A person who attended the invite-only Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco on September 12 shared with Business Insider some interesting details of the event, including the potential for falling manufacturing costs per Tesla vehicle.
Tesla's head of investor relations, Martin Viecha, said that the per-vehicle cost of manufacturing is the most important metric to monitor in coming years, as it is a key indicator of how many cars a company can make and how big it can become. He then revealed that in 2017, it cost Tesla $84,000 to make each vehicle. Remarkably, that cost has dropped to $36,000 per vehicle in recent quarters.
Most of that savings came from better vehicle design to make manufacturing as easy as possible- such as the use of megacasts for big bodywork and chassis components of the Model Y-as well as new factory design. Viecha added that Tesla's first factory in Fremont, California, is not a great place to build electric vehicles, noting that there are cheaper places for that, such as Shanghai and Berlin.
At the moment, the Fremont factory accounts for about half of Tesla's production, but as the Berlin and Austin plants' outputs are rising, Fremont's share of the total production will decrease.
Viecha views electric vehicles as the third major revolution in automobile manufacturing, following the Ford Model T, which was the first vehicle produced on an assembly line in 1908, and Toyota's low-cost production approach in the 1970s.
