GigaBerlin Production Update

With all the excitement and attention going to Tesla’s North American operations lately, news on the company’s other sites has taken a backseat - but it seems that work has quietly continued to ramp up in these other facilities - and GigaBerlin just passed a huge milestone.

The German gigafactory just announced that staff there have managed to produce 4000 Model Y vehicles in one week - a production target that was planned to be hit on around March 13th.

This target getting hit ahead of schedule is great news for the facility - which has consistently ramped up its production since opening less than a year ago.

GigaBerlin has had a goal of producing 500,000 vehicles per year - or roughly 10,000 cars per week - since it opened in March 2022. By October, they were putting out 2,000 per week. By December? 3,000. And now, we’re seeing 4,000 units- almost half of their goal met in under a year. That’s a pretty respectable pace.

And it’s not just cars being made at the site either.

Local officials report that GigaBerlin’s battery production facility is up and running. On February 16th, Brandenburg Economics Minister Jörg Steinbach confirmed that battery production had begun at the factory.

The German factory’s battery operations don’t handle complete battery production, but it does reportedly assemble them, and construct components such as electrodes - which Tesla has said they might ship from Germany to the US to support their operations there.

This news isn’t really surprising though - GigaBerlin has had a lot of labour put into it in order to prepare the facility for the expected peak of 10,000 units per week. Back in August 2022, visitors to the site noted that parts of the factory looked like they were already prepared for that production volume.

And while Tesla likely didn’t have a lot of foreknowledge of the US’s new Inflation Reduction Act before it dropped, they’ve obviously prepared their factories to support each other. 

GigaBerlin is getting its legs underneath it at just the right time.