The Assassin (Sha ren zhe Tang Zhan)

The Tesla factory...

America's largest industrial plant.

Behind me is one of the largest hydraulic stamping presses

in north America.

It's actually seven stories high.

For this cutting-edge facility

to build electric cars...

Suddenly, science fiction isn't tomorrow, it is today.

...engineers had to look to the past...

This beautiful machine, it's one of the world's

first electric cars.

Brilliant engineering.

...to make the impossible possible.

captions paid for by discovery communications

since the industrial revolution,

factories have often been portrayed

as dirty and dangerous places...

Churning out products at the expense of the work force.

But one American factory is challenging this view...

...the Tesla factory.

Located in Fremont, California,

this state-of-the-art automotive manufacturing facility

is kick-starting a new technological era.

And Tesla's Alexis Georgeson has witnessed the birth

of this giant industrial machine.

The processes here, in this factory,

are designed to be as efficient as possible.

It's a 5.3 million square-foot facility.

This American car manufacturer

revolutionized the industry

with the world's first electric sports car.

But producing hundreds of thousands of electric cars

for mass consumption

required an even greater scale of engineering.

That's one of the biggest challenges ahead,

as our CEO Elon Musk has said,

is really building the machine that makes the machine.

Starting production in 2012,

this machine is the biggest factory

in the western hemisphere.

The 5.3 million square-foot factory

employs 6,000 workers and state-of-the-art robots

to transform raw materials into high-tech vehicles

in just a few days.

Here, the staff and some of the world's mightiest machines

come together to cast, stamp, paint, and assemble

component parts into 2,000 cars every week.

That's before they go through the final lap

on the factory's dedicated test track.

But making this many cars in a factory this big

would have been impossible without mass production.

We're rethinking the way

that the automotive industry

has approached production in the past,

through first principles of physics

and through vertical integration

and just really treating this

as an engineering problem, first and foremost.

Once upon a time,

there was no such thing as mass production.

Sword, please.

Everything was made by artisans.

Thanks, peasant.

Though charming and unique...

Tada! hmm.

...the process was inconsistent...

What a chopper.

Mine's a tiddler.

...expensive...

More.

More.

More!

...and slow.

With this approach,

making mass quantities of products was impossible.

What's this?! Gah!

But a revolutionary change was on the horizon.

Architect and historian Benedetto Camerana

is in the iconic city of Venice, Italy,

to reveal where mass production got its start.

In the middle ages, the Republic of Venice

was a political power

with a strong reputation for war and conquest.

The strength of the venetian empire

was based on naval muscle and commercial trade.

Both needed ships and lots of them.

Naval boat building had been carried out

in different shipyards

sprawled throughout the city.

That could take weeks to produce a single galley.

And that was not fast enough.

In the 12th century,

the Venetians developed a game-changing solution.

And this is it...

the Venice arsenale.

Here, they completely re-imagined the way

that ships were built.

For the first time in history,

each individual component of a ship was mast produced...

Across a centralized row of specialized workshops.

The ships were moved around the dockyard

to different workshops.

Each focused on pre-fabricating

the different elements of the ship.

Hulls were made and launched as shells.

They were then towed across the shipyard and equipped

with ready-made masts, rudders, and anchors.

At the final workshop,

they were rigged and set up with oars and armaments.

At its height, they could assemble a galley per day here,

which is truly incredible.

At the arsenale,

venetian shipbuilders invented the production line.

And bringing this production line into the 20th century,

engineer Giacomo matte-Trucco

designed another one-of-a-kind factory

in Turin, Italy,

for the car company fiat, called the lingotto.

When it was completed in 1923,

this was the largest car factory in the world...

five stories high.

For the first time, all aspects of production

came together in a single building.

Specialized workshops were

placed strategically on each floor,

producing parts that would be fitted to the vehicles

as they progressed through the 1,600-foot-long factory.

Raw materials would arrive by rail

to the ground floor of the building.

Here, they would fashion the car components.

On the second floor,

the engines and bodies of the car were made.

One story up, gearboxes and steering were added.

The fourth floor specialized

in brakes and upholstery.

And on the fifth floor, finishing touches were made.

Finally, the completed cars would emerge on the roof...

the most iconic feature of the building.

All the cars coming off the lingotto production line

came here, a purpose-built rooftop test track.

For nearly 60 years,

this phenomenal test track high above the Turin skyline

would have been witness

to the birth of hundreds

of thousands of cars.

For over 50 years, the lingotto factory produced

countless vehicles until 1979.

But its tremendous legacy lives on.

At the Tesla factory in Fremont, California,

the principles of mass production,

first applied at the Venice arsenale

and further developed at the lingotto,

are getting a 21st-century makeover.

We move cars from one end to another.

So much of the factory is vertically integrated.

We're actually producing so many components here, in house,

rather than shipping them from other parts of the world

or other parts of the country.

While the production line principles remain the same,

compared to factories of the past,

the Tesla factory is practically unrecognizable.

We wanted this, first and foremost,

to be a beautiful working environment

that really was a testament to the quality of the products

that we were building here.

So we came in, we repainted the entire space,

we put sunlights in the roof.

We wanted a lot of natural light

and a place where workers could come

and be proud of the craftsmanship

and the space where they were creating these products.

But to create a truly futuristic factory,

filled with cutting-edge robots,

the engineers had to draw

on the great innovations of the past...

The robot is correcting itself to achieve its objective.

...to deliver more impossible engineering.

The Tesla factory.

As the largest industrial plant in America,

this cutting-edge electric car company

has one of the most advanced production lines on the planet.

The 5. 3 million square-foot factory

takes raw materials in at one end,

and in as little as three days,

transforms them into cars.

6,000 workers interact

with the most futuristic technologies

to produce a staggering 2,000 electric cars a week,

all of which go through the final lap

on the dedicated test track.

But to produce vehicles on this vast and ever-growing scale,

engineers had to design with extreme economy.

How do we streamline this?

How do we ramp production?

How do we keep the costs down?

And how to do we make this manufacturing process

as efficient as possible?

To be ultra efficient, the engineers looked

to one of modern history's great breakthroughs...

...robots.