The Model 3 has long been the linchpin in Tesla’s plan to bring electric cars to the masses. Hardly a point of speculation, Elon Musk said this himself in Tesla’s now somewhat famous “Master Plan” all the way back in 2006. If you recall, Musk at the time explained that Tesla’s overarching strategy was to take profits from pricier models (i.e the Roadster and the Model S) in order to bankroll an “even more affordable car.”
That affordable car, as we’d find out about 10 years later, was the Model 3. And while the $35,000 option for the Model 3 isn’t available just yet, demand for Tesla’s mass market EV remains incredibly strong. In fact, the Model 3 is largely responsible for Tesla actually managing to turn a quarterly profit earlier this year.
All that said, Tesla earlier today provided us with a nice sneak peek behind the curtain with a 48-second time-lapse video of the Model 3 production process. Dubbed “How Model 3 gets made,” the video shows us a bare bones Model 3 frame moving along the assembly line as it slowly but surely becomes a finished product. During the course of the video, we see Tesla employees and some of Tesla’s ballyhooed robots doing their thing. Interestingly enough, Musk a few months back conceded that highly publicized Model 3 delays were the result of Tesla relying too heavily upon automation. It certainly would be interesting to see how the current manufacturing process differs from the process Tesla employed earlier on in production.
In any event, the video can be seen below.