There are 86,400 seconds in a day, and dividing it by 5 gives us 17,280 Tesla drive units every 24 hours.
Yesterday, Tesla (TSLA) announced that the automaker has reached a drive unit (electric car motor) production rate of one unit produced every 5 seconds.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the company’s official announcement post on X by giving a drive unit production rate he aims to achieve in the future. “One day, Tesla will make a drivetrain per second,” Musk wrote in his X (formerly Twitter) post.
Manufacturing 1 drive unit every 5 seconds already seems an unbelievable number but Musk is always more ambitious than anyone expects him to be.
So, how did Tesla made this production run rate possible? The electric automaker produces its vehicle drive units at 5 of its Gigfactories around the world. Three Tesla factories in the United States produce Tesla’s latest most advanced drive units i.e. the Fremont factory, Giga Texas, and Giga Nevada.
Giga Shanghai, China and Giga Berlin, Germany also produce Tesla vehicle drive units although they started late on this front but caught up with the other factories with time.
When Tesla only produced cars at the Fremont factory in California, Giga Nevada was the only Tesla manufacturing facility that produced drive units alongside the 2170 battery cells and packs. It’s still #1 in producing Tesla vehicle drive units. On 31st July 2024, Tesla employees at Giga Nevada celebrated the production of the 5 millionth drive unit at the factory.
A Tesla vehicle drive unit consists of a motor, inverter, and gearbox as major components (watch Sandy Munro’s video below to learn more).
So, all these giant Tesla Gigafactories producing cars and drive units in different timezones around the globe make it possible to produce 1 every 5 seconds. Elon Musk’s guidance of 1 each second will result in 86,400 drive units produced each day which would be a monumental achievement by the EV automaker.
Tesla vehicles, depending on the model and variant, have from 1 to 3 drive units or motors installed in a vehicle. Tesla Model 3 and Y RWD have 1 motor installed, dual-motor variants of any car and Cybertruck have 2 motors and Model S, X Plaid and the Cybertruck Cyberbeast have 3 motors for torque vectoring, increased power, and performance.
If we take an average of 2 motors installed in every Tesla vehicle, the drive unit production rate of one per 1 second will be enough to produce 43,200 Tesla cars each day. Tesla sold 1.2 million vehicles in 2023 and aims to increase vehicle sales each year exponentially. For millions of vehicles each year, in-house efficient and fast drive unit production is critical.
Tesla is entering the phase of volume production of Tesla Semi at Giga Nevada and the automaker’s need for drive units is going to be ever-increasing. Luckily, the automaker already rolled out a $3.6 billion expansion plan for the Tesla Semi factory and Giga Nevada last year.
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