Tesla has finally announced another production milestone for Giga Texas, although it is not the one we were expecting. On Sunday the automaker took to Twitter to share that the nearly 1 year old Gigafactory in Austin produced 4,000 Model Ys last week.
Taking a slightly different approach than the other recent milestone announcements, Tesla used a drone to celebrate the moment with hundreds of workers surrounding a Model Y outside the factory.
Congrats Giga Texas team on building 4k Model Y this week! pic.twitter.com/JFqaixZLCa
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 2, 2023
This is the first production update for Giga Texas in three and a half months, with the last update coming in mid-December, at which time Tesla was celebrating reaching 3,000 Model Ys per week. That means crews at Giga Texas are falling further behind their counterparts at Giga Berlin.
Both factories reached 3,000 Model Ys per week in December, but it only took Giga Berlin until late February to reach 4,000 in a single week, and then until March 25 to reach 5,000 Model Ys per week. Following the time it took for production to increase from 3,000 to 4,000, it could be another 2 to 3 months before we see Giga Texas reach 5,000 Model Ys per week.
Part of the reason why Giga Texas has been slower to ramp production than Giga Berlin is likely because of the different cars the two factories have been producing, particularly in first few months after they opened.
Giga Texas opened with a huge Cyber Rodeo party almost one year ago on April 7, 2022, and at the beginning was only producing Model Ys with structural battery packs and 4680 cells. As we all know now Tesla hasn’t been able to produce enough 4680 cells to keep up with vehicle production, so they switched and added their traditional 2170 cells to Giga Texas production lines a few months later.
