Tesla CEO Elon Musk has approved an increase in budget of $216M into automating the Model 3 Battery module production line at Gigafactory 1, following a 2017 capex meeting held at the company’s Fremont, California factory on Wednesday, May 24. According to our source, the first battery modules for Model 3 test vehicles are being hand-built by a team 150 employees over a 24 hour shift. The source tells Teslarati via Teslanomics (video below) that it takes approximately 10 minutes to complete 1 section of a battery module with 2 employees moving 2170 lithium ion battery cells from a box and into the battery module. There are a total of 7 sections in each battery module. The manual production has been taking place for “several months now” according to our source, who says Tesla is currently building approximately 20 Model 3 battery modules per day by hand.

The newly approved $216M investment will automate this process which according to our source will take roughly 10 seconds to produce by robots. According to a release sent by Tesla:

Details on the Model 3 Battery Production Line capital expenditure:

Model 3 Battery Module Lines 1, 2 and 3 are capacitized to produce 5,000 cars/week by running parallel at 61 second ideal cycle time (TAKT) time operated at 75% overall equipment efficiency (OEE). The current overall budget for the equipment is $216.0M. The budget is allocated to:

• Current Collector Feeder Line: $13.0M
• Cell Handling: $19.2M
• Cell to Tube Attach (CTA): $30.7M
• Mount Attach Module Close (MAMC): $22.0M
• Current Collector Clamshell Attach (C3A): $27.5M
• Cell Position Mapping (CPM): $2.8M
• Interconnect: $20.8M
• Interconnect: $5.0M
• Module Test: $1.1M
• Buffering & Conveyance: $29.4M
• Module Configuration: $42.5M
• Controls Contractors: $2.0M

Tesla’s automated production line will be capable of producing over 4,000 battery modules per day. It’s worth noting that the battery modules being built are “specific to the Model 3” says our source and separate from the 2170 modules used in Tesla’s Powerwall 2 and Powerpack 2 energy products. Tesla is building three separate module lines at this time, which run in parallel to produce a battery module every 61 seconds. Tesla’s Model S and X 100kWh battery pack distributes 8,256 18650 battery cells across 16 modules while the Model 3 will utilize only 4 modules containing the larger and higher energy density 2170 lithium ion cell.

According to our source, the base Model 3, as of now, will start at 60kWh. This capacity comes in higher than what we originally expected and will meet the “at least 215 miles” of range that Tesla had first announced for the vehicle. Tesla is reportedly concentrating on the production of the premium battery at first, which is slated to be 74kWh, and likely badged as a Tesla Model 3 75.

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