Xiaotong Zhu0:11
Running the company's business in China and APAC today, I'm representing all the gigafactories and talk about how we can make more cars and faster.
Right now we have four vehicle factories on three continents that serve our markets. The total number of manufacturing employees is over 65,000. This also includes our amazing team in Reno; they are making power change battery packs and drive units for our vehicle factories. The total installed capacity in all these vehicle factories is about 2 million cars a year. That's it. We're always looking for opportunity to grow more capacity from the existing footprint, so you expect this number will grow over time.
In nine and a half months we built a greenfield project to establish the vehicle factory, and three months later we started delivering our first customer vehicle. People always ask me how Tesla can build a factory that fast. We learned from our previous manufacturers a lot; we talked to the survivors from the production hell and tried to avoid all the mistakes we made. We decided to design a straight line with minimum number of ups and downs and turns for easier manufacturability and easier construction. We also challenged all the assumptions that people ever know to build a vehicle factory; we deleted and simplified all the redundancies.
We have this in-house construction team that has full control over all the activities on sites, from design engineering to construction site management. This team not only built Shanghai, they also built Giga Berlin, Giga Texas, and Giga Nevada. They're really the hero behind the scenes. As Lars shared earlier, going forward with the new platform, the more modular design and densified gigafactory will be able to make more cars from even a reduced footprint. That also means we can build more factories at the same time with the drawing effort of all manufacturing teams around the globe.
In this factory, when you took a tour on our shop floor, you probably walked past it. It took us 12 years to build the first million vehicles, about 18 months to build the second million, the third million took us 11 months, and just shortly less than seven months we built the four million cars. So we're getting better at it faster, exponential growth. To the team.
What it takes to ramp a gigafactory? Well, if you have 600 robots, 10,000 training employees or 5,000 human and 5,000 optimists, and hundreds of processes, you can do it. Sounds simple, but it's factories with 90% OEE and 45-second cycle time. What that means? The OEE really evaluates the equipment uptime, the machine performance, and the quality. Simply put, this is the actual production time on a good quality product versus the planned productive time. The higher the better. 45-second cycle time means you expect every 45 seconds there's a car running off the final assembly line in the factory. The faster we ramp, the faster we can get to the economy of scale. If you look at the chart on the left, Shanghai people significantly dropped our labor hours per car.
The team there still is able to optimize the material flow, eliminate all the single point of failure, and drive higher outputs, hence reduce the labor hours. Actually, this factory keeps setting a new record; yesterday they just had a new factory daily record. Congrats Fremont team. Absolutely.
How can we reduce the cycle time and keep improving efficiency? We follow the philosophy Elon shared about building a rocket, which is questioning basically find the right problem to solve, and we start with delete, simplify, then we try to overlap baking range between the PVC sealer and the top coat. It was done by two different ovens, and we decided to combine the two processes. Eventually that helped us not just to reduce the cycle time but also save nine percent of energy consumption and nine percent of CO2 emission. Also we commonized the SNX design in Fremont. Right now we have a common body and common headlamp; we eliminated about 40 parts and reduced about 10 percent of the cycle time. All these improvements really help us to get to a faster ramp trajectory.
This helps us to overcome about 90 percent of the site over cycle issues for a particular process. In GA shop, we're going to soon implement this globally. Right now we have an integrated global organization from production all the way to sales and delivery service. This will help us to strengthen the feedback loop between manufacturing and service. We obviously want to bring a delightful customer ownership experience to our car owners, and with this direct feedback loop we've been able to turn customer escalations and feedback into quick actions and improvements on shop floor immediately. With that effort in the past six months...
To hit the 20 million car a year target, we're going to keep building new factories, new lines, and that will come up with new products as well. With all gigafactories now in one organization, we'll be able to replicate unified ideas across factories. Also we will help the new factories ramp faster and produce better quality at a lower cost.
