Here's What Tesla Said About Its Next-Generation Car

Following a remarkable and lengthy disclaimer that essentially reads "take all of this with a grain of salt," Tesla unveiled its "Master Plan Part 3" on Wednesday. Among other things, the company revealed details about its next-generation car. The company has some interesting intentions here.

Tesla is obsessed with finding manufacturing efficiencies, and believes it can improve on the standard practices in the auto industry. Lead designer Franz von Holzhausen and VP of engineering Lars Moravy detailed a novel manufacturing process for the car, using renderings of a Model Y as an example. Typically for a unibody car, the entire body-in-white is created, assembled, and painted before any further assembly can occur. This requires taking off the doors and using humans to assemble the interior. Tesla proposes that the car should, instead, be made from sub-assemblies, that are attached later. The photo above shows separate assemblies for the front, middle, and rear of the car, plus separate stampings for the sides and the doors. All these components are completed separately and married into a single unit towards the end of production, a process Tesla says will improve efficiency, and therefore, profitability.

It's not an entirely new idea. Many sports cars are based around some sort of central monocoque chassis, to which front and rear subframes are bolted. The difference here is that Tesla wants to do this at a huge scale. The company aims to produce 20 million cars per year by 2030—Toyota built 10.6 million last year—and production of such enormous volumes requires new approaches. Will Tesla ever get there? That's another matter entirely.

On the powertrain side, Tesla also announced it's working on a permanent-magnet motor that doesn't use any rare-earth materials. (BMW already makes a magnet-less motor that eschews rare-earth materials.) Tesla touts that these motors can work with any sort of battery chemistry and that the per-unit cost is around $1000.