Tesla Gigafactory Nevada leaked audio meeting: new leaders, goals

Tesla has shaken up leadership at the Gigafactory, its massive battery factory outside Reno, Nevada, and is setting new goals for the facility.

Former vice president of Gigafactory Operations Chris Lister left Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and clean energy business this summer, and Hrushikesh “Hrushi” Sagar was promoted to oversee the Gigafactory, according to audio of a Thursday meeting and filings shared with CNBC by people who work at the factory. Sagar reports directly to CEO Elon Musk and will also oversee Tesla’s vehicle assembly plant in Fremont, California, concurrently.

Sagar spoke to a group of hundreds of Gigafactory employees Thursday afternoon about management changes, performance reviews, factory milestones and aggressive new goals for the facility. He also revealed some information about progress at Tesla’s factories in Austin, Texas, and outside Berlin, Germany.

Sagar briefly addressed Lister’s departure, saying, “I really appreciate what Chris Lister did here, Chris’ contribution. I’m very grateful, as is Elon, and Tesla is very grateful, for his contribution, but at the same time now we are moving to the next phase”.

Workers at the Gigafactory produce battery packs and powertrains for Tesla’s electric vehicles, as well as the large backup batteries, Powerwall and Megapack, sold by Tesla’s Energy division.

During the meeting, Sagar celebrated the fact that Tesla produced about 134,000 cars at its factory in Fremont, California, in the second quarter of 2022, and said that August was one of the record months for Fremont in terms of production. The Fremont plant is now capable of producing about 12,000 cars a week and is aiming for 14,000 a week as its next goal, he said.

He also said that Tesla’s team in Brandenburg, Germany, recently reached a milestone of being able to produce 1,000 cars on a 7-day basis. Musk recently visited the German factory, and the company expects it to ramp up production to produce 5,000 cars per week by the end of 2022. Initially, Reno was sending drive units to Germany to help with that effort.

Tesla’s new factory in Austin, Texas also hit the 1,000 per week production rate.

In terms of drive unit production, the Gigafactory produced 283,473 electric power trains in the second quarter of 2022 “feeding” the company’s Fremont and Austin plants.

“You all played a very big role,” Sagar said. “I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart”, for the Reno team.

Before joining Tesla in late 2017, Chris Lister spent 22 years in precision manufacturing roles at PepsiCo. During his tenure at Tesla, the Gigafactory experienced rapid construction and growing pains, including high scrap volumes, fires and oil spills. But in ramping up production there, it also helped make Tesla the best-selling battery electric vehicle brand in the US and the world. Lister and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Sagar’s new title, according to his LinkedIn profile, is senior director of vehicle operations and manufacturing engineering.

Sagar told employees Thursday that they should think of the Fremont plant as their “customer,” noting that vehicle production there succeeds or fails depending on the volumes and quality of Gigafactory shipments.

While Sagar doesn’t plan to spend much of his time in Reno, he plans to work closely with executives at the plant, including Energy leader Matt Reddick, who joined the company about six months ago, and site manager Eric Montgomery, who will manage things. every day in Nevada. Other senior executives at the Gigafactory now include Jeff Jackson, who is running the infrastructure for the facility, and Bert Somsin, a director of human resources for the factory.

At the same meeting Thursday, Montgomery told Gigafactory workers that they must achieve a steady output of 8,800 high-voltage battery packs per week to support Fremont’s new production goals and “maximize builds with all the wheels”. He said August 2022 was also the Gigafactory’s second-best month on record for production, second only to October 2021.

Reddick said Tesla can now produce 42 giant Megapack batteries in a period of seven days. Megapacks are about the size of a shipping container and are used for utility-scale energy storage, often to store excess energy generated by wind or solar.

Tesla aims to produce 442 Megapacks during the third quarter of 2022, which represents an 85% increase over Megapack production in the previous three-month period.

The Gigafactory also hit and exceeded a production rate of 6,500 Powerwalls per week. Powerwalls are the smallest battery backups for home use that CEO Elon Musk recently promoted on Twitter amid a massive heat wave in California. The heat wave threatened blackouts, while the state urged residents to reduce energy consumption during peak hours.

Tesla previously required customers who wanted to buy a Powerwall to also buy a solar roof from the company. The Nevada Gigafactory made 37,600 Powerwalls in the second quarter, Montgomery said, and said the facility is on target to increase that by 22% in the third quarter.

As for the facility itself, Jackson announced a new, advanced water treatment facility that Tesla is building on site.

“This will eliminate the discharge of our country’s processing water, or wastewater, and allow for 98% recycling and evaporation of water,” he said. “It’s a big thing, it’s in line with our mission.”

Jackson also gave an update on the Gigafactory’s solar roof. “Right now we have about eight megawatts on the roof that we’re able to use on a daily basis, which is really exciting,” the infrastructure leader said.

Tesla also has a new food vendor on site that offers bowls, is building a meditation room for employees, and is making road improvements and installing more EV chargers along the roads around the facility.

On the human resources front, workers were asked to reduce the number of man-hours needed to produce a single unit of the products they build in their teams and submit more “take-charge” notices on how to improve safety and reduce costs all around. the plant.

The company is overcoming major headcount cuts that occurred in the second quarter of this year and is in the midst of an extensive performance review process, Sagar said.

An employee asked management if their equity grants would be tied to company milestones this year, and management said no. But HR teams and managers are still figuring out who might be eligible for promotions, raises and bonuses. Sagar said that by the end of September, managers should talk to their teams about their performance reviews.

Employees asked management to discuss whether and where Tesla’s next factory could be built. Lobbying by Tesla in Canada and the company’s previous investments in the North have fueled speculation about a Canadian-based factory.

Sagar said, “I have some ideas about candidates, but I don’t think I’m at liberty right now to reveal those candidates because of the confidentiality around some of those things.” He offered: “There is an exciting future for North America and across America.”