Tesla often engages in varying levels of tomfoolery with its electric cars.
Its broad collection of quirky features includes a “caraoke” mode integrated into the infotainment on some of its Chinese models, having the Model X’s falcon doors dance to the tunes of Christmas carols and a Cybertruck-inspired limited edition CyberHammer.
Turns out such the gimmicks aren’t just customer facing. Tesla’s gigafactories also have some silly labels for its machines.
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Tesla has reinvented manufacturing.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk's antics have diverted media attention toward culture wars, overshadowing some of the company's remarkable innovations. Tesla's gigafactories are the some of largest EV manufacturing complexes globally and they don't follow the textbook rules. It's a whole new approach that's the envy of the rest of the industry.
The Fully Charged Show’s Roland Tameling claims to be the first journalist to get a tour of Tesla’s Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg.
The Berlin factory is Tesla’s only manufacturing site in Europe. It makes the Model Y and the company claims it’s the brand’s most advanced and most sustainable factory yet, even more so than the ones in Nevada, Texas and Shanghai.
Tameling said two industrial robots in this factory are named after fictional characters Godzilla and King Kong.
Last year, Tesla released a thread on X detailing how a Model Y is manufactured, from scratch to a fully-finished product.
A huge part of the process involves welding and bolting together the stamped body panels and chassis castings made from the famous giga press.
Six hundred robots are in charge of putting them together. When that’s done, each body is lifted into the paint shop to a level above by what Tesla says is one of the largest industrial robots ever made. No wonder they named it Godzilla.
The video above shows the yellow robotic arm, about as tall as a three-story building, pivoting on its own axis and effortlessly lifting the Model Y. Rameling didn’t say what the function of the robot named King Kong was.
Quirky features aside, Giga Berlin looks like it can fit an entire world inside. It spans across 1.2 square miles and is roughly the size of 31 soccer fields, enough to fit 41 billion hamsters in it—another one of Tesla’s foolish measurements.
It makes cells, battery packs and electric drivetrain components that go into the world’s best selling electric car, the Model Y. Its estimated capacity is 375,000 units annually.
Just like Tesla EVs, Giga Berlin is also all about minimalism. “We deleted a lot of processes that are not really necessary,” one of Tesla’s paint shop engineers said in the video. “This gives us the possibility of building a longer paint line to offer special colors.”
He said that the painting line is nearly 300 meters long. Colors like the Midnight Cherry Red are only painted at Giga Berlin.
Moreover, the Model Y’s rear underbody is a single component. A quality control engineer said the giga presses first melt aluminum at 700 degrees Celsius and then turn the metal into a large giga casting.
This eliminates the need for 70 individual parts. After the raw materials enter the giga press, the casting comes out within seconds, the engineer said.
If you want to see how the Godzilla robot works, or are just curious about how electric cars are made, the video is worth watching in full.
