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Berlin made cars
- Thread starter asherwood
- Start date
Curious as to why you’re asking? Are you interested in any particular model?
I’m currently waiting for delivery of a Made in China Model Y. I guess it will take approx 3 weeks longer to arrive than a Berlin car would have done. Although Berlin will obviously add to the overall capacity and allow each factory to deliver to its own region.
China quality is top notch, especially compared to US built cars.
For MY, not sure when RHD cars will ship, but I hear performance models will be first (later this year?)
Edit:typo
That’s my understanding, larger casting machinery, improved paint process and possible different paint colours.
Should all lead to even further improvements in the car.
I’ve just not seen any information on how production is going recently.
AFAIK the first RHD cars from Berlin will be Model Y Performance arriving 'Late 2022'. I guess that LR Model Y would be next in 2023 sometime, and Model 3 much later if at all.
I'm not sure anything more has been said about when for the new paint.
I'm not sure anything more has been said about when for the new paint.
As per the shipping thread, I don’t even get how Tesla can continue to ship vehicles to Europe from halfway across the world, and still call them green and sustainable.
Each non-MIG Tesla arriving in Europe has burned the equivalent of 500 gallons of heavy fuel through their shipping journey. That’s about 2 years worth of usage needed to break-even vs an ICE made in Europe (which was the case of every previous car I bought)…
Import taxes should be drastically higher on imported cars to encourage Tesla and other makers to build locally.
Not even sure that I have made an environmentally conscious choice anymore
Each non-MIG Tesla arriving in Europe has burned the equivalent of 500 gallons of heavy fuel through their shipping journey. That’s about 2 years worth of usage needed to break-even vs an ICE made in Europe (which was the case of every previous car I bought)…
Import taxes should be drastically higher on imported cars to encourage Tesla and other makers to build locally.
Not even sure that I have made an environmentally conscious choice anymore
They've been shipping them from halfway across the world since day dot. Until 2021 all of the cars came from America.
Giga Berlin is presumably going to be taking over manufacturing for LHD markets in Europe (basically everywhere). It remains to be seen whether Germany will make cars in volume for RHD markets.
Shanghai is closer to all of the RHD markets in the world, with the UK, Ireland & islands being the outliers. If they end up continuing to ship anything to the UK I presume it would make more sense to carry on doing so?
I guess we'll see.
As long as Tesla prefers to sells you a MIC vehicle instead of shifting production to Berlin, absorbing charter costs vs labour, then they’re not high enough IMHO…
I generally love when someone objects to change in the workplace by saying « but we’ve always done it this way before ». Biggest red flag for me, you know you’re about to uncover some skeletons
Of course they had no choice until 21 as Fremont was their only operational factory.
Now that they have one per main continent/market, all cars should be coming from that GF. Use Fremont/Austin for all of America / Shanghai for APAC / Berlin for EMEA.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
Pity the Germans have put some many roadblocks in the way of Tesla getting the factory built and ramping up ...
No disagreement from me, and I admire your stand, but the big flag for me is Without Tesla we wouldn't have the current EV industry. Every EV already built, and not yet written off!, is good for what? 150K miles? All using increasingly green grid power. Unfortunate that MIC arrives with the dirty heavy fuel usage "cost", but overall the balance sheet is good - and will be better once replaced with MIG. There is huge demand for Teslas in China (and Chinese government apparently not happy at the amount of MIC exports), Chinese factory doubling (I think?) in size ... so they will all be happier when MIG has ramped up.
China factory was built, and producing cars, in about 6 months. Astonishing. German factory has had objectors at every turn and is ramping up much more slowly than expected. Despite that Tesla is already embarked on expanding it (I hope that goes better for them - I think I read "A year just for the paperwork").
My view is that without EU being flooded with MICs Germany would never have agreed to a Tesla factory there. Probably some arm-twisting at high level to enable that in the first place, so I think to easy to dismiss "Transport from China is dirty" if in fact it was the catalyst for Tesla getting permission to build EU factory(s) ... and other cause-and-effect - e.g. how much that influenced VW to get on with electrification
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TBF the parts and materials to assemble the car would have come from all over the world too. Not much will have come from Europe.
Of course, but shipping stacks of battery packs from China already has a better footprint than sending a fully assembled car on a ship, which is I would say at least 50%-60% of empty space.
Maybe on paper, but realistically and given the current economical context, I don't believe they would pass-on a £1000 price decrease if/when shifting to MiG..
Transporting stuff from Berlin via trucks might strangely cost more unless they could find cheap labour somehow.
The ships are more limited by the weight so they won’t be able to fill a ship to the max with batteries. They can’t even max the space out with Teslas due to the weight.
Not sure of where your figures come from there.
Typical figure used for international shipping is 16.14 gCO2e per km per tonne. Model 3 would be 1.7tonnes and 21694km from Shanghai. Works out to be 595kg of CO2. That's about 4,311 miles driven for an average ICE car.
Also your ICE car could well be built somewhere else and brought to the UK.
I do agree with your point about building locally, it's also Tesla's plan to reduce the impact of shipping, just takes a while for factories to be built and come on line. In all calculations though it's worth remembering how terrible inefficient ICE cars are, no one ever wins an argument based on them being 'more efficient' than anything.
I made a quick 'POMA' calculation myself based on a RoRo the size and tonnage of THEBEN/GLOVIS SPLENDOR burning this amount of bunker fuel on a China-Europe journey, and divided by roughly 4000 cars on board. And I didn't even account for the fact that bunker fuel emissions are immensely more toxic than modern petrol in an ICE.
I appreciate there is probably a much more accurate way of doing this and I welcome any refined calculation method to better sense the carbon footprint of a Tesla arriving on our shores shipping-wise.
Of course, that's why I highlighted that I, myself, have never bought a car that was made on another continent.
Absolutely, I have never even remotely floated the idea that an ICE car would be more efficient, just that currently, our Teslas do come with a much larger footprint than anything built on our continent, and therefore they should accelerate all efforts to shift to a local production to bridge this gap, to avoid this probably 15k to 20k miles required to break-even vs an ICE.
And of course I am not even mentioning the rare earth mining impact of batteries sourcing which would move even further down the break-even point. I believe I've read a study mentioning something like 30k miles, assuming that all your charges are coming from 100% renewable electricity, otherwise it's more like 50k...
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