Crews at Giga Berlin have been able to increase production substantially in recent months, enough for Tesla to move up plans to add a third shift at the factory before the end of the year.
Tesla has been celebrating the successes of two of its new factories that opened this year, Giga Berlin and Giga Texas. The automaker has shared some recent production updates on their new factory in Austin, most recently announcing it had surpassed 20,000 vehicles built at the end of October, after having revealed 10,000 Model Ys were built by mid-September.
The last update from Tesla on Giga Berlin’s production came in September when crews at the factory built 2,000 cars in a single week.
Assuming a 100% uptime during the current six-day work week at Giga Berlin, that put the factory’s production at around 333 cars per day.
Drive Tesla has now learned the factory set a new single day production record last week of around 550 cars, translating to a potential weekly production volume of around 3,300 cars.
That high level of production puts Tesla closer to their goal of producing 5,000 cars per week, and it is enough for them to move up plans to add a third vehicle production shift.
According to documentation seen by Drive Tesla, the third shift will start in mid-December.
UPDATE Nov 30 10:15am PT: After a meeting between Elon Musk and the Giga Berlin team, the third shift has been moved to the second week of January.
After originally hoping to add a third shift in December, Tesla had postponed those plans until early next year, but with the increased production and increased hiring have now moved up those plans up to be back on track with their original schedule.
A third shift will give Tesla 24 hours of production, and should easily get the factory to its goal of 5,000 cars per week, although maybe not quite before the calendar rolls into 2023.
The third shift comes at a time when Tesla has already begun work to expand the factory. A large area to the north of the existing facilities has been cleared and Tesla is planning to submit the permit applications for the first phase of the project before the end of the year.
