The secret sauce behind getting the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenberg up and running was a team of 25 highly skilled engineers, as per CEO Elon Musk’s recent Tweet. The team is the Delta Force of Tesla, said a Twitter user, referring to the US military’s tier-one special operations unit tasked with the most complex missions.
We already reported about this elite group back in 2020, when construction of the brand’s factory in Germany was still in its nascent stages, and when the automaker initially began putting together this special unit. But now the head honcho has confirmed that the highly skilled team has delivered on what was hired for.
The 25 Guns task force engineer is an official job posting on Tesla’s career website. And qualities team members must have include a “can-do attitude and maniacal sense of urgency.”
They are required to have mastery in manufacturing engineering, ramp-up, production uptime, and cost optimization. Most importantly, they have to be excellent problem solvers and great communicators.
A now-deleted LinkedIn hiring post by a Tesla executive stated that members of the 25-person engineering task force would be deployed wherever the toughest problems exist, and report directly to Musk.
The ‘only’ requirements were: to have exceptional engineering talent, an unconventional approach to problem-solving, and make amazing things happen.
But why the number 25? There’s no definitive answer to that. A research paper published by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications suggests that a team size exceeding 25 can create communication issues, are unlikely to follow agile development, and it’s not possible to keep everyone on the same page.
Moreover, people can be more reluctant in taking up responsibilities, assuming that someone else will. Although, the size can vary depending on the scale of operations. But for Tesla, 25 seems to be the magic number.
Tesla wants to make the Berlin factory the continent’s biggest EV manufacturing hub, with an annual target of over one million EVs, and 100 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity, as per Reuters. It’s not surprising that Tesla needs engineering wizards to lead this ambitious operation.
As of March 2023, the factory had an output of 5,000 units per week and is awaiting regulatory approvals for expansion.
The Tesla Model Y is manufactured at the facility – the electric crossover was Europe’s best-selling car of any category in the first half of 2023, outselling popular ICE models like the Dacia Sandero and Volkswagen T-Roc.
