Tesla Gigafactory Texas has achieved a new production milestone of 4,000 cars in a week, but the factory trails behind Gigafactory Berlin in its friendly production ramp-up competition.
The automaker has been simultaneously ramping up two major factories, Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas, to volume production at the same time.
It created a friendly competition between the two.
When ramping up a new vehicle to volume production at a new factory, Tesla generally considers 5,000 units per week to be the goal.
Last month, Gigafactory Berlin achieved that goal with 5,000 Model Y vehicles produced in a week.
At the time, Gigafactory Texas was only known to be producing 3,000 Model Y vehicles per week and Tesla hadn’t updated the production rate since December.
Today, Tesla announced that Gigafactory Texas has achieved a production rate of 4,000 units in a week:
Therefore, the Austin-based Tesla factory is falling a bit behind its colleagues in Germany.
However, Gigafactory Texas is facing different challenges then Gigafactory Berlin.
The primary difference being that some of the vehicles produced at Gigafactory Texas are equipped with Tesla’s 4680 battery cells, which enable the new « structural battery pack » chassis design.
As we recently reported, Tesla is known to have had issues ramping up production of the 4680 cells. It is believed to be impacting production at the factory although Tesla has adapted by producing some Model Y vehicles with 2170 battery cells as it does as other factories.
The new production rate is bringing Tesla closer to its goal to have a capacity for 2 million vehicles annually this year.