Tesla is going to need to make a lot of cars if it's going to fulfill all those Model 3 pre-orders... 500,000 per year by 2018, to be exact. And it's making a big purchase to help it reach that lofty goal. The company is acquiring Grohmann Engineering, a German firm specializing in automated manufacturing. The buyout (which creates Tesla Grohmann Automation) should give Elon Musk and crew more of the expertise and systems they need for high-volume production not only at the Gigafactory, but elsewhere in the world. Grohmann will serve as the base for Tesla's Advanced Automation Germany facility, with more locations coming.
If regulators greenlight the deal, it should close sometime in early 2017. As you might guess, Tesla is painting this as a positive for the German economy: it plans to add more than 1,000 "advanced engineering and skilled technician jobs" in the country over the next 2 years.
The move isn't coming out of the blue. Tesla had already been partnering with Grohmann on manufacturing upgrades for months, and the two sides found themselves making such major strides that they felt they could do better together. As it stands, Tesla has its work cut out for it beyond just the Model 3. Between new Powerwalls and Powerpacks, promises of full self-driving capabilities and everything that will come from buying SolarCity, it'll have to understand how to manufacture a wider range of products in short order.
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