Matthew DeBord reminds us of an important lesson about the auto industry: “It wasn’t the Model T that created Henry Ford’s fortune - it was the moving assembly line that enabled workers to rapidly build the car. As a few savvy observers have noted, it’s all about the Gigafactories. However, there’s another big factor that’s often overlooked - Tesla’s formidable manufacturing infrastructure, which is continuously expanding in scale and improving in sophistication. Reasons for Tesla’s phenomenal success include its cutting-edge technology, its fanatical customer loyalty, and its passive-aggressive marketing maneuvers. For example, a new Volvo plant in South Carolina took about two years from groundbreaking to production.įollowing the latest stock surge, Tesla has surpassed Toyota to become the world’s most valuable automaker, and it has a near monopoly on the EV market, which even the auto industry’s old guard concedes represents the future. However, according to DeBord, Tesla’s new factories are going up about twice as fast as facilities recently built by legacy automakers. To be fair, the entire auto industry moves much faster than it did back in 2003 when the California cowboys crashed the party. It’s an incredibly ambitious timeline, but this time, few doubt that Tesla will pull it off. The next project in the pipeline - a third US auto plant that will build the new Cybertruck - is slated to go online by the end of this year. As DeBord points out, it’s one thing to throw a factory up fast in go-go China, but it’s another thing to do so in Europe, with its famous layers of labor and environmental regulations. If Tesla meets this deadline, it will be doubly impressive. Now Tesla says it means to bring the next Gigafactory, in the heartland of Europe’s auto industry, into service by the middle of 2021. Following a brief virus-related shutdown, the new plant is propelling production (and TSLA stock) to record levels. The Shanghai Gigafactory broke ground in 2018, and was cranking out cars by early 2020. There’s a larger lesson to be drawn from Tesla’s wrongly maligned Gigatent: this company gets things done fast. It’s also worth pointing out that the automaker recently began Model Y production faster than originally promised, indicating that the days of missed deadlines and long delays may lie in the past. DeBord sees that “the tented assembly line was the best solution to the immediate problem.” The results are hard to argue with: Tesla delivered a record 250,000 cars in 2019. In fact, the solution did look amateurish by auto industry standards, and DeBord was one of many journalists who mocked it, saying that Elon Musk had promised an “alien dreadnought,” but given us a tent in the parking lot. In 2018, as Tesla was struggling to get Model 3 production ramped up quickly, the company improvised a third production line in what was popularly described as a “tent” (actually a semi-permanent aluminum structure).