A Tesla employee who builds robots told us why production hell is actually a good thing (TSLA)
Matthew DeBord
Updated
Sheena Tesla
Matthew DeBord/Business Insider
Sheena Patterson is a staff manufacturing engineer at Tesla.
She's working to build the machine that builds the machine: Tesla's highly automated assembly line for the Model 3.
She also knows how to create robots.
Editor's note: Business Insider had the chance to speak with four Tesla employees from different parts of the company to learn more about their work. And what we discovered were some of the coolest jobs at Tesla. This is the fourth in the series. You can read the other profiles here.
Engineers are great at identifying and solving problems. They're students of the practical, scrutinizers of systems, and, at Tesla, pretty much heroes. Few companies in history have so thoroughly combined a compelling vision of the future with innovative ways to design, build, power, and sell cars.
What engineers aren't always great at, though, is talking about engineering. They're technicians, not poets. But Sheena Patterson, a staff manufacturing engineer who's been at Tesla for nearly three years, is the exception.
Her thing is what's called general assembly, which means creating production lines that can mass-produce the equipment that makes the cars Tesla sells.
Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, calls it "the machine that builds the machine."
Patterson does him one better: "The factory is the symphony, and the car is the song."
A relatively recent graduate of the University of Michigan, Patterson got her start at Ford, where it was trial by fire, working on the launch of the risky aluminum-body F-150 pickup truck that the carmaker rolled out several years ago. Ford then offered her a desk job at its plant in Kansas City, Missouri, but Patterson wasn't ready to hang up her safety goggles and steel-toed boots quite yet.
"I was very much young and awake and ready to do more," she said, sitting in a break area at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California. She's dressed casually in jeans and a plaid shirt, ready for a day spent doing what she loves: working with her hands, "tearing things apart and making them better," as she puts it.
The perfect fit and timing
Tesla Factory
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Tesla turned out to be the perfect fit — and Patterson's decision to join the company was perfect timing.
She started just as Tesla was launching the Model X, a complicated vehicle to build. With her expertise in systems design and robotics, which dates to her undergraduate days, she could make an immediate contribution.
She designed a robot that now sits on the combined Model S-Model X assembly line where glass panels are glued and attached to the Model X.
Smaller than the massive orange robots at Fremont that can sling around entire vehicle bodies, Patterson's robot — named Gambit, for the superhero from the "X-Men" comics — is yellow, about as large as an adult, and encased in Plexiglas.
Its job is to apply adhesive — something formerly done by multiple workers, who had to use glue guns and work on tables set up next to the assembly line. Gambit draws adhesive from large barrels and can save Tesla time and money on this delicate phase of production.
It's a glimpse into Musk's plans for factories of the future: almost fully automated, with robots that can build cars so fast that air resistance becomes a problem.
Patterson is smack in the middle of that revolution. She's currently working on the new highly automated Model 3 assembly line.
The assembly line is everything
Tesla Model X
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Patterson's daily work routine depends on where Tesla is at with production.
If cars aren't yet being mass-produced, she'll arrive at the factory, make calls to suppliers, conduct design reviews, and then head out to the factory floor to see what's happening with an assembly line.
She's part of a group of about 50 employees, but her day-to-day team has only about half a dozen members.
Once a vehicle is in production, however, the day starts with a walk on the assembly line.
"It's been running all night," she says. "You might have been getting calls; you might not. Sometimes no news is good news."
Then it's desk work, as the engineers use what they've learned to make the machine that builds the machine run better.
"But it's probably 75% on the line," Patterson said.
This routine puts Patterson at the center of what Musk has often called "production hell," a term that has taken on negative connotations as Tesla has struggled since last year to ramp up Model 3 assembly.
But for an engineer, hell can be a type of heaven.
"It's something that manufacturing goes through," Patterson said. "Anytime you do it, it's going to be difficult. But what's really cool here is that everybody is banding around it, while at the Big Three" — General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler — "it is manufacturing's problem.
"Here we say, 'No, no, no, it's everybody's problem,' because it's just our third car and it's that much more important," she said. "We're still calling up design to come to the floor."
A consequence of this less segregated approach to production, Patterson explains, is that Tesla's vehicles can be more thoroughly designed to be manufactured.
In the traditional industry, vehicles are handed off from one group to the next. But at Tesla, an overarching ambition is to remake the entire manufacturing process — so if engineers like Patterson who are working to increase automation can communicate more fluidly with designers, Tesla vehicles can be designed with those advantages in mind.
Joining the revolution
Tesla Factory
Benjamin Zhang/Business Insider
If Musk and Tesla succeed in this reimagining of the car factory, it will be the first new major innovation in manufacturing since Toyota created the famed Toyota Production System in the 1970s and 1980s. And it would add a level of irony if it were to happen at Tesla's Fremont factory, which was once jointly owned by Toyota and GM so that GM could learn the now vaunted "Toyota way."
Patterson has seen automaking from one end to the other. Her first experience with a car factory was on a family trip to India, where she saw a Tata plant and witnessed firsthand old-school manufacturing. Ford advanced her knowledge, but Tesla has taken any abstraction out of her job and compelled her to focus on how things happen in reality, on the assembly line, in real time.
So what's more beautiful to Patterson in the end? The gorgeous Tesla vehicles, or the beautiful assembly line she has helped design and create?
She doesn't miss a beat — the line.
"I get a thrill going to Tesla stores," she said. "And when I tell the people there I work at Fremont, their eyes light up, because I get to work at the factory."
