Elon Musk Just Fired His Robots and Hired Humans to Take Their Places

Elon Musk, the founder and current CEO of Tesla, Inc., has been sleeping on a couch at his company’s Fremont, California plant lately following a slowdown in production that has caught the attention of the public in the last few weeks.

Flickr - pestoverde[/caption] Inconvenient Conveyors…And Automation The Freemont plant is centered around the production of the Tesla Model 3 electric car. When the model was announced, Musk told the public that it would run consumers $35,000, a very reasonable price, to purchase the car and that the California facility would pump out 5,000 vehicles a week.

Facilitating this production quota is the extensive use of automation and robots within the plant, reports Live Science. In fact, the manufacturing site is referred to by CBS News “as the most robot-heavy car plants on the planet.

That degree of automation appears to have been mostly counterproductive according to Musk. Instead of speeding up production, robots have actually slowed down output. In an interview with “CBS This Morning”, Musk told host Gayle King, “We put too much new technology into the Model 3 all at once. We had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts… and it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.”

Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Instead of the proposed 5,000 vehicles, Tesla has only been able to turn out 2,000. Neglected Resource With pre-ordering customers growing more and more upset about the delays, Musk was forced to order a halt to production until the factory revamp could be completed.

Among the revamp will be more human employees. Musk hinted at this the day after his CBS interview when he youtubeed, “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

With an economy that is beginning to experience a tighter labor market, Musk’s move to a more human employee pool may be more expensive for the company than it was had it been undertaken last year. The situation at the Freemont facility is so critical to Tesla’s future success, that Musk has been sleeping on his office couch as he pulls all-nighters.

Wikimedia Commons[/caption] If anyone can turn things around, however, it is Musk.

What do you think?