In the future, Tesla wants to produce 500,000 electric cars every year in Grünheide, Brandenburg. But contrary to what the self-advertising name “Giga-Factory” suggests, gigantic numbers are still a long way off. Most recently, 1000 vehicles were created from the Model Y – not a day, but a week.
But it shouldn’t stop there. Tesla wants to quickly expand the capacity of the plant that opened on March 22nd. At the beginning of July, production should even be completely suspended for two weeks. As the magazine “Teslamag” reports, the processes are to be changed so that a vehicle then only has to stay at each production station for 30 seconds instead of up to three minutes. That would even undercut the originally targeted 90 seconds per station.
According to the magazine, this should also be made possible by more staff. According to Brandenburg’s Economics Minister Jörg Steinbach (SPD), a third shift is planned soon – more than 500 new employees will be hired per week.
As reported, there is one hurdle: According to IG Metall, Tesla pays up to 20 percent less than its competitors in the region who adhere to collective agreements. In order to actually have 12,000 people on board by the end of the year, Tesla would have to “step it up a notch,” says the union.
According to “Teslamag”, the changes also include carrying out the final inspection in the individual production areas, so that time-consuming rework can be dispensed with. From the second half of July, production should then run according to the new pattern.
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Tesla has been in turbulence lately. Production had stalled worldwide due to interrupted supply chains as a result of the corona pandemic, and a lack of batteries was particularly noticeable. The founder of the US group, Elon Musk, had therefore repeatedly warned of an economic downturn and announced job cuts. 3 to 3.5 percent of jobs will be cut in the coming months, but the number of factory workers will increase in the long term.
Against the background of these difficulties, Musk called the new factories in Grünheide and Austin, Texas “giant money incinerators”. You would lose in “billions of dollars”. He described the past two years as an “absolute nightmare” with regard to the supply chain problems in the auto industry.
