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Two years ago, Elon Musk unexpectedly announced that Tesla would build a factory outside of Berlin, causing the audience at the awards ceremony to exclaim that the project is about to be realized, and the hype has never been more obvious.

An analyst recently compared the series of innovations Musk pursued at the factory with Henry Ford's revolutionary mobile assembly line. Volkswagen’s CEO expressed concern this month that Tesla will be able to produce electric cars within one-third of his company's time-a gap that would endanger employment.

Elon Musk arrived at the Open House of the Tesla Gigafactory in Glenhead last month. Credit: Associated Press

Musk called the novelty Tesla is studying as a revolution in the structural design of its vehicles. He wanted to use a large machine—as long as a semi-trailer and as high as two stories—to produce front and rear body parts from a single piece of metal. Eliminating this will save time and cost, reduce weight and increase mileage.

Those who followed the Model 3 release a few years ago are familiar with all these buzzing sounds. Musk, who has been propagating all the year round, touted efforts to build a highly automated "alien dreadnought" manufacturing system, which made catastrophic errors and almost bankrupted Tesla. Today, the company has more resources to support its CEO’s desire to push the limits of how cars are manufactured.

Morgan Stanley's top automotive analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a report last month: "The big picture here is that Tesla has the opportunity to completely transform the car production and factory car manufacturing processes." Sla is building the car factory of the future."

Musk summarized Tesla's pursuit in a simple way at the beginning of this year. "With our giant casting machine, we are actually trying to make full-size cars in the same way as toy cars," he tweeted in January.

When the Tesla factory opened to the public for one day last month, there were billboards everywhere. Tesla stated that it would inject aluminum into the world’s largest die-casting machine, and then use 6,100 tons of pressure to clamp the metal-equivalent to 1,020 African elephants stand on tools to form parts.

The factory will house 8 such machines, and Musk's goal is to finally stamp out the two largest components of the Model Y sports utility vehicle-the front and rear chassis-each component from a piece of metal. In contrast, the current Model 3 contains 70 metal parts, which are only used for the underbody of the rear body.

Although Musk used a term for these machines-"Giga press"-which suggests that Tesla called them internally, this is not the case. The company has been buying them from Idra Group, a privately held Italian company that has sold them to three customers on three continents and is in talks with other automakers and major suppliers.

The front and rear castings will be connected to the frame under Model Y, which will house the battery built into the vehicle structure. This may also be a phased change-Tesla and other electric car manufacturers have to pack their batteries in metal sheets at this point, and then seal these covers to a separate floor.

Musk touted the consequences of simpler and more integrated battery and body manufacturing at Tesla’s “Battery Day” event last year. He claimed that the company can reduce the investment per GWh of battery output by 55% and reduce the required plant area by 35%.

German automakers are paying close attention to Tesla's progress. Credit: Associated Press

For all the benefits Musk described, he also admitted that Tesla will gamble in Glenheide, a small town about an hour's drive east of the German capital.

"Many new technologies will appear in Berlin, which means huge production risks," Musk tweeted in October last year. He wrote at the time that Tesla's factories in Shanghai and Fremont, California will try the same transformation in about two years, when the new technology will be verified.

Five months after the post was published, a "Gigabit News" in Fremont was involved in a small fire. The machine will melt aluminum alloy at temperatures as high as 850 degrees Celsius before moving the metal into a lower temperature holding furnace. Jonas of Morgan Stanley wrote in his October 24 report that the manufacturing process is tricky, partly because the alloy must enter at a rate that ensures uniform cooling of the entire structure.

German automakers are paying close attention to Tesla's progress. Volkswagen may build a new electric car factory near its huge Wolfsburg headquarters in a direct response to Musk's advance.

Earlier this month, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess tried to unite his employees to meet the challenge. He warned that Tesla might build an electric car in just 10 hours, while Volkswagen's plant in Zwickau would take more than 30 hours. Volkswagen’s new plant will produce 250,000 electric cars every year, and its goal is to catch up with Tesla in production time.

Morgan Stanley’s Jonas last month increased his forecast for the number of cars Tesla will produce per year by the end of the decade by 2.35 million, citing his expectation of Tesla’s average production per plant by 2030 There will be more than 800,000 vehicles. This is far more than the company now claims that its Fremont plant has a capacity of 500,000 units.

"We haven't seen the'mobile assembly line moment' in the electric car industry," Jonas wrote, referring to Henry Ford's 1913 breakthrough. "We believe that the moment is about to come. We believe that Tesla is in a unique position to push the boundaries at the center of the automotive manufacturing revolution."

Milan Nedeljkovic, the production director of BMW AG, told reporters at an event last month that the automaker did not cooperate with large cast parts like Tesla, partly because this would reduce it from producing multiple different models on the same assembly line. The required flexibility. Nevertheless, Tesla's new method has aroused his interest.

"If it works, maybe we will consider it," Nedeljkovic said.

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