Tesla

Process Engineering Co-op: Body-In-White Cybertruck Team GFTX ~ January - May 2025

I worked as a Process Engineering Co-op at Tesla for my second co-op from January - May 2025. I relocated to Austin, TX, for these months and was lucky enough to have amazing support during this journey. I was a part of the Body-In-White team for the Cybertruck, where I aided in improving and running the manufacturing closure lines for the truck.

Disclaimer: I am under NDA, so I cannot share images of my work from within the factory.

Body-In-White

What does that even mean?

"Body-in-white refers to the metal structure of a vehicle after all components are welded together, but before the vehicle is painted or has its engine, chassis, seats, etc."

Essentially, just the outer shell of the vehicle is pieced together. This is the team I worked in at Tesla.

Cycle Time Redesign

My first, and main project for the first few months of my internship was redesigning the process flows and updating cycle times for my manufacturing lines. I used AutoCAD to overview the layouts of each line, performed Gemba walks of the lines, and ultimately, aided in lowering cycle times for the lines. I redesigned the process flow for the sails, fenders, powergate, and cantrails to optimize cycle time within design targets. This was done by extensive videoing and analysis of each line, where I used Excel to document the details of each step and the time it took to perform the tasks. By doing this, I discovered bottlenecks in the flows and was able to help solve them. I also helped reduce the impact of bottlenecks in the lines. This project allowed me to research how the lines run and function.

Sail Bracket Fixture

On Cybertrucks, Sails are the part of the truck on the rear left/right bumpers. They are the rear equivalent of fenders on the truck. An issue we were having with Sails during my internship was that General Assembly would perform maintenance on trucks, but would be unable to reattach the brackets due to strict GD&T. My task was to figure out the issue and find a solution. Below is an example of what a sail looks like.

I 3D designed/machined a fixture to reattach brackets to reworked closures with +/—1mm dimensional tolerances, reducing scrap and downtime in 2 production lines and general assembly. I designed, printed, and tested this fixture with process technicians to ensure proper functionality. Since then, this fixturing has become obsolete because I found a better solution, using a pre-existing fixture that held perfect dimensional accuracy for parts. I created a work instruction with this and approved it for production. This project lasted over a month and was the last major project I completed in my internship.

Global Audits

What is a Global Audit?

A global audit is when the quality team audits full Cybertrucks to find all defects/flaws that a truck may have. Global audit essentially means taking fully built trucks and checking over every aspect of them to see if they pass quality specifications. These happened twice a week and every team was invited to see what issues got tagged to them.

I performed these global audits on the Cybertrucks and managed quality topics to solve the top 5 key issues on the closure lines. I was able to update and record body-in-white issues and reduce the quality alerts tagged to BIW. I did this throughout my entire internship and was able to make a well-organized Excel sheet with all the data, which got passed on to the next intern.

Audit Forms

Closure Line Audits

I constructed audit forms to ensure that 13 closure lines were within critical specifications based on the control plan per line. This involved researching the intricate details of each line and learning about the critical components of each line. These audit forms helped improve the quality of parts manufactured.

What did these Audits do?

The audits I created were on the sail, fender, door, tailgate, powergate, and cantrail production lines. These audits contained all processes of the manufacturing process to ensure no defects passed through the lines. They were performed 3x per shift, morning, lunch, and night, and these audits were done before sending the parts to General Assembly. They happened before quality to ensure no defects would pass through and to track defects when they were found.

Here are some videos that show the Cybertruck's abilities and the Giga-Factory in TX

Phone

(203)-819-9670

rescsanski.s@northeastern.edu

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