In retrospect: What can manufacturing companies learn from Tesla's hyperautomation reversal in 2018?

August 10, 2021 | Case Study

In the race to meet its highly ambitious 5,000 cars per week target in 2017, Tesla relied on extreme automation with more than 1,000 robots for its Model 3 production. However, the production didn't go according to plan, and the company had to reset its target to 2,500 within a year of the initial announcement. In the middle of the "production hell" period, as cited by the company's famous CEO Elon Musk, the company was far behind its schedule. It produced only 2,000 cars per week on average in April 2018, which led Elon to tweet that the company had relied on too many robots and that humans were underrated. The company then quickly changed its strategy and hired workers to do things that robots couldn't and finally met its target in July 2018. While we first wrote about this case study in 2020, here, we analyze what went wrong, now that we have additional details from Tesla.