Tesla is supposed to bring Model Y, its upcoming small electric SUV, to production quite fast and yet, it doesn’t have a factory officially assigned to it.

Today, leaked documents reportedly reveal more about Tesla’s plans to build Model Y at Gigafactory 1 by end of 2020, have another production line in the China Gigafactory 3 a few months later, and have a third-row seat.

That’s based on a report from Business Insider claiming that it obtained internal documents about Model Y production plans given to Tesla employees in October.

In the documents, the company states that it plans to have “a pilot Model Y line built at Gigafactory 1 by June 1, 2020” and ramp up production to about 2,000 units per week by September 2020.

By the end of 2020, Tesla plans to reach a production of 7,000 Model Ys per week at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada.

According to the same documents, Tesla plans to also a Model Y production line at Gigafactory 3 in China by October 2020 and ramp up production to 5,000 units per week by February 2021.

Tesla’s own filings in China have already revealed the company’s plans to build Model Y along with Model 3 at Gigafactory 3.

As previously reported, Tesla plans to build the Model Y on the Model 3 platform and now the documents also show that Tesla is planning to limit the number of changes to simplify production.

The biggest change would be a third-row seat to fit in the back thanks to the higher frame.

Tesla commented on the report saying that the information from the leaked documents is “outdated”:

“The timelines and information shared here are outdated. When we have details to announce, we will certainly share them. In the meantime, we remain focused on Model 3, which we are excited to bring to Europe and China early next year,”

The Model Y is expected to be unveiled in March 2019 and Tesla should release its production plans around the same time.

Electrek’s Take

The fact that Tesla doesn’t dispute that it was their plan at some point and they don’t specify which parts are “outdated” leaves me to believe this is mostly accurate.

Tesla reportedly sent out the documents to engineers in October and that’s when Elon Musk announced that he approved Tesla’s Model Y prototype for production and stated that they target 2020.

Everything else is also in line with what has been expected.

With a 2020 timeline, a new factory is kind of out of the question at this point and Gigafactory 1 makes the most sense.

As usual, Tesla has an extremely aggressive timeline and I think we shouldn’t take it too seriously at this point.

We are talking about a start of production in the summer of 2020 and a ramp up to 7,000 units per week in just a few months.

It sounds similar to Tesla’s original Model 3 production plan for 2017 and we all know what happened there.

It doesn’t mean that Tesla will make the same mistakes, but it is still an extremely ambitious goal.

The third-row would be the biggest surprise here. The Model Y is expected to be higher and bigger than Model 3 and feature a hatchback, but a third-row hadn’t been mentioned as potentially part of the plans until now.

It would certainly increase the appeal for big families looking to go electric.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.

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