We are now roughly 100 days into the Tesla Gigafactory Texas construction project, and it is progressing on pace, but the hard part is still to come as Tesla tries to rapidly deploy production capacity at the new facility.
Electrek exclusively reported that Tesla’s next factory is going to be in Austin back in May 2020.
At the time, a source said that Tesla planned to move fast with hopes to have a general assembly line for Model Y in Texas by the end of the year.
It took longer than expected for Tesla to go through the approval process, resulting in the Gigafactory Texas project in Austin not being approved until the end of July 2020.
That killed the hope to have any kind of production capacity at the site before the end of the year, but the project is still moving fast.
A new drone video of the site by Jeff Roberts shows that foundations of the factory are starting to take shape:
As the video shows, they appear to be working at two ends of the main building simultaneously.
On one end, we can see Tesla building foundations for what is expected to be some massive casting machines:
The progress we are seeing at the site in the last few weeks is encouraging, but Tesla and its contractors are still only working on the base build (the core elements of the building).
The difficult part is going to happen early next year when Tesla is expected to start deploying production equipment at the site to put its manufacturing processes in place.
As usual, that’s going to take some fine tuning and a lot of hiring before it can start producing electric cars.
Tesla has recently confirmed that its first plan is to deploy Model Y production capacity at Gigafactory Texas:
That’s even though Tesla CEO Elon Musk first referred to the plant as “Cybertruck Gigafactory” since it’s also going to be the site where Tesla’s electric pickup truck is going to be produced.
Musk recently commented that in order for Tesla to bring the Cybertruck to production by the end of the year, everything needs to go smoothly at Gigafactory Texas, and they need to develop their new manufacturing process for the pickup’s exoskeleton body.
The CEO warned that there are going to be challenges when trying to do that, and he set the stage for possible delays.
The official timeline for the start of some kind of production (not necessarily full vehicles) at Gigafactory Texas is now around May 2021.
Tesla has also recently acquired even more land around the Gigafactory Texas site, and it is looking to deploy battery cell production capacity at the site, too.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
