Tesla wants to roll 500,000 cars per year off its assembly line by 2018, and now it's making moves to turn that vision into a reality.
The electric car maker on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Germany-based Grohmann Engineering, "one of the world leaders in highly automated methods of manufacturing," Tesla explained in its announcement.
Following the acquisition, the company will become Tesla Grohmann Automation and serve as Tesla's "Advanced Automation" headquarters. The team in Prüm, Germany, will be tasked with designing and producing "several critical elements" of Tesla's automated manufacturing systems.
"Combined with our California and Michigan engineering facilities, as well as other locations to follow, we believe the result will yield exponential improvements in the speed and quality of production, while substantially reducing the capital expenditures required per vehicle," the Tesla team said.
For consumers, this could result in shorter wait times for a Tesla. The news comes after Tesla's $35,000 Model 3 in April racked up more than 180,000 pre-orders in its first 24 hours of availability. Those who pre-ordered will be waiting a while, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he is "fairly confident" that deliveries to customers will begin next year.
The Grohmann deal needs to be cleared by regulators, but Tesla hopes to wrap everything up in early 2017. The car maker further expects to add more than 1,000 "advanced engineering" and skilled technician jobs in Germany over the next two years.
"Accelerating a sustainable energy future is only possible with high-volume factories," the Tesla team wrote. "They allow us to manufacture high-quality products with economies of scale, making them more affordable and accessible to the world.
"As the machine that builds the machine, our factories are so important that we believe they will ultimately deserve an order of magnitude more attention in engineering than what they produce. At very high production volumes, the factory becomes more of a product than the product itself," they said.