Before Tesla moved in, back in October 2010,

this factory in Fremont was the home of Nummi,

which was a joint venture between

General Motors and Toyota.

It was at the time when the auto industry was struggling,

and we were able to buy this factory for relatively low

purchase price, and we decided to essentially

refurbish the factory from scratch.

I was based at SpaceX making rockets and the SpaceX

factory was really super clean, super light, super open.

When we were able to acquire the Tesla factory,

we said, okay, we need to make it similar to SpaceX.

We're going to paint the ceilings white,

the columns white.

We're going to make it bright.

Where we have the ability to have skylights,

we're going to have the light from the sky, you know,

and the psychology of that is,

if you want quality, you need people to feel at ease.

You need people to feel like this is a quality place here.

I need to make a quality product.

We constantly try to improve process efficiency.

We're utilizing automation to the fullest.

We have about 160 robots,

the latest technology you can find on the planet,

that are able to do very diverse tasks.

Robots are extremely good at repeatability,

accuracy of motion,

but humans are more intelligent than robots.

Therefore, we need to use humans where there is

a lot of value for that intelligence.

Here we're in Silicon Valley, right?

So you have wonderful universities, you know,

Stanford, Berkeley, UC Davis, you name it,

so we have a lot of talent.

We want to take full advantage of having

highly educated people help us improve the automation.

What is unique about building the Model S

as an entry vehicle, is a lot of the components

are actually very different.

Like the drive units, the battery pack,

the battery modules.

A lot of those components do not exist anywhere else,

so we need do a lot more than any other factory

that I've been at,

in terms of sub-processes inside the factory.

We do about 95% of our stamping in-house.

We do a lot of the machining in-house.

We do some coating in-house, we do painting in-house,

we do the center display in-house.

The level of integration is very, very high,

and because everything is here,

it speeds things up, greatly.

And that speed has a lot of intrinsic value

in terms of innovation, adaptability, flexibility,

all of them.

In the future, we have a lot of opportunity to

grow and bring more of this product to the market.

And so, huge potential here.