Connect with us

News

Tesla is giving high school grads Gigafactory jobs as apprenticeship program enters 3rd year

Published

on

At Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 in Sparks, Nevada, local high school graduates have had the opportunity since 2017 to participate in two-year apprenticeships hosted by the electric vehicle manufacturer. As the program heads into its third year, the company is searching for 50-60 juniors and seniors to take part in the full-time hours, full-time benefits opportunity combining hands-on manufacturing job training with personal development support. Tesla has a history of investing in its local communities, making this program yet another nod to their commitment to embracing those supporting their mission of driving towards a sustainable energy future.

High school graduates in the program will primarily learn to build electric batteries and motors for Tesla’s product lines, but also included in the Reno Gigafactory apprenticeship is a 20-credit educational program through Truckee Meadows Community College, a local school. Additionally, personal and financial development classes and workshops are offered as well as reserved housing, all at the pay rate of $17 per hour with full employee benefits. The hours at the factory accommodate the educational schedule – each week alternating three 12-hour shifts and four 10-hour shifts.

There’s no guarantee of a permanent Tesla job at the end of the program, but according to Chris Reilly, head of workforce development and education programs at Tesla, several students from the completed programs have already been hired. Also, the skills acquired provide students with the ability to continue growing in similar industries or vocations. In 2018, 54 Nevada students were selected to participate.

Tesla takes part in 2018’s Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. | Credit: Tesla

The Gigafactory 1 apprenticeship program began as a pilot in 2017 wherein 13 high school graduates were brought on board to participate. Vocational robotics programs at a Las Vegas technical school inspired the concept, and Tesla has since turned their program model into a framework for others in the manufacturing industry to use as an example. Overall, it’s a win-win for both students and companies – job skills and development in exchange for a potential source of a ready-trained workforce. “The thought was: As we grow from a small team out in Northern Nevada to thousands of employees, how do we build sustainable pipelines,” Reilly explained to a local reporter during an informational session hosted at Las Vegas High School last week.

The process of participating in Tesla’s apprenticeship seems fairly straight forward: Students apply as juniors and seniors, tour the Gigafactory, and then split off into two groups – juniors take resume-writing workshops and seniors are interviewed for positions in the program. If selected for the program, graduating seniors move into Tesla-reserved housing in the Reno area and begin.

The apprenticeship program isn’t Tesla’s first investment into Nevada’s student population – the carmaker has pledged to donate $37.5 million dollars to Nevada schools as part of a Gigafactory Incentive Deal. An initial grant of $1.5 million for K-12 programs went out last summer to FIRST Nevada, a robotics and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics) focused non-profit, and the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, an initiative to enable schools to establish premier robotics programs, among other technology-focused educational efforts. In early 2018, Gigafactory 1 hosted local 6th grade students for Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, an initiative aiming to foster and support the interest of young women in the engineering field.

Advertisement
-

Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

Advertisement
Comments

Investor's Corner

Tesla has a Cybercab problem nobody saw coming

Tesla’s Cybercab line now builds robotaxis faster than Tesla can deploy them, Lars Moravy says.

Published

on

By

Tesla’s Cybercab line in Texas can now build the two seat robotaxi faster than the company can put it into service, according to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering. “We don’t run every day because the line can run so fast. It’s currently outpacing our deployments,” Moravy said in a new Cybercab deep dive from Munro Live. “So, it’s a bit of a race right now. Who’s going to go faster? Right now the manufacturing line’s ahead.”

Tesla’s official Robotaxi account shared a Cybercab analysis video on X on Monday, calling it a “Cybercab engineering deep dive.” Moravy’s comments go further than what he told analysts on the Q3 earnings call last week, when he said the Cybercab line’s listed capacity of more than 125,000 units a year undersells what it can actually run.

The tour shows where that speed comes from. Tesla’s unboxed process splits the Cybercab into front, rear, side and center modules that are built and tested on their own before they meet on a short final line. That final line has just 25 fully automated stations, which Tesla’s team estimated is a fifth to a tenth of what a Model Y needs. The full line is about 78% automated, the framing line is already at 100%, and the layout uses roughly 50% less floor space per vehicle. The stated goal is “100% automation in 10 second cycle time,” or one finished Cybercab every 10 seconds.

Tesla also deleted the paint shop. Only the side modules are coated, and the exterior panels get their color inside the molding machine. Engineers said the car is designed to run at least 500,000 miles, which matters for a vehicle that will spend most of its day carrying riders.

The battery got the same treatment. The Cybercab uses an 88S6P pack of 4680 cells in a steel enclosure, a first for Tesla, with each module potted separately so a single failed module can be swapped instead of the whole pack. Wireless battery management boards replace a wiring harness, and new contactors are fast enough to drop the pyro fuse entirely. Tesla’s battery director graded the pack an A minus, compared with a D for the Model Y structural pack and a B minus for Cybertruck. Up front, the drive unit runs an 11:1 gear ratio versus roughly 9:1 on most Teslas, since the Cybercab does not need a high top speed.

Advertisement
-

The deployment side is now the bottleneck Moravy described. Tesla had more than 50 Cybercabs working the Formula 1 weekend in Austin, and Texas records show 463 Cybercabs registered. Tesla said on its earnings call that Cybercab service will launch in Dallas next month, and Moravy said the company is aiming to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026. Every unit built so far has gone into Tesla’s own fleet since the line moved into volume production in April.

Munro Live also asked when it could get a Cybercab to tear down. Tesla’s answer: “Not yet.”

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

How SpaceX Is raising Raptor’s sea-level thrust while holding engine mass steady

Published

on

Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX’s Raptor engine family has steadily increased sea-level thrust while simultaneously reducing mass, turning iterative engineering gains into substantially higher performance for the Super Heavy booster. CEO Elon Musk shed more light on how powerful Raptor 4 will be, and it’s pretty crazy.

Raptor 1 delivered 185 metric tons of thrust at roughly 2,080 kilograms, while Raptor 2 raised that to 230 tons while cutting mass to about 1,630 kilograms. SpaceX data for Raptor 3 lists a target of 280 tons at 1,525 kilograms (with further reductions in associated vehicle hardware), while operational flight ratings have been cited near 250 tons.

This morning, Elon Musk stated that Raptor 4 is expected to reach 300 tons of sea-level thrust at roughly the same mass as Raptor 3. Across these versions, thrust has risen by more than 60 percent from the first engines while engine mass has fallen, producing a sharp improvement in thrust-to-weight ratio. This is a true testament to how great SpaceX engineering has been:

With 33 engines on SuperHeavy, the jump from earlier versions to a 300-ton Raptor 4 would produce roughly 9,900 metric tons of total liftoff thrust, nearly three times the Saturn V’s approximately 3,400 metric tons from its five F-1 engines.

This is not just a larger number on a data sheet, either, as sea-level thrust is the force available the moment the vehicle leaves the pad. This is when it is heaviest and still deep in Earth’s gravity well and dense atmosphere.

Higher levels of sea-level thrust directly improves the initial thrust-to-weight ratio of the full stack. A higher ratio produces faster acceleration off the pad, which shortens the time the rocket has to spend fighting gravity, and gravity losses during the first minute or two of the flight are a major drain on total available delta-v. Every second shaved off of that early climb preserves more propellant energy for reaching orbital velocity or for carrying extra payload.

Because Super Heavy’s engine count is constrained by vehicle diameter and packing density, increasing thrust per engine is the most straightforward way to raise total liftoff performance without redesigning the booster structure or design.

The same-mass target for Raptor 4 is equally important. Holding engine mass roughly constant while raising thrust improves the engine’s own thrust-to-weight ratio and reduces the structural and propellant mass fraction that must be carried solely to support the engines.

Earlier Raptor iterations also simplified or eliminated extensive vehicle-side hardware such as heat shields. These gains compound: more force for less installed mass leaves additional capacity for propellant, payload, or operational margins such as engine-out capability.

For Starship’s architecture, the practical effects are large. Greater liftoff thrust supports heavier vehicles, larger propellant loads, and higher payloads to low Earth orbit, figures SpaceX has targeted in the 100-plus-ton reusable range. That capacity underpins orbital refueling, lunar missions, and eventual Mars cargo and crew flights.

Continued growth in sea-level thrust therefore tightens the gap between theoretical rocket performance and the high flight rates and reusability needed to make large-scale space transport practical.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla Assisted Driving expands to tenth EU country

Published

on

Tesla has expanded its Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD) suite to its tenth European country, as Latvia joined a growing list of European Union member states authorizing the company’s advanced driver assistance technology.

Tesla Europe announced this morning that the system is now approved in Latvia, with a software rollout to begin soon.

The approval and rollout follow recognition of a provisional European type approval originally granted by the Netherlands’ RDW authority on April 10.

Latvia’s Road Traffic Safety Directorate (CSDD) evaluated the Dutch documentation, coordinated with the other national authorities, and reviewed updates from Tesla. These included tightened limits on speed offsets, automatic resets of any manual speed adjustments after each trip, and stronger driver monitoring.

In Europe, the feature is marketed as Tesla Assisted Driving after a recent rule change that labeled the name “Full Self-Driving” as misleading.

Tesla starts showing how FSD will change lives in Europe

The system remains an SAE Level 2 driver assistance tool, not unsupervised autonomy. It can control speed, steering, braking, lane changes, and intersections while following a navigation route. Drivers need not keep their hands on the wheel at all times, yet they must continuously monitor the road and be prepared to intervene immediately.

The sequence of EU recognitions began with the Netherlands in April and continued through Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia, and Slovakia. Most have relied on mutual recognition of the single Dutch provisional approval rather than independent national testing.

These national clearances do not yet constitute bloc-wide authorization. An EU-wide decision requires a qualified majority in the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population. Larger markets, like Germany, France, and Italy, remain under review, and a vote is expected this December.

However, for Latvian Tesla owners with compatible vehicles and software, the imminent rollout expands access to the supervised system while underscoring that attentive human oversight remains essential.

Continue Reading