Tesla’s Global Production Plan
We got a look at some of Tesla's upcoming plans last week, as Tesla workers at the GigaBerlin held their first all-employee meeting on October 5th.
Giga Berlin's Works Council reportedly went over the factory's achievements this year so far, and then discussed Tesla's plans for the next few months. These plans detail how Tesla is making a global effort to bolster US production to take advantage of the new Inflation Reduction Act - and the extra spending the US government will be committing to the clean energy industry over the next 10 years.
According to the meeting notes, as many as 50 employees will be sent from Giga Berlin to US facilities as part of this plan. As a result, Tesla says it will be temporarily pausing some battery production at the Berlin facility.
However, Tesla says that aside from this change, they don't expect Giga Berlin to slow down. Aside from the temporary pause in battery production, Tesla says the team will continue producing electrodes, and testing and calibration of the new 4680 equipment will continue, so progress will still be made on that front while Berlin employees are helping out in the US.
The facility also recently hit the milestone of 2000 Model Ys built per week, and they believe they can still hit 5000 units produced per week by year's end.
Even more promising, local Drive Unit production has ramped up to over 100 units per day, and is expected to grow even faster once the planned second work shift is added in 2023. Currently, GigaBerlin's Drive Unit production is being supported by imports from Giga Shanghai.
And while it's great to see Giga Berlin starting to bring more of its own production in-house - it's hard to say that Shanghai is suffering.
The latest numbers from the Chinese Giga Factory show that it sold and exported over 83,000 vehicles just in September - beating last September's numbers by about 48%
Overall numbers show that Shanghai has sold over 64% more vehicles up to this point, than last year's numbers. That's over 483,000 vehicles bought and shipped this year despite the shutdowns.
Original estimates for the factory's output after the recent upgrades have predicted that it might be able to put out 1.2 million units per year - or 100,000 units per month - once it fully ramps up. And they're pretty close to that number already.
GigaShanghai accounts for a large chunk of Tesla's global sales, but the facility is also used to supply other factories with parts they can't make yet - or are in the process of bringing in house, like the Drive Units for GigaBerlin.
The Shanghai facility has consistently been the workhorse of Tesla's global production network, and it's just incredible to see the numbers laid out like this. Hopefully with enough time, the other GigaFactories will be able to support numbers like this too.