In Grünheide, Tesla wants to revolutionize the production of car bodies.
The competition trembles and makes no secret of it.
Grünheide - Germany prides itself on being a land of poets, thinkers and car makers.
In its new Gigafactory in Grünheide, the US electrical pioneer Tesla wants to show Germans how cars are built today.
Elon Musk calls what he plans to do not far from Berlin, a "revolution in car body construction".
And the German car sizes?
They look to Brandenburg with eagle eyes - and are already raising the public alarm.
In October, at an open house in Grünheide, Musk gave the audience an insight into his production vision, which will soon become reality.
Posters showed how the cars will be built in the new Gigafactory: The front and rear body parts are pressed into a single piece of metal in gigantic machines.
For comparison: According to
Handelsblatt
, the rear underbody of the Model 3
today consists
of 70 individual metal parts.
Tesla relies on "Giga presses" in Grünheide
The "Giga presses", as Tesla calls the machines, are the largest die-casting machines in the world. Eight of these monster machines are to be used in Grünheide. In the presses, aluminum with a temperature of up to 850 degrees Celsius is formed into a body using 6,100 tons of pressure. That saves time and money, reduces weight and increases the range, says Musk.
The front and rear cast parts that come from the “Giga presses” are then connected using frames.
The battery is also integrated directly into the chassis.
That makes production much easier and reduces complexity, Musk said at Tesla's “Battery Day” 2020.
On Twitter, the Tesla and SpaceX boss explained the new type of production: "With our huge casting machines, we're trying to make full-size cars just like building toy cars."
Tesla plans “car factory of the future” in Grünheide
Auto analysts like Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley compared Tesla's revolution in vehicle manufacturing to Henry Ford's invention of the assembly line.
"Tesla is building the car factory of the future," he wrote in one of his monthly reports.
The Gigafactory in Grünheide taught the German carmaker to fear even before it opened.
At a works meeting in early October, Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess warned that Tesla could build electric cars in just ten hours, but that the VW plant in Zwickau would need more than 30 hours to do so.
Tesla plant in Grünheide worries VW boss
"We mustn't let Tesla in Grünheide destroy our location, our corporate headquarters," he appealed to his employees at Volkswagen. With the planned new plant in Wolfsburg, the Golf Group is considering building a new electric car factory near Wolfsburg in response to Musk's initiative. Milan Nedeljkovic, Head of Production at BMW, is looking forward to Tesla's Gigafactory. He recently described Tesla's approach as “exciting” and promised: “If it works, we might consider it,” said the manager.
Musk himself also wants to take a closer look at his Brandenburg blueprint before it can be introduced at other locations: "Many new technologies are being developed in Berlin, which entails considerable production risk," he tweeted in 2020. If the new type of production proves itself , it should also find its way into the Tesla plants in Shanghai and Fremont in two years.
(yo)
