GigaBerlin Closes

The word out of Germany this week is that Tesla intends on shutting its GigaBerlin factory down for about two weeks in order to upgrade the facility, and add a third shift.

Tesla’s been having a hard go of it in terms of production numbers last quarter, and we’ve been seeing them talk about upcoming changes to help boost productivity. That said, last month GigaBerlin was able to hit their goal of 1000 cars produced in a week - mostly thanks to the Model Y Berlin models using the ubiquitous 2170 battery cells.

The upgrade to facilities is apparently to add the manufacturing of electric motors to the in-house production - currently Berlin is getting them imported from GigaShanghai.

But with a new production article comes the need for more labour, and this is where that third shift comes in.

Back in May, Tesla added a second shift to allow the floor to stay open for 16 hours. This seemed to have the desired effect - more time working lead to higher production numbers, who knew?

But with the push for higher numbers comes the need for even more coverage, and adding a third shift will keep the factory open 24 hours per day - the hard part is enticing workers.

Tesla’s had a harder time in Germany for reasons that probably have to do with stronger labour laws and union support. However it’s not like Tesla isn’t playing ball - they gave their employees a 6% salary bump in response to suggestions that pay is a little low.

Problems in Germany have always required a little more effort on Tesla’s part to solve, but the factory there has done a good job of steadily increasing production all last quarter. There’s no reason to think that with a bit of bargaining with their employees, Tesla can’t recover from this scheduled downtime.