Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk said his new car factories are ‘losing billions of dollars’ due to supply chain woes and battery shortages.
‘This factory is losing insane money right now,’ he explained. ‘We should be operating a lot more cars from this factory versus a very puny amount of cars.’
‘Both Berlin and Austin factories are gigantic money furnaces right now. Okay? It’s really like a giant roaring sound, which is the sound of money on fire,’ he told members of a club of Silicon Valley Tesla owners in Austin in an interview published Wednesday.
Musk said Tesla’s Texas factory produces a ‘tiny’ number of cars because of challenges in boosting production of its new ‘4680’ batteries and as tools to make its conventional 2170 batteries are ‘stuck in port in China.’
Telsa founder and CEO Elon Musk bemoaned the negative impact of supply chain disruptions on the production of electric vehicles at his Berlin and Austin gigafactories, saying that both are losing ‘billions’ of dollars at the moment.
‘This is all going to get fixed real fast, but it requires a lot of attention,’ he continued.
‘It will take more effort to get this factory into high line production than it took to build it in the first place,’ the chief executive said.
Musk, who also founded SpaceX, said its Berlin factory is in a ‘slightly better position’ because it started with using the traditional 2170 batteries for cars built there.
He said the COVID-19-related shutdowns in Shanghai ‘were very, very difficult.’ The shutdown affected car production not only at Tesla’s Shanghai factory, but also at its California plant, which uses some vehicle parts made in China, he said.
“The past two years have been an absolute nightmare of supply chain interruptions, one thing after another, and we’re not out of it yet,” Musk said.
Tesla’s overwhelming concern, he said, is “How do we keep the factories operating so we can pay people and not go bankrupt?”
The electric vehicle maker started production at the factories in Berlin and Texas earlier this year.
Musk told the group he expected Tesla would start production of its Cybertruck electric pickup trucks, which has been delayed, in mid-2023.
