Less than a month after it hit a production rate of 4000 cars per week, Tesla’s Giga Berlin factory has now reached a rate of 5000 cars per week which Tesla considers the threshold for “volume production”.
Employees celebrated the milestone as the 5000th vehicle rolled off the production line in the German factory on Saturday.
Although it had originally hoped to hit the 5000 unit per month milestone by the end of 2022, Tesla’s Giga Berlin production ramp still appears to be growing exponentially.
It took Giga Berlin four months to go from 1000 to 2000 cars, but just one month to go from 4000 to 5000.
If the factory can maintain its production growth rate of 1000 cars per month, it will hit a weekly production rate of 10,000 units by August. That translates to an annualised production rate of just over half a million cars per year.
While Tesla only has approval to produce 500,000 cars per year at the factory, it recently submitted an application to Germany’s environmental agency to increase that to 1 million vehicles per year. Tesla hopes to have approval for the increased production rate before it hits the half million unit limit in a few months.
On it’s current growth trajectory the factory would hit an annualised production rate of one million vehicles around mid-2024.
The expansion, however, will not increase the factory’s physical size, the Berlin Giga factory is said to be big enough to produce up to 2 million vehicles per year when it reaches full capacity. At that rate, the factory would be producing over 2% of the world’s entire vehicles production.
Giga Berlin on the bleeding edge of vehicle manufacturing
Tesla’s Berlin factory is one of the most advanced car manufacturing plants in the world thanks to its revolutionary layout as well as new processes such as single-body castings, structural battery packs and new vehicle assembly methods.
You can get an idea of how advanced the factory is with the fly-through clip that Tesla posted when Giga Berlin was opened last year.
The Berlin factory is currently only producing the Model Y however it’s believed that lines a second model will soon be added.
Giga Berlin is one of 4 EV assembly plants Tesla now has around the world. Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin is roughly the same size as the Berlin factory and not far behind on production numbers. Tesla’s Shanghai factory produced over 700,000 vehicles last year making up over 50% of Tesla total annual production of 1.3 million for 2022.
Tesla also recently announced that it would begin construction of a new fifth factory in Mexico this year.
The new factory in Mexico will feature some of the new manufacturing techniques announced at Tesla’s Investor Day earlier this month.
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