- Mr. Gray, how are you doing? - [Gray] Good, how are you?
- Good to see you.
- [Gray] Yes, sir.
- Making progress?
- [Gray] Always.
- All right, good. I'll talk to you.
We're here in Normal at our production facility.
You can really think of it as almost two plants within one.
Our R1 products - the R1T and the R1S,
and there's a separate line where we build
our commercial vans, the EDV 700 and the EDV 500.
First, we're gonna look at how we build these panels,
and we have six large presses in the facility
that do everything from Class-A panels,
large panels, like our body sides,
to smaller inner panels or structural panels.
The body is a mixed-material structure.
A lot of the core structure is steel,
but any of the closures are aluminum,
and all those panels get stamped in-house.
So, out of stamping,
we actually have two different body shops.
Our first body shop is our R1 body shop,
and there we build the R1T and the R1S.
And we took a lot of the learnings
and a lot of what we developed in the R1 body shop
to inform how we designed our second body shop,
which is the commercial van body shop.
This is also a new part of the building.
So, where I'm standing, right by this line,
last year at this time, was being converted
from a parking lot into what you see today,
and what's cool about this is,
because the vans are so large,
the robots themselves are enormous.
Look at this.
These look almost like dinosaurs in their size.
They're picking up the full body side as it's being built.
Our paint shop is a brand new state-of-the-art facility,
and in the last 18 months,
with this being a bare shell to being a paint shop,
now painting the R1T, the R1S, the commercial vans,
and also electrostatically coating our skateboards
and our battery enclosure.
This facility has seen a tremendous amount of progress
and it's now operating as a high volume shop,
and the paint system that we use actually allows us
to change colors without any need to purge the system.
It's a canister-based process.
Incredibly efficient, really minimizes any waste.
You see all the different colors.
R1T, R1S, and on the far side,
the EDV 500 and the EDV 700.
It's like a big vending machine for painted vehicles.
Once the body is selected,
it's then assigned a whole build combination
and actually connects with the customer,
and from that point forward,
its future destiny is determined.
So, now, we're walking through the drive unit assembly,
where we build the full drive unit.
We're assembling the gearbox, assembling the inverter,
and putting that together with the motor.
This is a really critical process for us.
Our quad-motor, with two motors per axle, one per wheel,
really gives a lot of the differentiation
in terms of how the vehicle drives and feels.
In the battery shop, we're building sub-modules,
which then go into modules,
modules which then go into a pack,
and ultimately a pack, which has 7,776 cylindrical cells.
There's a tremendous amount of tuning
and training of the workforce that we've had to go through,
and we're now really seeing an inflection point
in terms of the output and the production.
General assembly, as we describe it,
that's the part you typically think of
when you think of an automotive plant,
when you think of all the workforce
assembling different parts onto a vehicle.
For R1, there's around 2,000 components
from roughly 400 suppliers that come together.
We actually have two general assembly lines.
We have one for the R1 program,
and another line, our second line, for the commercial vans.
Those two lines are moving through the plant in parallel.
The end of line portion of the plant
involves taking the vehicle.
After it's finished its process through general assembly,
it goes through a wheel alignment process.
It goes through a headlight aim and alignment process.
It goes on a dynamometer,
and we make sure everything's performing as intended.
We calibrate all the sensors,
and then ultimately, following a water test,
it does a short drive,
and then final inspection for body fit and overall quality.
All that's really possible because of the team.
The attitude, the capabilities,
and the willingness to challenge one another
is what gives me an incredible amount of confidence
as we look at the path forward.