Tesla Inc.’s factory outside Berlin is making Model Y SUVs at a much slower clip than Elon Musk envisioned over a year ago.
(Bloomberg) — Tesla Inc.’s factory outside Berlin is making Model Y SUVs at a much slower clip than Elon Musk envisioned over a year ago.
The plant in Gruenheide, Germany, built 3,000 sport utility vehicles last week, according to a tweet from Tesla’s verified Twitter account. That’s well short of the 5,000 to 10,000 vehicles a week that Musk said 14 months ago the carmaker was targeting by the end of this year.
Tesla opened the facility in March following months of bureaucratic setbacks. Weeks after output finally started, Musk referred to the company’s factories in Germany and Texas as “gigantic money furnaces” that were losing billions of dollars.
Read more: Elon Musk May Regret Tesla Plant Pick After More German Setbacks
While Tesla has steadily increased output in Gruenheide — it produced 2,000 vehicles there the last week of September — efforts to also make batteries and expand the plant for additional logistics capacity have been hindered by red tape. During an event at the site last year, Musk warned that reaching volume production at Gruenheide would be “incredibly difficult,” adding that the company would need “a lot of talented, hardworking people to get there.”
Tesla has been preparing to run three shifts at Grueheide for an around-the-clock production schedule, Germany’s Maerkische Onlinezeitung reported last week. More than 7,500 people currently work at the site, MOZ said.
Last week, Tesla shares closed at a two-year low, costing Musk his position atop the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. While the CEO has been distracted by running Twitter Inc., the carmaker has been cutting prices and production in China, and offering incentives for customers to take delivery of vehicles in the US.
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