By Victoria Waldersee
BERLIN, Feb 27 (Reuters) – Tesla’s German factory in Brandenburg, near Berlin, is now producing 4,000 cars a week, the company said on Monday, four times more than in May, when chief executive Elon Musk compared the investment in the company’s new factories to “giant silver kilns”.
The Berlin plant met the production target three weeks ahead of the production schedule seen by Reuters.
Tesla shares rose 1.9% to $200.70 in trading ahead of the U.S. market.
With its new weekly production, the Tesla factory in Germany would have an annual production of more than 200,000 vehicles. The planned maximum capacity for the Brandenburg plant is 500,000 cars per year, or about 10,000 per week, the company said.
Production at the German factory now accounts for a third of Model Y production in Shanghai, where Tesla planned to maintain total average production of 13,000 Model Ys per week – around 1,000 below maximum capacity – and 7,000 Additional Model 3s in February and March, according to the manufacturing plan.
Tesla had planned to increase Brandenburg production to 4,000 units in the week of March 13 and to more than 5,000 by the end of June, after hitting production of 2,000 units per week in October this year. last and 3,000 in December.
The Brandenburg plant started operating in March, but was slow to start up at first. In an interview in May, Musk described Tesla’s new factories in Germany and Austin as “giant money ovens” due to difficulties in ramping up production. (Reporting by Victoria Waldersee and Zhang Yan; Spanish editing by Carlos Serrano)