Latest / Elon Musk Podcast / Mass producing Tesla's paintless driverless Cybercab

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Mass producing Tesla's paintless driverless Cybercab · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:00
  So Tesla has officially started mass producing a vehicle at Giga
• 0:02
  Texas that completely lacks the steering wheel, brake pedals and
• 0:08
  a paint job. It's the Cyber Cab.
• 0:10
  Yeah, the physical reality of that statement is just
• 0:13
  staggering, honestly. I mean, we are looking at a
• 0:16
  fundamentally new category of hardware here because automakers
• 0:19
  usually just load self driving software into regular consumer
• 0:23
  cars as an afterthought. You know they just hope the
• 0:25
  sensors can manage human centric designs, but this machine is
• 0:29
  designed from the absolute ground up for one specific
• 0:32
  purpose and that is operating as a fully autonomous ride hailing
• 0:36
  vehicle exclusively without a human driver.
• 0:38
  So having gone through the engineering leaks, the
• 0:41
  regulatory filings, the factory blueprints we have, the goal
• 0:44
  today is to look past all the hype and figure out the exact
• 0:47
  mechanisms allowing this to happen.
• 0:49
  We're going to examine the physical construction of this
• 0:51
  vehicle, the economics of its operation, and the regulatory
• 0:54
  loopholes being utilized. Yeah, which leads to the real
• 0:57
  drive in question here. How exactly does a manufacturer
• 1:00
  legally and practically deploy a fleet of completely driverless
• 1:03
  cars onto public roads? Right.
• 1:05
  Well, to understand the deployment, you really have to
• 1:06
  start with the vehicle itself. Yeah, the very first production
• 1:09
  unit to roll off the line is known as VIN 0.
• 1:12
  Wow, Vin 0. Yeah, and just picturing this
• 1:15
  thing gives you a sense of how radical the design choices are.
• 1:18
  It's A2 seat coupe. It features these butterfly
• 1:22
  doors that articulate upward. OK.
• 1:24
  There are no side mirrors anywhere on the exterior.
• 1:27
  Inside the the entire cabin is dominated by a single 21 inch
• 1:31
  central screen. But I think the most surprising
• 1:34
  detail is the exterior finish. Yeah, the finish is fascinating.
• 1:38
  VIN 0 features this glossy champagne gold exterior, yet the
• 1:42
  vehicle is entirely unpainted. Right, the exterior is a massive
• 1:46
  shift in manufacturing because the color is actually injected
• 1:49
  directly into polyurethane plastic panels.
• 1:52
  Just right into the plastic. Exactly.
• 1:53
  The pigmentation is an integral part of the material itself.
• 1:56
  You completely eliminate the factory paint, which is a.
• 1:59
  Huge deal. It is because if you look at
• 2:01
  traditional car manufacturing, the paint shop is just a massive
• 2:04
  logistical and environmental burden.
• 2:07
  Building a traditional car involves sending the steel body
• 2:10
  through like linear lines of anti corrosion, chemical baths,
• 2:14
  electrostatic sprayers and giant high temperature ovens to bake
• 2:18
  the paint and clear coats. Right, the whole baking process,
• 2:21
  yeah. Paint shops are incredibly
• 2:23
  expensive to build. They consume huge amounts of
• 2:26
  energy and emit volatile organic compounds into the environment.
• 2:30
  So by removing the paint shop, Tesla drastically cuts the
• 2:33
  physical footprint of the factory, slashes the utility
• 2:36
  bills, and fundamentally lowers the production costs.
• 2:40
  Wait, back up a second. A plastic car?
• 2:42
  Yeah. I mean, I understand the cost
• 2:43
  savings on the factory floor, but doesn't that feel incredibly
• 2:46
  cheap for a passenger? Service.
• 2:48
  You would think so, right? Yeah, because you want
• 2:50
  passengers to actually trust this vehicle when they get
• 2:52
  inside. Telling them they are writing
• 2:54
  inside a plastic shell sounds like a glorified golf cart.
• 2:57
  I know it sounds counterintuitive at first
• 2:59
  glance, but polyurethane actually creates a superior
• 3:03
  exterior for this specific commercial use case.
• 3:07
  How so? Well, these color infused panels
• 3:09
  resist chipping and scratching in a way that traditional spray
• 3:12
  paint simply cannot match. If a shopping cart scratches a
• 3:16
  traditional painted car, you see a bright white primer layer
• 3:21
  underneath the paint. Oh right, the scratch is super
• 3:23
  obvious. Exactly, but if something
• 3:25
  scratches this polyurethane panel, you just see more of the
• 3:28
  exact same champagne gold color. Because the color goes all the
• 3:32
  way through the material. Right, it goes all the way
• 3:33
  through. Polyurethane also avoids the
• 3:36
  rough orange peel texture you sometimes see reflecting off the
• 3:39
  clear coat of standard spray paint.
• 3:42
  And you know, a rideshare fleet is designed to run continuously,
• 3:45
  day and night, picking up passenger after passenger.
• 3:48
  Constantly on the move. Right, so the exterior has to be
• 3:51
  highly durable. This material choice practically
• 3:54
  eliminates cosmetic maintenance and costly trips to the body.
• 3:57
  Shop for paint touch ups. But having a plastic exterior
• 4:00
  creates a completely new engineering problem though.
• 4:03
  Yeah, you cannot run a plastic car down a traditional welding
• 4:06
  line. Exactly.
• 4:07
  The sparks, the heat, the heavy machinery, it would just destroy
• 4:10
  the panels. To make the painless exterior
• 4:13
  work, they had to completely destroy the traditional method
• 4:15
  of assembling a car. Right, because for 100 years the
• 4:19
  entire automotive industry has relied on the linear assembly
• 4:22
  line pioneered by Henry Ford. You start with a bare metal
• 4:26
  frame at the beginning of the factory.
• 4:27
  And then it just crawls along. Slowly crawls down a conveyor
• 4:31
  belt. Yeah.
• 4:32
  At every station, workers or robots add a few parts.
• 4:35
  The engine goes in, the suspension is bolted on, the
• 4:38
  seats go in, the doors go on. The fundamental problem with a
• 4:41
  linear line is that if station number 42 encounters a problem
• 4:45
  and stops, stations one through 41 have to stop too.
• 4:48
  Everything just backs up, waiting for the bottleneck to
• 4:50
  clear, but the unboxed process destroys that linear model.
• 4:55
  The car is built in parallel modules.
• 4:57
  You have a front structure, a rear structure, the cabin
• 5:00
  interior, and the floor pack. All built simultaneously.
• 5:03
  Completely independent of each other.
• 5:05
  The seats are bolted to the floor pack in one area of the
• 5:08
  factory. The steering and suspension are
• 5:10
  attached to the front structure in a completely different area.
• 5:14
  Which keeps the heavy machinery and welding away from the
• 5:17
  delicate interior components. Exactly.
• 5:20
  The modules only meet at the very end of the line where they
• 5:23
  are snapped together, and making those individual modules work
• 5:26
  requires a huge piece of machinery known as the
• 5:29
  gigapress. A gigapress?
• 5:30
  Yeah, Tesla uses this machine to take liquid molten aluminum and
• 5:36
  cast the entire front and rear underbodies of the car as single
• 5:40
  solid pieces. Hold on, I saw the number 50000
• 5:42
  tons in the engineering specs for the Gigapress, 50,000 tons.
• 5:47
  That's just the clamping force, right?
• 5:48
  Yeah, that. Strictly measures the clamping
• 5:50
  force OK because. I was trying to clarify what
• 5:51
  that number actually measures. Like is it the physical weight
• 5:54
  of the machine? No.
• 5:55
  It's about the pressure. High pressure die casting
• 5:58
  involves shooting liquid aluminum into a steel mold at
• 6:01
  incredibly high speeds. Because the metal is being
• 6:04
  forced in so rapidly, the pressure naturally wants to blow
• 6:08
  the two halves of the mold apart.
• 6:09
  Oh wow. So it needs to hold it shut.
• 6:11
  Exactly. The machine has to apply 50,000
• 6:14
  tons of pressure just to keep the mold closed while the metal
• 6:17
  fills the cavity. To give you a sense of what that
• 6:20
  means, the machine is applying the equivalent physical weight
• 6:23
  of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, pressing down on the
• 6:26
  mold that. Is wild.
• 6:28
  Within seconds, the aluminum cools, the mold opens and
• 6:31
  outcomes a single structural piece.
• 6:34
  And in a traditional car, the front underbody might consist of
• 6:37
  70 or 80 individual pieces of stamped steel.
• 6:40
  Robots have to line all those pieces up perfectly, hold them
• 6:43
  in place and apply hundreds of spot welds.
• 6:45
  Everyone of those welds is a potential point of failure over
• 6:48
  the lifespan of the car. Every junction is a place where
• 6:51
  metal can rub and create noise. But.
• 6:53
  The Gigapress takes all those dozens of parts and replaces
• 6:56
  them with one solid piece of aluminum.
• 6:59
  And the consequences of that casting process completely
• 7:02
  change vehicle repairability because.
• 7:04
  You can't just bend it back right.
• 7:06
  Right. In a traditional vehicle, if a
• 7:08
  driver gets into a severe accident, a Body Shop has to put
• 7:11
  the car on a frame machine. They use hydraulics to bend,
• 7:15
  pull and stretch the crumpled steel back into alignment.
• 7:19
  But cast aluminum does not bend back.
• 7:21
  No, if you try to pull cast aluminum it's simply cracks and
• 7:24
  snaps so you lose. Traditional repair methods, but
• 7:27
  you gain rapid modular maintenance.
• 7:30
  Because the car is built using the unbox process, mechanics can
• 7:33
  simply unbolt the damaged front or rear module entirely, discard
• 7:37
  it, and swap in a fresh, perfectly aligned factory
• 7:40
  casting, which is huge. When your vehicle is a
• 7:42
  commercial asset in a rideshare fleet, minimizing downtime is
• 7:46
  everything you. Cannot wait four weeks for a
• 7:48
  Body Shop to pull steel. You unbolt the front bulk on a
• 7:51
  new one and get the vehicle back on the road picking up
• 7:54
  passengers the same afternoon. So fewer parts, no paint, built
• 7:58
  like snapping blocks together that.
• 8:00
  Physical manufacturing efficiency provides the
• 8:02
  foundation for the technology powering the vehicle which.
• 8:05
  Brings us to the technology, and that starts with how the vehicle
• 8:08
  gets its power. The Cyber Cab relies entirely on
• 8:12
  inductive charging. There are no physical plugs
• 8:14
  involved, none at all. The vehicle autonomously drives
• 8:17
  itself to a depot and parks directly over a charging pad on
• 8:21
  the ground, transferring power wirelessly through the
• 8:24
  floorboard. And it operates on a highly
• 8:26
  compact 35 kWh battery, which is pretty.
• 8:30
  Small to. Put that in perspective, many
• 8:32
  modern electric trucks use batteries well over 130 kilowatt
• 8:36
  hours. The Cyber Cab achieves around
• 8:38
  200 miles of range on that small battery because the vehicle has
• 8:41
  extreme aerodynamic efficiency and a lightweight cast frame,
• 8:44
  right? Tesla builds that pack using
• 8:46
  their in house 4680 battery souls featuring a dry electrode
• 8:50
  process for both the anode and the cathode.
• 8:53
  Explain how that dry electrode process differs from the
• 8:55
  industry standard. OK.
• 8:57
  So think of traditional battery manufacturing like baking a
• 9:00
  large cake. You take the active materials
• 9:02
  and mix them with toxic liquid solvents to create a wet slurry
• 9:06
  like a. Batter, yeah.
• 9:07
  You spread that wet batter onto metal foils, but you cannot put
• 9:12
  a wet battery into a car. The factory has to run these
• 9:15
  foils through giant football field sized ovens to evaporate
• 9:19
  all that liquid solvent out that.
• 9:21
  Sounds incredibly resource intensive.
• 9:23
  It takes. Incredible amounts of space and
• 9:25
  consumed huge amounts of energy. Now imagine a pharmaceutical
• 9:28
  company making medicine. They take a dry powder, put it
• 9:31
  in a machine and compress it instantly into a solid pill.
• 9:35
  Oh I see Tesla applies that concept to battery electrodes.
• 9:39
  They take a dry powder binder and run it through heavy rollers
• 9:42
  to press it directly onto the foil.
• 9:44
  So. No wet slurry, no.
• 9:45
  Wet slurry, No giant ovens. It saves factory floor space,
• 9:49
  slashes the energy bill, and fundamentally changes the cost
• 9:52
  structure of the battery pack. I want to.
• 9:54
  Address the psychological barrier of the interior cabin,
• 9:56
  though. Imagine you are sitting in the
• 9:58
  back of this vehicle. You're traveling 70 miles an
• 10:01
  hour on the highway. OK, suddenly the main computer
• 10:04
  glitches out. There's no steering wheel for
• 10:06
  you to grab. There are no brake pedals for
• 10:08
  you to press right? Your brain is going to panic.
• 10:10
  Absolutely. Being trapped in a moving box
• 10:13
  without any physical controls feels like a massive safety
• 10:16
  flaw. Every computer crashes
• 10:18
  eventually the. Engineering answer to that fear
• 10:21
  is the vehicle's aviation grade dual redundancy architecture.
• 10:25
  OK, how? Does that work the?
• 10:27
  Vehicle relies on multiple completely independent systems
• 10:30
  running simultaneously. The primary computer, the AI 5,
• 10:34
  has a complete duplicate processing the environment at
• 10:38
  the exact same time just. Running in parallel.
• 10:40
  Exactly. The braking circuits are
• 10:42
  duplicated, the power supplies routing electricity to the
• 10:45
  computers are duplicated. Even the steering actuators, the
• 10:48
  actual mechanical motors that turn the front wheels are
• 10:51
  duplicated. So.
• 10:52
  If one thing fails, if any. Single system experiences a
• 10:55
  fault, like a wire snaps or a computer glitches.
• 10:58
  The backup system takes over instantly, within milliseconds
• 11:01
  the. Vehicle is designed to
• 11:02
  completely eliminate single points of failure.
• 11:04
  Yes, shifting the vehicle from a human operated machine to a
• 11:08
  purely vision guided mobile robot relying on 8 high
• 11:12
  resolution cameras. Constantly reading the
• 11:14
  environment and feeding data to both computers, right?
• 11:18
  The redundant hardware ensures the vehicle can always safely
• 11:21
  pull over to the side of the road and stop if something
• 11:23
  unexpected happens. The.
• 11:24
  Engineering logic makes complete sense.
• 11:27
  The redundancy is sound. The legal system, however, does
• 11:30
  not care about engineering logic, no.
• 11:32
  It really doesn't the. Legal system heavily restricts
• 11:35
  any vehicles operating without human controls.
• 11:38
  Currently, federal safety standards tightly capped the
• 11:41
  number of autonomous vehicles a company can test without
• 11:44
  steering wheels standard. Regulatory exemptions for
• 11:47
  autonomous vehicles are strictly capped at 2500 units per
• 11:51
  manufacturer annually, which is. Nothing for.
• 11:53
  A company built around scaling mass production 2500 units is a
• 11:57
  rounding error. Operating a huge factory in
• 12:00
  Texas to build 2500 cars makes absolutely no financial sense.
• 12:05
  But Tesla? Has a workaround for this.
• 12:07
  They entirely bypassed the regulatory exemption process.
• 12:10
  They engineered the cyber cab to self certified directly against
• 12:14
  the existing physical crash codes, bumper regulations and
• 12:18
  theft standards. Right.
• 12:19
  They are not asking for a regulatory exemption.
• 12:21
  Wait. So they just declare the car
• 12:23
  safe themselves? Yeah.
• 12:24
  Because most people assume there is a massive government facility
• 12:27
  somewhere where federal regulators take every single new
• 12:31
  car model, strap dummies into it, run it into a wall, and then
• 12:36
  issue a stamp of approval before it goes on sale.
• 12:39
  That's. Definitely what I pictured.
• 12:40
  They assume the government is doing the physical testing, but
• 12:43
  self certification is how all standard consumer cars are
• 12:46
  approved. The reality is essentially an
• 12:49
  honor system backed by severe legal penalties.
• 12:53
  The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, or FM VSS.
• 12:56
  Exactly. They dictate exactly how a car
• 12:59
  must perform in a crash, how the airbags must deploy, and how the
• 13:02
  safety systems must respond. The automakers themselves buy
• 13:06
  the crash test dummies. The automakers run the crash
• 13:09
  Sluds in their own private facilities.
• 13:10
  And then? They just submit the data.
• 13:12
  They compile all the engineering data from those impacts, and
• 13:15
  then they submit a document to the government swearing under
• 13:17
  penalty of perjury that the vehicle meets the safety codes.
• 13:21
  By meeting the physical standards through design, Tesla
• 13:24
  avoids the exemption cap. So by exploiting this
• 13:26
  established honor system, they avoid the autonomous vehicle
• 13:30
  bottleneck entirely. They simply say this car meets
• 13:34
  all the physical crash requirements.
• 13:36
  We certify it, right? Self certifying the hardware at
• 13:39
  the federal level means they can legally manufacture the car in
• 13:42
  massive quantities without asking for a special waiver.
• 13:45
  This completely opens up Tesla's ability to mass produce the
• 13:48
  vehicle without waiting for federal exemption approvals,
• 13:51
  completely sidestepping A bureaucratic bottleneck that
• 13:54
  constrains competitors. But.
• 13:56
  Building the car legally and operating it as a driverless
• 13:59
  taxi are two completely different legal hurdles.
• 14:03
  Very different. Actual deployment on public
• 14:05
  roads still requires state by state and sometimes city by city
• 14:08
  regulatory approval, right A. Federal manufacturing loophole
• 14:11
  does not force California or New York to allow the car on their
• 14:15
  specific St. Exactly, which is why Tesla is
• 14:17
  simultaneously producing a transitional version of the
• 14:20
  cyber cab to handle that exact problem.
• 14:22
  Which? Is wild to think about.
• 14:24
  This alternate version includes temporary brake pedals and a
• 14:27
  physical steering wheel to ease this production and regulatory
• 14:30
  ramp up. By outfitting a version with
• 14:33
  manual controls, human drivers can put the vehicle on the road
• 14:37
  immediately so. They just drive these cars
• 14:39
  around target cities to gather high resolution mapping data and
• 14:42
  log environmental edge cases to train the vision.
• 14:46
  Deploying the transitional models allows the company to
• 14:48
  keep the factory lines moving and the supply chain scaling.
• 14:52
  They can manufacture thousands of vehicles, perfect the unboxed
• 14:56
  assembly method and generate mapping data all.
• 14:59
  While waiting for local state transportation departments to
• 15:02
  legalize full driverless operation, the.
• 15:04
  Strategy aligns perfectly with the hardware design.
• 15:07
  Once a state legally approves the autonomous fleet, mechanics
• 15:10
  can simply remove the temporary steering wheel and pedals and.
• 15:14
  The cars instantly join the fully the autonomous ride
• 15:16
  hailing network. Exactly.
• 15:18
  OK, so to wrap this up, Tesla has started mass producing A
• 15:21
  driverless paintless vehicle using parallel assembly and
• 15:25
  massive aluminum castings, bypassing federal production
• 15:28
  caps through self certification. Yeah.
• 15:30
  The factory physics are solved. The regulatory loopholes are
• 15:34
  actively being exploited, but I think the ultimate unknown
• 15:37
  variable here is human psychology.
• 15:40
  Even if the manufacturing, efficiency and legal hurdles are
• 15:42
  completely resolved, when the butterfly doors close, the
• 15:45
  interior screens light up, and the car merges onto a crowded
• 15:48
  Hwy. at full speed, will everyday passengers actually
• 15:51
  trust a machine without a steering wheel to get them home
• 15:53
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• 15:55
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• 15:58
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• 16:01
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• 16:03
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