The head of the car company Elon Musk visited the plant near the village of Grünheide near Berlin on Friday. In a meeting with employees, he mentioned, among other things, a plan to produce a 25,000-euro vehicle there, a Reuters source said. Currently, the German plant produces the Model Y.
The average retail price of electric cars in Europe in the first half of 2023 exceeded 65,000 euros (almost 1.6 million CZK), research company Jato Dynamics reported. In China it was just over 31,000 euros. On the Czech version of its website, Tesla offers the cheapest car, the rear-wheel drive Model Y, for CZK 1,097,750. In their reactions, some users of the X network believe that the mentioned price of 25,000 euros does not include tax.
Musk had long planned the production of a more affordable electric car, but in 2022 he declared that the automaker had not yet mastered the necessary technology and postponed the plan. In September, sources told Reuters that Tesla was approaching an innovation that would allow it to cast almost the entire chassis of an electric car in one piece. It would be a breakthrough that would speed up production and reduce costs.
The best-selling car in the EU this year won’t even be European with an internal combustion engine
The American automaker wants to increase the number of delivered cars tenfold to 20 million by 2030. To do this, it needs mass market expansion. But demand for electric cars was negatively affected by the weak economy and high interest rates. Tesla and other automakers have responded in recent months by cutting prices in an effort to boost sales.
At the German plant, Tesla intends to double the capacity to one million cars per year. The last time it published data on the number of cars produced was in March. It was 5,000 electric cars per week, which roughly corresponds to 250,000 cars per year.
During Musk’s visit on Friday, Tesla management informed workers that the carmaker will increase the wages of approximately 11,000 employees at the German plant by four percent effective from November, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. Tesla will also pay a bonus of 1,500 euros in December to compensate for inflation. From February, the company will increase the annual wages of production employees by an additional 2,500 euros.
The German trade union IG Metall said in 2022 that wages at Tesla are about 20 percent lower than those at other automakers based on collective agreements.
