering innovations
would not be possible
without the giant cutting-edge factory
that builds them.
This extraordinary engineering process begins
with humble coils of aluminum sheets...
And ends just a few days later on the test track.
That can-do, think-outside-the-box
is really something that informs both the vehicle
and the factory side of the equation here at Tesla.
You'll see that both in the engineering of our products,
as well as the engineering and in our approach
to manufacturing and production within this facility.
By drawing from the great innovators of the past...
This was the largest car factory in the world.
Oh, that's great!
Amazing!
...adapting their ideas,
and making trailblazing discoveries of their own...
Every single manufacturer will be making a car
just like this with their own brand on it
within five years.
Things can be done better.
You don't have to be trapped in the past.
...the planners, designers, and engineers
behind this futuristic factory
are succeeding in making the impossible possible.
Being in this factory, certainly,
is something that, I think, every employee can agree
is something they're incredibly proud of.