On the Tesla earnings calls, Elon Musk announced they will make a Texas Gigafactory. They have started construction this past weekend.
It will be built on a 2000 acre property on the Colorado river and five minutes from the Austin Airport. The property is the largest property owned by Tesla.
Tesla will still consider Tulsa Oklahoma for any future expansion.
Elon in the earnings call mentioned that within 12-18 months, Tesla will have 3 new factories in operation. This would be GigaBerlin, Texas and some other factory. It is unclear what the third factory is.
The chart below describes the planned three factories. GigaBerlin and two US factories. One factory for model Y and Cybertruck and another for SEMI and roadster.
Elon believes that Full Self-driving will be worth $100,000 per car. It will be a huge historic increase in asset value.
Model Y’s wiring is optimized for automated production lines. Elon Musk envisions Tesla factories will eventually run with mainly robots on the manufacturing line. Tesla’s internal name for the nearly fully automated factory is the “Alien Dreadnought”. Elon says they are version 0.5 of the alien dreadnought factory.
Local sourcing of parts in China is increasing from 40% to 80% be the end of the year. This reduces the costs and increases the margin in Shanghai.
SOURCES – Tesla Q2 Earnings Call
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com (Brian owns shares of Tesla)
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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Most certainly. Even as shortly back as 93 when I was a kid that place has changed. Between 2013 and 2019 I moved there[two occasions] and I could tell a difference in the people. All those out of staters.
Making fully robotic gigafactories is at least half about designing vehicles to be assembled more easily by robots, vs making robots smarter about doing assembly tasks. Fewer parts. Fewer wires. Etc.
I’m guessing Cybertruck will be a testbed for a lot of that sort of design, so the Austin plant will likely have a lot fewer human workers per vehicle produced.
Something Tesla should be looking into, for hard to robotize tasks, is having robots teleoperated by workers in a separate, safe environment. Get all humans off the floor, even though humans are still needed for some tasks. Then set AI to study the work done by those human teleoperators, to learn how to robotize those tasks as well. This will also be extremely valuable tech development for Musk’s Mars colony.
When you think of disruptive tech, you think of Musk. Of course he’s going to get a lot of coverage.
Or SC. We already have BMW and Mercedes and a huge automotive manufacturing base with an international shipping port.
Hey Elon. Alabama. Look into it.
Hippie Hollow Aug 1973 was NOT a hellhole!
I just moved out of that hellhole again. Actually lived close hy where this be built.
Austin has changed since I got here in ’73. ’73 Austin will make an excellent plan for an O’Neill Settlement!