Elon Musk paid a visit to the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin construction site and gave an update on the expected start of production, which is delayed.
Tesla had originally planned to start production at Gigafactory Berlin in July 2021.
Lately, Musk has said that Tesla expects to start production toward the end of the year.
Earlier this month, a report came out of Germany claiming that Tesla was facing a delay of as much as six months – pushing the start of production to potentially January 2022.
Musk visited the Gigafactory Berlin construction site today and commented on the production timeline [via Reuters]:
It’s hard to predict with precision cause you can only make the cars when all of the pieces are here. It looks like we’re able to start production end of this year.
In a quick discussion with local reporters, Musk commented on Tesla’s lack of overall approval for the factory:
I think there could be less bureaucracy, that would be better. There should be some kind of active process for removal of rules. Otherwise, over time, the rules will just accumulate and you get more and more rules until eventually you can’t do anything.
German officials, who first announced Musk’s visit, said that they don’t plan to be meeting with Tesla’s CEO.
They said that Musk’s visit was “technical.”
The last time that Musk visited Gigafactory Berlin, the CEO participated in an effort to create and hire a new team called the Tesla 25 guns, a 25-person engineering task force to help fix problems in the building of Gigafactory Berlin.
Tesla has faced several challenges at the factory already, and it ended up firing the engineer in charge of the project.
The project is extremely important for Tesla since it’s going to enable the automaker to launch the Model Y in Europe and significantly expand its production and delivery capacity.
Gigafactory Berlin is also an opportunity for Tesla to poach some top talent from the German automotive industry.
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