Elon Musk announces next Tesla factory location
And the winner is... Austin, Texas.
Elon Musk finally announced the location of Tesla's next U.S. car plant on Wednesday's earnings call. The gigafactory is where the forthcoming Cybertruck will be built.
About 2,000 acres on the Colorado River is "basically going to be an ecological paradise," Musk said. The area around the factory will be open to the public and only 15 minutes from downtown Austin.
Tesla's Fremont car factory will continue to make Model S and X cars, as part of a "nice split between Texas and California," Musk said. The new Model Y compact SUV will eventually be made in both Fremont and Austin.
After months of speculation on which American city would house the next gigafactory, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lost out. But Musk made sure to acknowledge that the city petitioned hard for the factory.
"Shoutout to Tulsa," he said. "We will strongly consider Tulsa for future expansion down the road."
With the Texas announcement, Tesla's factory footprint is expanding quickly. Its new Gigafactory Shanghai is already building Model 3s and will eventually produce the new Model Y. A Berlin factory is also under construction for Tesla's first European location.
Tesla car production was up for the first half of the year "despite tremendous difficulties," as Musk described coronavirus shutdowns and restrictions. Tesla workers in California went back to work earlier than state and local health officials had planned. Across the S,3,X,Y lineup, Tesla delivered nearly 400,000 vehicles in the past three months.
Topics Electric Vehicles Tesla Elon Musk
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
