Tesla Will Rapidly Grow the Number of Gigafactories Under Construction

Minister of Economy, Labor and Energy of the State of Brandenburg Jörg Steinbach said Tesla’s goal is to complete the construction Gig Berlin factory at a faster pace than the 11-month Giga Shanghai build. Tesla is leveraging modular construction for faster construction.

Tesla is able to complete new gigafactories in less than 11 months. Tesla can raise tens of billions of dollars from the markets, leverage over $8 billion in cash and is rapidly growing profitability to increase the pace of gigafactory construction. 2021 profits will be enough to fund 2-3 new factories each year.

In Berlin, Tesla went from first pillars to first walls in two weeks while this step took 4 weeks in Shanghai.

In Shanghai, Tesla went from first walls to first car bodies in 5 months and to first delivered cars in 8.5 months.

You can see in the pictures that the construction teams have modular wall sections ready to be lifted in place between pillars. The main outer shell of Giga Berlin could be done by the end of September. The first cars could be delivered by the end of December, 2020.

In the second quarter 2020 earnings call there was mention of another new US factory besides the Texas factory. Tesla plans to complete three factories (Berlin, Texas and one other factory) within 12-18 months.

Elon Musk has started talking about a second gigafactory in Asia. This factory would be outside China and the leading rumors are for construction in South Korea or Japan.

Tesla is getting faster at building factories and is building more factories as they grow financial resources.

If each gigafactory will have 500,000 cars per year, then Tesla factory scaling could look like this:
Three factories completed by mid-2021,
five factories completed by mid-2022,
eight factories completed by mid-2023 and
twelve factories by mid-2024.

There could be multiple 500,000 car per year production capacity at the same location. Texas might hold six 500K per year car factories.

By the end of 2021, Tesla would have car production capacity of 2.5 million cars per year.
By the end of 2022, Tesla would have car production capacity of 5 million cars per year.
By the end of 2023, Tesla would have car production capacity of 9 million cars per year.
By the end of 2024, Tesla would have car production capacity of 15 million cars per year.

Tesla would launch various new models. There would be cybertrucks, cybervans, cyberSUVs, and a smaller $20,000 Model 2 that still will have over 300 miles of range.

There would be the SEMI truck and Tesla buses.

SOURCES- Elon Musk Twitter, Inverse, Tesmanian, Torque News Youtube
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture (Brian owns shares of Tesla)

18 thoughts on “Tesla Will Rapidly Grow the Number of Gigafactories Under Construction”

  1. Don’t forget the previous ‘unspeakable evil’ (if not still only ‘previous’) of car dealerships, dealership associations, and car mechanic (associations??) pushing for lobbying, legal, and ‘other undefined’ restrictions, bans, and unofficial disparaging of EVs, online sales, ‘mixed’ (ICE and BEV) lots and of a disinterest in promoting/ selling/ maintaining an ICE-alternative. Such status-quo quagmire (best word) is likely still continuing – maybe county-by-county, state-by-state, etc. Sometimes its not just about meeting customer demand and vehicle supply, but all the messy EV politics (and what happened with CA unions) that may be reducing EV flow-thru. Long hard trip ahead…

  2. The big problem for ICE is a Tesla car can, easily, substitute for 3-4 ICE cars in its life time.
    We are talking 1 M miles cars in the near future (in not already).
    If Tesla is able to produce and sell 16 M cars by 2025, ICE producers are boxed.
    There would be used ICE cars competing with used Tesla cars and the high end would be nearly all served by Tesla or other electric).
    The market for used ICE cars would tank and for new ICE cars would drop under the bottom of the barrel.

  3. 30% ev market penetration by 2030…?
    fark, let me guess, you’re either a oil sheik, or a fruit loop.

  4. I know Elon’s master plan has always been getting rid of the smogmobiles on the road. If he can profitably farm out the batteries for other car companies, he probably would. Then if he could farm out the motors, the charging ports, the interface to the Boring Company tunnels, etc.

    He could really Ray Kroc the electric vehicle market, while still being the primary producer. He’d be setting all the standards in stone for what constitutes a valid Tesla off-brand vehicle.

    Remember when you could buy an IBM desktop or an IBM “clone” computer? Same thing, only Elon gets a cut from all the clones.

  5. not sure on the ‘only EV selling in 2030’ as most state, country, and company fleet regs ask for zero-emission vehicles, transport, etc., way after that. And what with world’s economies recovering over the next 2 – 4 years, 2025 at the earliest before cheap (for everyone) models (less than $25k) more available.

  6. Getting a GF into production in less than a year changes everything for Teslas growth especially if it’s not just China. Tesla can get short term loans to cover it for as many GF projects as it can handle. This is very different from the assumption it took 3 years of heavy capital investment before any return from a new plant.

  7. It depends entirely on Autonomy which when it’s legally accepted will transform the whole global car biz completely. EVs vs ICE won’t play out in the same old market for much longer.

  8. Exponential growth in EV means that by 2030 EV penetration in passenger cars will be easily 50%. And only EV will be selling. ICE will be still running but will aging out.

  9. He said himself he’s willing to license his technology out to the competitors. He’s trying to push the electrification of the fleet forwards, not make any more money than he already has (he has likely some trust fund set aside so that he can live as comfortable as he pleases even if all his companies went bankrupt tomorrow).

  10. Factories present in almost every continent will decrease transportation&ogistics costs&import taxes as well. They could get parts from local suppliers(if they are quality&reliable enough), like they are doing in China to decrease costs even more.

  11. The math is fairly straightforward.
    Lifetime of Tesla car 1 000 000 miles (claimed, without examples)
    Average driving distance per person ~ 8 000 miles/year
    So to support demand for 1 Tesla requires 125 drivers (once the market has reached 100% Teslas, and settled down to a steady state. A reasonable assumption given the time frames involved, see below).
    Hence, 1 billion Tesla’s per year will support the driving requirements of 125 billion drivers.
    If drivers represent 75% of the population, that’s a total population of 167 billion.

    Assuming the entire population is rich enough to afford a car.

    Which is certainly on the cards given the centuries required to reach that point.

  12. Can you elaborate? Your understanding is impeccable. When will Tesla reach a yearly billion car production?

  13. Create factories to generate cars no one will have the money to buy for years. What could possibly go wrong? Just out of curiosity … how many people are cancelling their Tesla pre-orders? Anyone have that info?

  14. Help me with the math, your multiplications are simple and impeccable. When is Tesla going to reach Billion cars a year?

  15. to me, this is Tesla’s 2000 Microsoft moment: to stay true and pure with their own batteries, software/CPUs, body stylings (like Apple of then) -or- just licence (or sell) as much as possible and try to dominate a thin area of tech (whatever that is, as with Microsoft’s DOS, XP, etc. OSs) and just let the competitors run wild with the equivalent of Microsofts’s beige boxes and interchangeable parts as back then. To me: Tesla’s current success is based on its ‘first to deliver in quantity, scale, and quality’ but that is likely not to last long. Even though, I don’t anticipate EV saturation of more than 30% by 2040, all custom brands will likely have comparable or ‘good enough’ EVs to eat Tesla’s current large market-share of a minuscule EV market. If Elon is about comfortable survival, he will license EV-system tech, push his serviceable stylings and in-car UI further within Tesla, and even sell batteries to his competitors knowing he can’t expect more than the equivalent market-share of an Audi vehicle today, but in a moderate total size of market. Tesla’s maximum revenue potential is still likely 5 – 10 years away, but the world’s automakers will do what they do best – beg, steal, and licence fundamental tech and place their own style.

  16. 2.5 million by the end of 2021? By the end of 2020, Tesla will be at a run rate of about 1 million at best case. So, they would have to build 3 new factories in 2021 and ramp to full production..? And for 2022, they would have to add 5 more factories plus ramping..? Since I own Tesla stock, I would like you to be right, but Elon has targeted 50% growth per year:

    2020: 750 k run rate (at end of 2020)
    2021: 1.1 million run rate
    2022: 1.7 million run rate
    2023: 2.5 million run rate
    2024: 3.7 million run rate
    2025: 5 million run rate

    If Tesla hits these targets, it will be plenty impressive…

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