Musk opens Berlin Gigafactory: “We have to make a lot of electric cars”

Elon Musk has opened Tesla’s Berlin Gigafactory and presented the keys to the first Model Y electric cars off the production line, and declared that scale was the key to complete the switch from a fossil fuel economy to a sustainable energy future.

“Every vehicle that we make is another step in the direction of a sustainable energy future,” Musk said at the opening, where he also took questions from an adoring crowd of onlookers, many of them Tesla employees.

“We will also make battery storage, that’s very important for solar and wind. We are extremely confident that the world can transition to a sustainable energy future, with the combintion of solar and wind, battery storage and electric vheicles. If you have those, you can create a sustainable energy future for as long as the sun shines and the wind blows.”

Musk is preparing to launch Part 3 of his grand plan to change the energy world, and it will – as we reported earlier this week – be focused on scale.

See: Tesla planes and a $15,000 EV: Part 3 of Musk’s master plan to end fossil fuels

Part 1 was about testing the concept, Part 2 (released in 2016) was about rolling out the technologies and building up expertise, the next phase is focused on size, and yet more technology jumps.

Key among these are new manufacturing techniques that could slash the costs of electric car production, the evolution of battery storage chemistries, and new products including the Powerwall 3, the Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi and Roadster, and a new version of the Tesla solar tile.

Musk noted, however, that there are two billion vehicles in the world, and Tesla’s current production of around one million vehicles a year is less than one per cent of that total.

“We have to make a lot of cars,” he said. “As we are able to ramp up production and satisfy demand in existing markets, we will expand to other markets and add more products.”

Musk says that if Tesla could make 20 million EVs a year, that would be one per cent of the global fleet and that would start to implement change. And the world also needed around 300 terrawatt hours of battery storage to transition the electricity grid, and cater for the shift to EVs.

But he warned that chip shortages were still a challenge, as well as sourcing the metals for battery storage. He indicated, though, that Tesla was looking at a mix of new chemistries, inclding iron phosphate, manganese cathode, and a nickel cathode for long range applications.

The Gigafactory opening was attended by German chancellor Olaf Scholz and economy minister Robert Habeck, who said it was a crucial day for the transition to electric mobility in Germany, where 14 per cent of new car sales are already electric.