Wired takes us for a tour inside Tesla's car factory of the future
At one end of Tesla's 500,000 square metre factory in Fremont, California, there is a very large, white box. Inside it is a Schuler SMG hydraulic stamping press, and it happens to be the largest in North America; this one machine can stamp out a new car panel once every six seconds, or 5,000 per day, with up to 10,000 tonnes of force out of an aluminium coil that weighs 9,071kg when it shows up at the factory.
New, this single piece of equipment would cost you $50 million. Elon Musk bought it for $6 million -- including shipping, which took four months. To stand on a gantry, and watch this mechanism about its brutal work from above, you might suppose that Tesla is in the business of making cars.
Not so, says VP of business development Diarmuid O'Connell. [...]
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