Giga

Tesla announced it produced 10 million 4680 battery cells at Gigafactory Texas. It is a good sign for the automaker’s production ramp-up, which relies heavily on the new cell. The 4680 battery cell format has taken the industry by storm since Tesla unveiled its own cell strategy at Battery Day in 2020. The automaker claimed a potential to reduce battery cost by over 50% with the new design; it has been trying to bring it to volume production since, but it has run into some bottlenecks.…

Tesla has unveiled a new retail concept called ‘Giga Laboratory’, which appears to be a showcase of its manufacturing capacity. While Tesla announced a move to online sales and moved back from physical retail back in 2019, the automaker has, in practice, continued to rely heavily on retail locations as part of its marketing effort. In fact, Tesla’s number of physical locations (retail and service) has more than doubled to now 1,000 locations around the work over the last 3 years. Tesla’s…

Tesla has applied to expand Gigafactory Shanghai to produce over 1 million vehicles and add pouch battery cell production. Gigafactory Shanghai is a significant success story for Tesla. The factory went from beginning construction in December 2018 to starting production in December 2019. Within just two years of starting production, it became the biggest/most productive electric vehicle factory in the world by a wide margin. Its production rate has reached close to 1 million units per…

Tesla has achieved its goal of producing 5,000 Model Y vehicles in a week at Gigafactory Texas, which was the original goal for volume production at the plant. The automaker has been simultaneously ramping up two major factories, Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas, to volume production. 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. In March, …

Tesla is facing a backlash from employees at Gigafactory Shanghai who are complaining about their performance bonuses having been cut reportedly because of an accidental death at the factory earlier this year. Gigafactory Shanghai has become a critical asset for Tesla. The factory was able to quickly ramp up production to become Tesla’s highest output factory with a capacity north of 750,000 electric vehicles per year. The efficiency of the plant also enabled the automaker to profit from…

Tesla has fired dozens of employees at Gigafactory New York after a new unionization effort was launched this week, according to a new complaint with the US National Labor Relations Board. As we reported earlier this week, workers at Gigafactory New York, where now almost a thousand workers perform data annotation for Tesla’s Autopilot and self-driving efforts, announced their intent to unionize. The effort started with the data labelers who want better pay, job security, and less tracking at…

A report coming from China states that Tesla is going to partly shut down some Gigafactory Shanghai production lines for upgrades starting this weekend. It’s believed that the upgrades are for a refreshed Model 3. Late last year, we started hearing rumors that Tesla is working on a Model 3 refresh that would come during the second half of 2023. But we have seen since indications that Tesla is close to launching the new version of the Model 3. Over the last few years, we have noticed…

Tesla employees at Gigafactory New York, located in Buffalo, say they are “tired of being treated like robots,” and they informed CEO Elon Musk that they seek to unionize. It’s not the first time the automaker has faced unionization efforts, but they have mostly been focused at Tesla’s car factories, and in the US, specifically at Fremont Factory in California. The powerful Union of Auto Workers (UAW) has launched over the years several unsuccessful efforts to unionize what is now the most…

A new report states that Tesla plans to ramp up electric vehicle production at Gigafactory Shanghai to 20,000 units per week after a surge in orders. After years of claiming that demand was exceeding production capacity, we have seen plenty of evidence late last year that Tesla was starting to have some more serious demand issues. However, Tesla countered that last month with significant price cuts across its entire lineup in all markets. The price reductions appear to have worked, as…

This week on the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. This week, we review Tesla’s earnings, we discuss Tesla Semi/4680 production at Giga Nevada, the new Toyota CEO, and more. The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel. As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments…