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March 10th, 2016 
Awake Goy
Tesla Hires Former LEGO Executive, Expert in Fully Automated Manufacturing Methods
March 9th, 2016
Via: electrek:
An interesting fact about lego bricks: the first hands to touch a Lego brick are the hands of a customer since the entire manufacturing process is automated.
Granted, plastic blocks are significantly less complicated than li-ion battery cells, but since Tesla hired a long-time Lego manufacturing executive to lead the Gigafactory effort, it is an interesting analogy for the potential level of automation at Tesla’s battery factory.
Last year, Tesla hired Jens Peter Clausen as “Vice President of Gigafactory�. Clausen spent the last 15 years of his career in management and executive roles in manufacturing at Lego. First as a production manager for “manufacturing, ramp up and process development moulding� according to his LinkedIn profile.
Later on, he was promoted to Director of Process Innovation and more recently, before joining Tesla, Clausen was General Manager and Senior Vice President for Lego’s operations in Mexico.
Lego absolutely needs automation since it makes about 40 billion bricks per year, which would be extremely difficult or even impossible to do with only manpower.
According to the Lego Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the standard required. That’s probably the kind of result Tesla and its battery cell manufacturing partner Panasonic would hope to achieve at the Gigafactory.
Tesla will not be making 40 billion battery cells per year at the factory, but still, based on its stated goal of 35 GWh of battery cells per year and depending on the energy capacity of the cells they plan to make, the number of individual cells could easily be in the low billions of units.
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