Tesla has announced that Giga Berlin hit a new milestone, producing 5,000 new Model Ys this week for the first time. The milestone figure was achieved just over one year after the factory first opened.
Tesla announced the milestone on Twitter, confirming reports on social media earlier in the day that the factory had achieved the milestone. With the announcement Tesla also shared a time-lapse video showing the 5,000th Model Y making its way down the production line and rolling off as finished car, just like the first Model Y one year ago.
Giga Berlin hits 5k builds/week—1 year after delivering the first vehicles to customers pic.twitter.com/PZigSaSci5
— Tesla (@Tesla) March 25, 2023
Tesla first opened Giga Berlin on March 22, 2022, about two years after construction first began. The automaker ramped production not as quickly as they had originally hoped, ending the year producing 3,000 Model Ys per week.
By February that number had increased to 4,000 per week, thanks in part to the addition of a third production shift, and now one month later it has reached 5,000 per week. With this milestone being reached this early into the year Giga Berlin could produce over 260,000 cars this year, an impressive figure considering the factory is just one year old.
Tesla however has even bigger plans. The automaker applied this month to expand Giga Berlin to produce 1 million cars per year. This initial expansion will not involve expanding the footprint of the existing factory, but will instead take place within existing buildings on the factory complex. Tesla will also be able to expand their production to 1 million cars without requiring any extra water supply by treatment and reuse of water used during production.
Tesla is also ramping production at another factory, Giga Texas, which opened one month after Giga Berlin. As of the last update from Tesla the factory in Austin was producing 3,000 per week at the end of 2022, in line with what Giga Berlin was producing at the time. Given how close they have been in ramping production up to this point, it would not be surprising to see a similar announcement for Giga Texas in the next week or two.
