When
a paint shop fire halted
vehicle production around 7 a.m. on
April 3, a Tesla spokesperson said the fire was "small" and
extinguished by internal teams in a matter of seconds.
But
employees told CNBC the fire was significant enough to stop work
for at least a full shift on that day. The shop was also shut
down for at least one more shift two days later. It also forced
Tesla to decommission two burnt sprayer robots that they
estimated were worth over $1 million.
The
fire happened just after the company's head of vehicle
engineering, Doug Field, who is now
on leave, sent out an e-mail encouraging employees to "prove
the haters wrong." In that spirit, and under management's
direction, paint shop crews worked on.
The
week of the fire, according to two employees and two other
people familiar with Tesla's Fremont factory, Musk showed up to
assess damage to the paint shop. The fire had burnt an entire
zone dedicated to painting Model 3s.
Rather
than suspending operations immediately, Musk and others
encouraged teams to fix what they could and push through.
Some
Model 3 parts, including B-pillars and chassis components, which
had been in the paint shop at the time, were moved into a
containment area, visually inspected and put back into
production, rather than being scrapped or further tested for
damages, employees said.
Tesla
emphasized that no damaged parts were used in new vehicle
production.
Engineers
scrambled to repurpose equipment in the paint shop that week so
that robots could be used to put primer on both the interior and
exterior surfaces of Model 3 vehicles. Before the fire, separate
robots handled interior and exterior primer application.
Tesla
handled the April 3 fire with its own internal brigade. It did
not report it to the Fremont Fire Department, a spokesperson for
the department confirmed.
However,
a citizen did call after seeing reports about the fire on social
media that day, the fire department spokesperson said. Tesla
security greeted a fire department battalion chief who went to
investigate and said the department had no internal reports of
fire at the facility, the spokesperson said. The chief toured
the exterior of the Fremont factory looking for signs of fire,
and seeing nothing but a "cloud formation" outside, left without
going inside, according to the spokesperson.
A
week and a half later, Tesla announced it was shutting
down its Fremont factory operations
temporarily to make some improvements. (Tesla also shut down its
factory for a week in May for planned upgrades.)