Godzilla, the pirates and the dancing robots: what’s inside the Gigafactory that turbocharged Tesla
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Next to the light tunnel from which every Tesla Model Y produced in Gigafactorythe huge automated factory that Musk wanted to speed up the production of cars and batteries, there is a golden gong.
In the weeks following the plant’s opening, when only a few dozen cars were being produced, the workers rang it to emphasize the passage of a “perfect” car that did not need any tweaking or adjustments. “But now it’s no longer used,” Tesla employees tell us, suggesting that it’s now bordering on perfection.
Right next to that gong, in March 2022, Elon Musk he danced under the amused gaze of the German chancellor Olaf Scholz. The two could be considered more than satisfied. Musk had managed to inaugurate his first Gigafactory in Europe in record time, overcoming the resistance of environmentalists who accused him of wild deforestation and excessive water consumption. Scholz, on the other hand, smiled thinking about the economic return for Germany: Tesla had invested between 5 and 7 billion dollars in the Gigafactory in Berlin. And he had promised to employ 12,000 people.
Even the mayor of Grünheide, the town closest to the factory, thought Musk’s money would give new impetus to an area that belonged to East Germany. And that she has long been employed by the Stasi. Right here, 30 km south of Berlin, letters from West Germany were checked one by one. Tesla has erased the signs of the war, in every sense. Before work on the Gigafactory started in early 2020, the area was cleared of some unexploded mines.
Today excavations are proceeding only in front of what will one day be the main entrance to the plant, where bulldozers and excavators raise clouds of sand that invest employees, visitors and for the first time a small number of journalists from international newspapersincluding Italian Tech.
Tesla opens the doors of its factory in an exhilarating moment. 5,000 cars a week leave the German Gigafactory. A number that has contributed to the first quarter 2023 deliveries record, when 423 thousand cars of the American company ended up on the road. 36% more than in the same period of 2022.
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Musk also won his bet in Germany. He succeeded by focusing on a site designed to produce (almost) all the pieces needed to build a car.
Instead of buying and putting together components produced by others, as the big car manufacturers have always done, Tesla has decided to melt and print the aluminum that makes up the skeleton and cladding of its cars directly in its plant.
The larger parts of the frame, for example, the front and rear, come out already formed by Giga Pressthe world’s largest car-making press. It was invented by Idra, a company from Brescia. The German Gigafactory hosts eight of them, in a warmer and darker area of the factory where flags with bones and skulls stand out. They indicate that Tesla employees work here jokingly called “pirates”. It is up to them to throw the aluminum ingots into the ovens, where it operates and to manage a printing process that requires a temperature of 700 degrees and a pressure of 6,000 tons.
On the other side of the factory, large enough to hold 31 football fields, instead there is a press that transforms large sheets of aluminum into bonnets and doors. All external parts produced in the plant – up to 17 different pieces – flow together via overhead bridges in the heart of the Gigafactory, the “Body shop” where humans and robots start putting cars together.
He also contributed to the automated dance of mechanical arms Comauthe Italian company controlled by Stellantis which not so long ago – it was 2018 – helped Tesla avoid bankruptcy. “In that period John Elkann was very close to me” said Musk during the Italian Tech Week of 2021, referring precisely to the intervention of the Comau robots in a moment of great difficulty for his company, when Tesla was unable to mass-produce and the low-cost Model 3.
However, the most characteristic robotic limb is signed by Fanuc, the Japanese company specializing in industrial automation. Tesla employees called it “Godzilla” and drew the silhouette of the sea monster on it. His job is to move the cars to an elevated bridge that will transport them to the paint shop.
Nevertheless the Tesla assembly line remains profoundly human. The workers who work at the “Body shop”, 300 of the Gigafactory’s 11,000 employees, are entrusted with the most delicate tasks: fixing the moving parts of cars, for example. In short, without man, the Tesla factories could not churn out cars. Musk understood this in 2021, when California closed the Fremont plant to counter the Covid. At the time, the entrepreneur tried to keep everyone in their place, writing to employees that “the chances of being killed by the coronavirus are much lower than the risk of dying in a car accident”.
Traveling the large aisles of the Gigafactoryone can sense how vital the mega-factory is to Musk’s vision: everything fits together perfectly, with a high but not inhuman pace. Each operation is designed to limit unnecessary movement between the various areas and to recycle materials. Even the batteries of the Model Y – the only car produced in Germany – are assembled on site. In 2012 Tesla depended solely on panasonic for their production. At a high cost that profoundly affected the final price of the cars, too high compared to traditional petrol models. It’s different now.
By autonomously producing the most precious component of its supercars, and not having to buy it around the world, Musk managed to lower the prices of Teslas. After all, a similar intuition led to success SpaceX. When Musk set out to start an aerospace company, he initially thought of buying old Russian rockets. Their exorbitant cost convinced the entrepreneur to build them himself. And today the entrepreneur it even points to Mars.
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“Tesla was initially a money-making company – he told us Tim Higginsa WSJ reporter who recounted the lights and shadows of Tesla in his book “The bet of the century” (published in Italy by Mondadori) -. Musk was able to get that money by selling his vision over and over again.” When no one believed in the Gigafactory project, the entrepreneur and his collaborators bet millions of dollars to start work on the first mega factory in Nevada anyway.
They would never have completed them without the help of investors and politicians. That having arrived on site, and seeing the bulldozers in action, they gave in to Musk’s dream. Now there are six Gigafactories and they are also colonizing China, starting from Shanghai.
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Many governments would like one. And of this too, perhaps, Melons And Tajani they spoke with Musk during the entrepreneur’s lightning visit to Rome last June. But apparently France is in pole position.
“There are several options on the table,” said Le Marie, France’s economy and finance minister. It already seems to see Elon Musk dancing to the tune of La vie en rose.
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