Tesla Gigafactory Texas in Austin is starting to take shape with construction ramping up on both sides of the first section of the construction site.
In May 2020, Electrek exclusively reported that Tesla’s next factory is going to be in Austin.
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.
That’s despite the fact that the factory was first known as the “Cybertruck Gigafactory” to produce Tesla’s new electric pickup trucks.
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.
Last month, we shared a video of the construction sites showing great progress on the foundations of the plant.
Now a month later, a new drone video from Jeff Roberts shows that the factory is starting to take shape with the first building going up:
We can see the steel beams of a two-story building coming up with foundations around giving us an idea of the size of the building:
On the other side of the site of the first section of Tesla Gigafactory Texas, there’s also a lot of construction work at what we believe are the foundations of Tesla’s upcoming giant casting machines for the factory:
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.
At first, the focus is going to be on Model Y production, but Tesla quickly plans to start working on Cybertruck production at the factory.
Tesla CEO Elon 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
