I imagine the stress level on the software engineers is equally insane and perhaps just as debilitating as the physical labor of the line workers.
It's no justification, but IMO you simply can't get where Elon is trying to go without that level of sacrifice from the people carrying the load.
Tesla apparently made a lot of basic mistakes in designing their initial production line, as you say, basic ergonomic failures. Now what we hear as they scale up for Model 3 is that it's people building machines that build cars. If there's a human actually on the Model 3 "line" then by definition it won't run fast enough. My own experience is that automation is asymptotic in that it takes orders of magnitudes more engineering to achieve progressively more "complete" automation. Not everything will be automated, and the whole line will run so hard that the parts which aren't will be absolutely brutal to keep up with. But I have absolutely zero evidence for this, it's just a hunch.
It's no justification, but IMO you simply can't get where Elon is trying to go without that level of sacrifice from the people carrying the load.
Tesla apparently made a lot of basic mistakes in designing their initial production line, as you say, basic ergonomic failures. Now what we hear as they scale up for Model 3 is that it's people building machines that build cars. If there's a human actually on the Model 3 "line" then by definition it won't run fast enough. My own experience is that automation is asymptotic in that it takes orders of magnitudes more engineering to achieve progressively more "complete" automation. Not everything will be automated, and the whole line will run so hard that the parts which aren't will be absolutely brutal to keep up with. But I have absolutely zero evidence for this, it's just a hunch.