This text originally appeared on Business Insider.
Elon Musk warned Tesla employees to prepare for a difficult production ramp-up as he previewed plans to construct a mass-market vehicle.
The Tesla CEO said on the corporate’s Wednesday earnings call that constructing Tesla’s next-generation EV, set to enter production in 2025, would require Tesla employees to live and sleep on the manufacturing line at the corporate’s Texas factory.
“We really want the engineers to be living on the road. This is just not kind of an off-the-shelf ‘it-just-works’ sort of thing,” Musk told investors.
“That will likely be a difficult production ramp,” Musk said. “We’ll be sleeping on the road, practically. Not practically, we will likely be.”
It would not be the primary time Tesla employees have reportedly had to sleep on manufacturing lines to meet the corporate’s production deadlines.
A former employee at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, told The Verge that employees would sleep on the factory floor after 12-hour shifts. Musk has said he slept beneath his desk while spending “three years straight” mainly living in Tesla’s manufacturing facilities.
Musk said that Tesla’s next-generation vehicle, which Reuters reported is a mass-market, reasonably priced EV codenamed “Redwood,” is about to enter production in the second half of 2025 at the corporate’s Texas Gigafactory — though he admitted that he is usually optimistic with timing, and will not yet predict how lots of the vehicles Tesla would initially produce.
Tesla employees could face a heightened type of what Musk previously dubbed “production hell” during Tesla’s 2017 Model 3 ramp-up.
“There’s lots of recent technology, an incredible amount of latest revolutionary manufacturing technology here,” Musk said.
“I’m confident that when it gets going, it would be head and shoulders above some other manufacturing technology that exists anywhere in the world. It’s next level,” he added.
The billionaire has hinted for years that Tesla plans to release a less expensive EV expected to cost below $30,000.
It comes as the corporate is under increasing pressure from Chinese EV manufacturers prioritizing more cost-effective vehicles, with the Chinese EV manufacturer BYD recently overtaking the U.S. automaker because the world’s largest producer of electrical vehicles. But BYD doesn’t yet sell its cars in the U.S.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.