EVERY FOUR SECONDS, in the middle of a factory floor in eastern Germany, a deafening thump-thump blasts out as a mold slams down on a sheet of steel. The percussion is just one small part—albeit one of the loudest—of the frenzied action inside the facility, as workers stoke raging smelting furnaces, and robots topped by “Godzilla” heads hoist auto bodies up onto assembly lines.
Germany is home to dozens of plants like these, but this is no ordinary car factory. After each thump-thump, two automated claws reach around the mold and retrieve an item that a certain kind of superfan can identify on sight: the dramatically curving tailgate of a Tesla Model Y.
We’re inside Tesla’s Giga Berlin, set amid woodlands about 24 miles from the German capital—and a crucial component of Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar effort to keep the company at the forefront of the electric-vehicle revolution.
André Thierig, director of manufacturing at Giga Berlin, is guiding me through the halls one warm Tuesday morning in May—the first visit by a non-German reporter, according to Thierig, since Musk inaugurated the factory in March 2022. Today, about 5,000 Model Y SUVs roll off the assembly line every week, and that’s just the start, Thierig says. “We are still ramping up production with the three shifts we have,” he says. “To get to full capacity in the future, we will add more shifts.” Tesla also hopes to add more space—enough to double Giga Berlin’s output to as many as 1 million cars a year.
Expanding production at break-neck speed has come to define the rambunctious and polarizing style of the self-styled Technoking of Tesla (not to mention of Twitter, SpaceX, and Neuralink). In July, it will be 20 years since Tesla’s founders launched the company. (Musk became its biggest shareholder a year later, and chairman and CEO in 2008.) Two decades on, Tesla is still the world’s biggest pure-electric carmaker. Indeed, it has come to define the EV industry, and Americans might struggle to name any of its competitors.
Musk, meanwhile, has become famous for making outrageous predictions about Tesla’s future, falling far short of them—and still delivering results that qualify as breathtaking. There are few better ways to measure Tesla’s rise than the Fortune 500, which ranks the biggest American companies by yearly revenue.
