Giga Berlin just had its best week ever. Tesla’s factory in Grünheide, outside Berlin, built 7,000 Model Ys in a single week, a new production record for the plant, and it did it running around the clock on weekdays only.
Tesla’s manufacturing account announced the milestone at 5:33 PM ET / 2:33 PM PT on Friday, Oct. 23 (6:33 AM JST Saturday):
Plant manager André Thierig called it a “huge achievement” for the team and added, “Job is not done!” Asked on X whether the factory now runs 24/7, he answered in four characters: “24/5.” That works out to roughly 1,400 cars per production day, EV (eletric-vehicles.com) calculates, and about 364,000 a year if the pace holds.
Still 500 short
The record isn’t the finish line. Management told staff in June it would lift output to 7,500 cars a week from October and hire 1,000 more people, according to dpa, and Thierig said the cycle time across much of the factory would drop to 45 seconds from about 80. By early September the plant was still building fewer than 6,500 a week, Handelsblatt reported, and Tesla scheduled mandatory extra shifts on Sept. 18, 19 and 25 to close the gap. So 7,000 is real progress, with about 500 cars a week still to find.
The climb has been steep. Grünheide first hit 5,000 a week in March 2023 and 6,000 in early 2024, Drive Tesla Canada notes. As recently as June, Thierig described “just about 5,000 cars a week” as “the maximum we can squeeze out of supply chain.” Tesla’s Q3 shareholder letter said the company “attained record production at Gigafactory Berlin,” and it still lists Berlin’s installed capacity at more than 375,000 Model Ys a year (our Q3 earnings story has the rest of that letter).
Why Europe needs the cars
Demand stopped being the problem. Tesla’s European registrations jumped 72.5% in September, and German registrations alone more than tripled to 12,552, the highest monthly figure since December 2022, helped by Germany’s reinstated EV incentive. Berlin builds only the Model Y (the refreshed car, the Performance and the cheaper Model Y Standard) and ships it to more than 30 markets, including Canada and Taiwan.
It’s a sharp turn from 2025, when the plant built about 202,000 vehicles, roughly 54% of its installed capacity, and revenue slipped to about €7.1 billion (about $8 billion). And the site is still growing: Tesla is planning a giant second production hall on the road to 1 million cars a year, and it plans to start making 4680 battery cells in Grünheide from the first half of 2027, at up to 18 GWh a year.
A Japan footnote: the Model Ys sold here come from Giga Shanghai, not Berlin, and Thierig himself has been blunt about the gap. “We will never achieve the cost-effectiveness of Shanghai,” he said in June. Berlin’s job is to feed Europe without a long sea voyage and without the EU’s extra duties on China-built EVs. At 7,000 a week, it’s finally doing that job at full volume.
Sources: Tesla Manufacturing on X, André Thierig on X, EV (eletric-vehicles.com), Drive Tesla Canada, TeslaNorth, Handelsblatt, dpa via Tagesspiegel.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: A Tesla Model Y outside the main building at Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Grünheide, September 2024. Photo: Ot, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (cropped).
