This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Elon Musk has warned Tesla workers to prepare for a challenging production increase as he laid out plans to build a mass-market vehicle.
Tesla’s CEO said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday that building Tesla’s next-generation electric vehicle, which will go into production in 2025, will require Tesla workers to live and sleep on the production line at the company’s plant in Texas.
“We really need engineers living on the front lines. This isn’t some standard ‘it just works’ thing,” Musk told investors.
“It will be a challenging production phase,” Musk said. “We’ll be sleeping on the line, basically. Not practically, we will be.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Tesla workers were forced to sleep on production lines to meet the company’s production deadlines.
A former worker at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, told The Verge that employees slept on the factory floor after 12-hour shifts. Musk said he slept under his desk while spending “three years straight” practically living at Tesla’s manufacturing facilities.
Musk said Tesla’s next-generation vehicle, which Reuters reports is an affordable, mass-market electric vehicle codenamed “Redwood,” will go into production in the second half of 2025 at the company’s Texas Gigafactory, although he admitted that he was often optimistic with the times and could not yet predict how many vehicles Tesla would initially produce.
Tesla workers could face a heightened form of what Musk previously dubbed “production hell” during Tesla’s Model 3 launch in 2017.
“There’s a lot of new technology, a huge amount of revolutionary new manufacturing technology here,” Musk said.
“I’m confident that once it starts, it will be superior to any other manufacturing technology that exists anywhere in the world. It’s the next level,” he added.
The billionaire has hinted for years that Tesla plans to launch a cheaper electric vehicle, expected to cost less than $30,000.
This comes at a time when the company is under increasing pressure from Chinese EV makers prioritizing more affordable vehicles, with Chinese EV maker BYD recently overtaking the US automaker as the most major global manufacturer of electric vehicles. But BYD still doesn’t sell its cars in the United States
Tesla did not immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment outside of normal business hours.