Unknown to analysts, investors and the hundreds of thousands of customers who signed up to buy it, as recently as early September major portions of the Model 3 were still being banged out by hand, away from the automated production line, according to people familiar with the matter.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-teslas-production-delays...
Reminds me of some other automotive companies when a new car is launched..
If you try to make the perfect assembly line before you deliver 1 car, you'll be making huge over-engineering expenditures and costly assumptions which result in even greater net production losses.
The press is up and running:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BaInXGBg9G7/
Based on a 3.7 second cycle time, they can bang out 5,837,837 body panels per year (assuming some math an automotive engineer on /r/teslamotors provided that takes into account downtime and typical automotive labor scheduling: 50 weeks/year * 5 days/week * 24 hours/day * 3600 seconds/hour)/3.7 second panel cycle
EDIT: csours: Thanks! I removed my grossly inaccurate prediction of per-vehicle pressed components.
in_cahoots: Original response was to comment that Tesla is still banging out components by hand; this is possible, my rebuttal is that they do have parts of the line that are fully operational.
There are probably a number of press lines and the press lines would be changing dies periodically to make different parts.