Image: @Alwinart smaller Tesla concept imagined in 2021
According to an unnamed source speaking with Chinese publication 36 Krypton (via @zhongwen2005) Tesla is reportedly planning to produce up to 4 million low-priced vehicles annually, with a focus on a small Model Y as part of the product planning roadmap.
The company’s annual production capacity plan is still in its early stages, and is being passed along to the industry chain. Of the 4 million vehicles, North America will take on 2 million, while the factories in Berlin and Shanghai will each handle 1 million vehicles.
Tesla’s upcoming Monterrey plant in Mexico will be the main production capacity for this new model. The factory covers an area of almost 4,200 acres, which is 68% more than the 2,500 acres of the Texas factory and about 20 times the area of the Shanghai factory.
Meanwhile, the Berlin Gigafactory in Germany plans to increase its annual production capacity from 500,000 vehicles to 1 million vehicles.
Tesla’s low-priced model was officially announced by CEO Elon Musk during the company’s 2020 Battery Day event. Musk revealed that by 2023, Tesla will make a self-driving electric car with a price of $25,000, made possible by the company’s plan for self-developed batteries and expanding the production scale of 4680 batteries. This timeline hasn’t exactly been followed as planned as 4680 battery cells have yet to ramp up to mass scale.
If Tesla reduces the current cost by half to produce cars, the price of the new products will drop to 150,000 yuan or even lower, about $21,800 USD.
Tesla’s cost optimization through technological innovation and the Monterrey plant’s Lego-like manufacturing method will help the company in reducing production costs by 50%, with parts assembled in six different modules and then put together at the same time.
Despite the progress, the mass production of Tesla’s low-priced model is still at least a year away, according to these sources. Nonetheless, we should find out more from Tesla about its lower-cost vehicle built on its next-gen platform, as Gigafactory Mexico nears completion.
