Featured image: Tesla Daily/YouTube
During Battery Day, Elon Musk and Drew Baglino shared many details regarding Tesla's plans for the future. The information disclosed also allows us to make additional, significant assumptions. We just need to connect some important dots.
Tesla Daily/YouTube takes a look at some points in its video. He notes that Musk said that, in the future, Giga Shanghai could be expanded to produce more than one million vehicles per year, making it the largest car plant in the world. This was the first time Elon had confirmed plans to expand production facilities in Shanghai.
With each new factory, Tesla improves. Right now, Tesla's plans show that the company intends to produce 500,000 vehicles per year at Giga Berlin and the same at Giga Texas. Yet, according to some rumors, Tesla plans to produce two million vehicles at Giga Berlin.
In support of this assumption, we know that Tesla previously planned to hire 10,000 employees, but now Tesla is talking about up to 40,000 employees. 10,000 employees will probably be needed for each phase of the factory. Accordingly, if each of the four phases produce 500,000 vehicles per year, the total volume of Giga Berlin will be two million per year.
The construction of Giga Berlin is proceeding rapidly. However, Musk said the construction of the Giga Texas is progressing at an even faster pace. Given Tesla is getting increasingly better at optimizing space, the 2,100-acre site could potentially house a more manufacturing facilities than anticipated, which could produce several million vehicles per year.
With that in mind, Tesla Daily says Tesla is targeting over five million vehicles a year. Indeed, right now, the company is simultaneously building three of the largest factories in the world--and the company's plans don't end here.
Elon said that their pilot battery production line in Fremont will scale to about 10 GWh per year in 2021, but he said actual manufacturing plants should reach 200 GWh per year in 2022. If we consider the scenario for the production of vehicles with batteries with an average capacity of 80 kWh, 200 GWh will be enough to produce 2.5 million vehicles per year. But, of course, a significant portion of this production would need to be dedicated to energy storage.
Tesla also announced its plan to achieve 3 TWh by 2030. Assuming that each plant will have a capacity of 200 GWh, this means that the company can build 15 such plants, located around the world.
During the presentation, Musk drew attention to the fact that the construction will be capital-intensive. On one of the slides, he presented that the construction of factories with a capacity of 20 TWh (which is equal to 135 Gigafactories) would cost the company about $2 trillion. Considering that Musk said that Tesla's goal was to build factories for 3 TWh, this means that it will cost the company $300 million.
However, the presentation also explained that, if all the improvements presented at Battery Day were applied, the company would be able to cut costs by 69%.
As such, we see that the gradual construction of a large number of factories becomes affordable for Tesla. This enables production capacity in the next few years to increase to five million vehicles per year.
© 2020, Eva Fox. All rights reserved.
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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter
About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
