Tesla Targeting 1.5 Million Cars A Year With New Gigafactories, Texas And Berlin

The start of the year could not be better for Elon Musk and Tesla: with record profits and the opening of two new Gigafactories, the company has its sights set on the last quarter of the year. 2022 should be a year full of success, but also commitments; Tesla hopes that with the two new Giga-factories total production will ramp up and do the work, with more than one and a half million units manufactured. A fact not exempt from certain conditions.

Tesla set the year 2021 as the year in which they would basically reach one million vehicles sold. With an impressive push in the last quarter of the year, the company was just a few thousand units away from the target. This year there are no excuses to achieve it, as the first quarter already points directly at achieving that target: more than 310,000 vehicles delivered in the first quarter make clear that exceeding the million unit figure is more than feasible, but Elon Musk wants more. Tesla wants to make 1.5 million cars before the end of the year.

We all know that Tesla is very much in favor of stepping on the accelerator to the fullest during the last months of each cycle. Elon Musk hopes to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the last quarter, and for this he needs the collaboration of the newly opened plants. The Austin and Berlin Gigafactories will become sites of great importance, although they will be far from the crown star, the Giga Shanghai plant. We have recently learned that the German factory already assembles about 350 cars a week. A slow but steady pace, which they hope will become much higher right before the end of this month.

Austin has already increased production capacity, but once again the recent opening means still some slow manufacturing. As the months go by, it is logical to think that both factories will begin to show much more important figures, because Tesla needs them in order to beat that self-imposed production figure. If achieved, it would become the best year in the history of Tesla, something that we repeated on many occasions over the last few years. Tesla's EV dominance doesn't seem to be threatened at all, no matter what they say at BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota or Mercedes Benz.

However, while the first quarter has been exceptional, Tesla is going to have to work really hard in order to reach the goal. In recent weeks, its most productive plant - Giga Shanghai – was closed due to the harsh confinement established by the Chinese authorities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although production is already back on track, it will be difficult to recover that volume of vehicles paralyzed due to the closure. At the end of this year we will know if Tesla and Elon Musk have finally achieved what they set out to do.

All images courtesy of Tesla Inc.

Nico Caballero is the VP of Finance of Cogency Power, specializing in solar energy. He also holds a Diploma in Electric Cars from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and enjoys doing research about Tesla and EV batteries. He can be reached at @NicoTorqueNews on Twitter. Nico covers Tesla and electric vehicle latest happenings at Torque News.