Tesla’s (TSLA.O) German factory in Brandenburg near Berlin is now making 4,000 cars per week, the company said on Monday, growing four folds from May when Chief Executive Elon Musk had likened investment in Tesla’s new factories to “gigantic money furnaces.”
The Berlin plant reached the production target three weeks before a production schedule reviewed by reporters. Shares of Tesla rose 1.9% at $200.70 in U.S. premarket trading.
At its new weekly output, Tesla’s factory in Germany would have annual output of more than 200,000 cars. The maximum capacity planned for the Brandenburg plant is 500,000 cars every year, almost 10,000 per week, the company has said.
Output from the factory in Germany is currently a third of the Model Y output in Shanghai, where Tesla intended to maintain an average total output of 13,000 Model Ys per week – almost 1,000 below maximum capacity – and an additional 7,000 Model 3s in February and March, according to the production plan.
Tesla was planning to boost output from Brandenburg to 4,000 in the week of March 13 and to more than 5,000 by the end of the first half of 2023. It reached production of 2,000 units per week in October 2022 and 3,000 per week in December.
The Brandenburg plant began operations in March but was initially slow to get going. In a May interview, Musk described Tesla’s newest plants in Austin and Germany as “gigantic money furnaces” because of the challenges of ramping up production.
This increase in output in Germany would enable Tesla to use a bigger share of its Shanghai production for markets outside Europe, including Thailand, where it has just started sales.
Tesla has also started making batteries in Germany that will soon be used in vehicles built at the plant, but said last week it would concentrate on cell production in the U.S. in light of Inflation Reduction Act incentives.
Buy Bitcoin NowThe U.S. electric-car maker is also planning to produce cell components such as electrodes, some of which will be transported from its site in Gruenheide in the state of Brandenburg to the United States, Tesla said on Wednesday.
Tesla is scheduled to update analysts on its strategy on Wednesday when the company has its investor day.
