Tesla Will Spend $9-12 Billion Building Gigafactories in 2021-2022

by

Tesla reported in its 10Q filing that their capital expenditures will be in the high end of $2.5 to $3.5 billion in 2020 and will increase to $4.5 to $6.0 billion in each of the next two fiscal years.

Tesla will start building a new factory in for semi-truck and the Roadster. This would be Tesla’s fifth car factory and it will be in a TBD location in the United States.

Elon Musk has tweeted that Tesla could start a new factory in India in 2021.

SOURCES- Tesla
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com (Brian owns shares of Tesla)

12 thoughts on “Tesla Will Spend $9-12 Billion Building Gigafactories in 2021-2022”

  1. It seems to me the fit and finish of the Tesla is often sub-par. Maybe Elon wants to knock the doors down with market share, but his underlying goal is to eliminate petrocars. It might make a lot of sense to lease his battery tech to existing car companies so you could buy a Buick that performs like a Model 3.

    Again though, market share. We all know that if Elon keeps this up, other car companies will go bankrupt. Once the CyberTruck is unleashed, Ford is destroyed. So maybe he's planning on collapsing Ford and then buying it all up as junk bonds. He would own Ford, and could then put his tech into the F-150. As far as gas guzzlers go, the F-150 is the premium truck. Musk it up a bit and it's a winner.

    We'll know it's his secret evil plan when he starts building a battery factory near Detroit. Or then again maybe not. Tech giants have no patience with workers unions. There are car factories outside Detroit.

    Maybe one of his emerging industries he can invent is the ability to take any existing car and remake the whole thing in a gigafactory. Scan in an F-150, replace all the guts with Tesla gear, and the gigafactory reconfigures itself to make brand new Tesla F-150's since it bought out Ford. Why not?

  2. Well, so far it seems that it is more cost effective to make custom production lines for EVs, at least when it comes to cars. My guess is that it is also true for electric semis…

    Also, please noet that Tesla has allready designed a brand new semi, so they would not want to use the cab from another existing semi…

  3. I agree that this would be a good idea. LiFePO4 cells have excellent cycle stability and are cheaper per kWh. Makes no sense to go for more expensive and less suitable cells.

    I don't know if Tesla has committed to making LiFePO4 cells at their new battery production lines or if they are just planning on buying LiFePO4 cells from CATL and LG (?). Time will tell.

  4. I worked in a Freightliner class 8 truck plant in Cleveland, NC. Those things are big, and battery ones will be even heavier than the 10,000 pounds current sleeper designs come in at. An existing automotive plant would require a lot of changes
    They should try to buy that plant from Freightliner. It's underutilized(runs 1 shift) since they sent most production to the Saltillo, Mexico plant, and laid me off. Likely, the existing aluminum body cab line could be used without modification. They already build cab-over designs there, as well as the more common hooded models.

  5. I suspect power walls will shift to LiFePO4 cells, or some non-lithium chemistry, maybe sodium ion. It's silly to use more expensive high energy density cells for static applications. The cells will likely become larger than the new big cells that were recently announced, with a similar tabless design.

  6. I suspect the Fremont factory will be used for development, and battery manufacture, high productivity per worker activities, or maybe closed altogether. It's just too expensive to employ people in California, thanks to government by socialists.
    The writing is on the wall that Musk is likely to move himself. That's what all the not owning things is about.
    He should bail before Kalifornia decides it owns part of his income for ten years after he leaves. On second thought, the US supreme court would likely nix that.

  7. I predict they will not be able to make enough batteries for at least a decade, or maybe two decades. Demand for vehicles, and static storage products will have to be controlled by keeping prices higher than the otherwise would be.

  8. "Tesla will start building a new factory in for semi-truck and the Roadster. "

    More likely Tesla hasn't decided which existing or under construction factory they will be built at.

  9. Big difference in plans depending upon understanding O'Neill. Factories in Space, or on Earth. Batteries, or H/Space Solar. Launch, or lunar resources. For fuel, glass and metal. Forget Mars.

  10. I think a lot of that money is going to be used for battery factories. Note, though, that even 6 billion USD per year is not sufficient to reach 3 TWh of battery production by 2030. For that you would need (if the promises of battery day are fulfilled) about 10-15 billion per year.

    On a side note, I'd like to point out that Tesla power walls are *way* to expensive for general adoption. They still cost about 500 USD per kWh, and the power electronics is another few *thousand* USD. Tesla needs to come to volume production, take a cut of any power savings and lower the end user capital spending radically. Say, 100 USD per kWh and two thousand dollars for the power electronics. But this all hinges on scaling battery production….

  11. Same here. The semi prototypes were built there, and the Fremont plant is totally underutilized. It only makes sense to use existing facilities.

Comments are closed.