Elon Musk Talks About Manufacturing, Engineering & Design At Giga Berlin

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Elon Musk is making waves and progress in Berlin. Yesterday while at Giga Berlin, he spoke with a crowd at length about a handful of matters. James Stephenson provided a detailed transcript with the video. One thing Elon Musk mentioned is that Tesla Berlin is doing its own version of things, including a “radical redesign of the core technology of building a car.”

“It’s actually a radical redesign of the core technology of building a car. And some of this, when I do Battery Day later in September, I’ll be talking about what we are going to be doing here in Berlin.”
– ⁦@elonmusk⁩ $TSLA
(full transcript below) https://t.co/U8LqWBjjZl

— James Stephenson (@ICannot_Enough) September 3, 2020

James noted that he made the transcript due to some of the audio being poor in some areas. He wanted to make sure that everyone could clearly understand Elon’s message.

The Transcript

In the transcript James provided, Elon Musk said that Giga Berlin is going to be “a great place to work, making cool cars, and we really need to hire a lot of people, so we really want people to work here and make it as convenient and easy as possible.”

“We’re actually going to have a train station that comes all the way from Berlin and stops right by the entrance. I think in fact 2 train stations. So that makes it easy if someone is living in Berlin and wants to come work here. They can be a driver or they can go by train.

“Yeah, we’re looking forward to having a wonderful place here. I think the two main contractors, Vogel (sp?) and Goldbeck, have done great work. In fact, you can see how quickly the progress has been going, it’s excellent. This is using technology of prefabrication, so while we are preparing the ground, we also make parts of the building in a pre-fabricated manner so they can actually go up incredibly quickly and still be a very high-quality, great building.”

/3 pic.twitter.com/zJDkbgUA0n

— James Stephenson (@ICannot_Enough) September 3, 2020

Someone else asked this question: “Why are you building in such a hurry? Why do you need to go so fast?”

Elon explained that speed was very important for our climate. “I believe in speed. And I think also well, to be more serious for a second, I think it’s very important for our climate that we move quickly. It matters. I think it’s very important that we accelerate the transition to sustainable energy and that we move as quickly as possible. So this is the reason for the sense of urgency. And I’ve been saying this for a long time. It’s good to see some companies like VW taking this seriously now, but still only a very small percentage of cars that are made are electric. And then I think we will probably do more than cars here. I think we will probably be building some battery cells here. I think that’ll be good for stationary storage of wind and solar.

“Essentially, the three elements that are necessary for a sustainable energy future are energy generation, energy storage, and electric transportation, electric cars, and eventually electric aircraft. Ironically, everything will go electric except rockets. …

“The reason for the urgency is that it matters if we take a short or long time. And the faster we can make the transition to a sustainable energy future, the better for the world. That’s why.”

Elon Musk also had a special message for the people of Grünheide. Elon said that, “We are very excited to be in Grünheide. And we appreciate very much the support. And I want to make sure that when we have a big party to celebrate the opening, the whole neighborhood is invited — yes, everyone’s invited. We’ll start the party early and — if you want to have an early party you can go — and it’ll go late, and we’ll have — I don’t know –some sort of a rave thing at the end, some cool thing. It’ll range from family event to late night. I think a rave cave is culturally necessary! Totally. It’s cool.”

He added, “Well, I came here to see the progress in person. I was actually meaning to come here sooner, but you know, the pandemic. I was meaning to come here like three or four months ago. But I’ll be here quite frequently. I understand the new airport … is finally opening, so that’ll be conveniently located.”

Elon also spoke of how he loved Germany and how he is impressed with the talent and engineering there. “I feel like this is a really ideal place to have our first factory in Europe. We’ll start off with a factory, but then we’ll do some original engineering and design work. And I may have mentioned, but the Berlin paint factory will be the most advanced paint factory of any car factory in the world. And I think this is going to be really cool. Actually, to be totally frank, it’s going to be better than the one in the US. We will upgrade the one in the US later.”

“So, it’s a really cool multilayer paint system and we’re going to have a color lab here. It’s going to be really cool. So, you know, it’s engineering and design as well as manufacturing.”

Elon Musk also spoke of some of the innovations that Giga Berlin will be doing. “It’s not just a copy of the Model Y. It’s actually a radical redesign of the core technology of building a car. And some of this, when I do Battery Day later in September, I’ll be talking about what we are going to be doing here in Berlin. But it will be the first time there’s going to be a transformation in the core structural design of the vehicle. It’s quite, quite a big thing. So, it’s, like I said, manufacturing, engineering, and design as well.”

You can see James’ full transcript here.