A new drone flyover of Tesla Gigafactory Texas is showing some great progress, and it’s even starting to look like the render of the finished building.
The start of production at Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin is the most important thing for Tesla’s growth this year.
Starting production in any vehicle program is always difficult, and even more so when you are building a brand new factory from scratch.
But Tesla has done it before, and it’s looking to do it again with two new factories coming up almost simultaneously.
There’s sort of an unofficial race between the two factories to reach production.
The buildings appear more advanced in Germany than in Texas, but the latter is starting to catch up.
A new drone video from Jeff Roberts taken yesterday at the construction site shows the main building taking shape:
The massive main factory building is starting to look about 80% complete, and Tesla is already deploying production capacity in the completed parts.
Gigafactory Texas is first going to produce an updated version of the Model Y for the North American market.
The new version is expected to use Tesla’s latest “megacasting” technology that replaces a lot of body parts with single giant cast parts produced using the world’s largest casting machines.
Earlier this summer, we reported on Tesla producing its first Model Y megacast at Gigafactory Texas after installing the first machines.
A Model Y body was also spotted at the construction site last month.
The new drone video also shows a massive new concrete pad for another building coming up on the other side of the piece of land:
Tesla is also planning to build a battery cell factory at the location to produce its new 4680 cells developed in-house.
Lately, the automaker has also been ramping up listing production jobs at the factory, which is also a good sign that the automaker is getting closer to production.
Several battery production jobs have also been showing up on the automaker’s website.
Officially, Tesla is guiding the start of Model Y production at the factory “by the end of the year,” but the exact timing is unclear.
The automaker is also working to bring the Cybertruck to production by the end of the year, but CEO Elon Musk has been hinting at a possible delay into next year.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
