On April 13, 2018, during Tesla’s Model 3 production ramp, Elon Musk acknowledged that the company had relied too heavily on automation. “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated,” he wrote. The admission referred to a specific manufacturing problem—not a rejection of automation in general.
What Musk meant by “humans are underrated”
Musk’s statement followed discussion of a complicated conveyor-belt network at Tesla that was not working as intended. He said Tesla removed it. The contemporary reporting connected the episode to the company’s struggle to increase Model 3 production. TechCrunch reported Musk’s April 13 tweet and his comments about the conveyor system; The Guardian covered the production difficulties.
The practical point was that people could adapt more readily when the production process encountered unexpected circumstances. In his December 9, 2018 interview with Lesley Stahl, Musk put it this way: “People are way better at dealing with unexpected circumstances than robots.” That describes his explanation of this particular ramp, not a general finding that human workers are always more productive than machines.
Why production speed mattered at the time
Tesla had set a target of producing 2,500 Model 3s per week by the end of the first quarter of 2018. Fortune reported that the company produced 2,020 Model 3s in a week at quarter-end, below that target. Both figures describe the 2018 ramp, not Tesla’s production today. Fortune reported the target and quarter-end production figure on April 13, 2018.
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What Tesla changed: a general-assembly line in a tent
In the December 2018 60 Minutes interview, correspondent Lesley Stahl described two assembly lines that were not producing cars fast enough and a third general-assembly line set up in a tent in Tesla’s parking lot. Musk said the tent line was assembled in three weeks and increased output by 50 percent. Those numbers are Musk’s account in the interview, rather than independently verified measurements.
He described the effort as “a pretty miraculous effort by the team to create a general assembly line out of nothing in three weeks.” The interview showed a line relying visibly on human workers. Its relevance was not that tents or manual work are inherently superior, but that Tesla used a more adaptable setup while addressing a production bottleneck. Read the CBS News transcript of the December 9, 2018 interview.
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What the episode does—and does not—show about automation
The 2018 story is best understood as a warning about fitting automation to a production process, especially during a difficult ramp. A system can become an obstacle if its complexity makes it hard to keep operating or adjust when conditions change. Human flexibility helped in the account Musk gave of Tesla’s response; that does not establish that people outperform automation across factory work.
The sources describe one company’s production challenge and its response. They do not provide a controlled comparison of automated and human-run lines, or a broad measure of automation’s effects on productivity or employment. Musk’s admission was therefore specific: Tesla had over-automated part of its Model 3 production system, and he took responsibility for that decision.
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