$25,000 Tesla To Ditch Production Line For Radical New Assembly Technique

Tesla’s “unboxed” approach may be the biggest change in car manufacturing techniques in over a century.

Tesla Giga Laboratory store in China

Andrei Nedelea

By: Andrei Nedelea

Apr 1, 2024 at 1:00pm ET

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Tesla is not like other big automakers, burdened by decades of tradition and certain engrained ways of doing things. The EV maker builds its cars quite differently compared to legacy manufacturers, with its one-piece “giga casting” process as the best example of this, and now it plans to implement a completely new way to assemble cars that it believes will help cut costs and streamline the assembly process.

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Tesla to change car assembly

Leave it to Tesla to change how cars are made. Tesla's $25,000 electric car will reportedly be built unlike any other car has been in the past. Will it work? We shall find out in a couple of years.

It’s called the “unboxed” assembly technique, and it does away with having a car (or a rectangular “box”) roll down a traditional assembly line past various stations where parts are added on. What Tesla plans to do instead is assemble different sections of a vehicle at the same time in dedicated areas of the factory and then bring a handful of large sub-assemblies together in the end.

This is said to potentially halve production costs and require around 40 percent less space than a traditional car factory with the same output. If true, this will play a big part in allowing Tesla to bring manufacturing costs down significantly and produce vehicles cheaper than ever.

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Company boss Elon Musk has alluded to this new manufacturing approach on several occasions, but he’s stopped short of providing any concrete details. All he’s said until now is that the way Tesla plans to build its $25,000 model is “revolutionary” and “far more advanced than any automotive manufacturing system in the world, by a significant margin.”

The affordable Tesla is supposed to enter production (or at least be unveiled) by the end of 2024 or early in 2025, and Musk has confirmed that the project is “very far along” but without adding any additional details. However, Tesla has missed its self-imposed deadlines in the past, so the affordable model may actually debut a few years further into the future.