Elon Musk speaks at Cyber Rodeo, the inauguration of Tesla’s new plant in Austin, Texas.
On Thursday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke at the inauguration of the new $ 1.1 billion electric vehicle maker’s factory near Austin, Texas airport.
At the event, he talked about how massive the new factory is and the annoying products that are still under development, including Cybertruck and Robotics, which he promised would look quite futuristic.
“It wasn’t easy to build this huge building and get all this equipment here,” Musk said, wearing a big black cowboy hat and thanking Tesla’s neighbors in Travis County, as well as Tesla staff who helped build the building. factory.
“If you put the building aside, it is taller than the Burj Khalifa,” said Musk, referring to the world’s tallest skyscraper in Dubai. He joked that Tesla estimated that the building could hold 194 billion hamsters.
Tesla aims to produce 500,000 units of the Model Y in one year in Austin, the CEO revealed on Thursday night. The company also hopes to begin production of its Cybertruck in Texas next year, Musk confirmed.
However, Tesla’s timelines often change. Tesla and other carmakers are struggling with chip shortages and rising commodity prices exacerbated by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
“We’ve shipped over a million cars worldwide in the last twelve months,” Musk said. – There is still a long way to go.
Tesla cars account for more than 75% of all all-electric vehicles sold in the United States today, according to a study by AutoForecast Solutions, with all-electric vehicles accounting for about 4% of all new vehicle sales in the country.
Musk also announced plans to expand his pilot driver support program to a wider user base.
“Our goal is to move to a broad beta for almost all fully self-driving customers in North America this year,” Musk said. The company does not produce autonomous cars, but sells a first-class driver assistance package called Full Self-Driving. Owners with the premium option can test new, unfinished features on public roads through Tesla’s FSD Beta program. Currently, the program is limited to a selection of Tesla customers and employees.
Tesla celebrated its new vehicle and battery factory in Austin, Texas with the Cyber Rodeo event on April 7, 2022.
Tesla built its vehicle assembly plant in Austin in about two years from the start. His first U.S. car plant in Fremont, California, was jointly owned by GM and Toyota before Tesla adapted it to produce its Model S sedan and X-model SUV, its first mass-produced vehicle and later -available Model 3 and Model Y.
The Fremont plant still operates today, but Tesla aims to increase production of its Model Y electric vehicles and batteries in Austin and to produce its unusual Cybertruck trapezoidal pickup truck in Texas for North American customers.
Sam Fioriani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, told CNBC that the new plant is desperately needed.
“With new products on the road, they need more production space, “he said. He believes the Tesla plant in Austin, as it is freshly designed to produce only Tesla products, should help the company improve the quality of its products. cars and reduce your production costs.
“They have built about a few million vehicles so far, which means they had to figure out what was working and what wasn’t at the moment. They need to be able to improve on the positives,” Fiorani said.
Musk said Thursday night that the Model Y vehicles produced in Texas have what is known as a “structural package,” meaning that the cells in the car’s high-voltage battery packs carry the vehicle’s load.
Prior to the Texas event, Tesla hosted a grand opening and began some commercial production at another new plant in Brandenburg, Germany.
The company’s factory in Shanghai, which began production at the end of 2019, has been closed for days due to covid’s health restrictions in the region.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk sent a sharp rise in Twitter’s share price following financial documents, and Twitter revealed that it had taken about a 9% stake in the social media company and will take a seat on the board there.
Musk has built the Tesla brand on social media, especially Twitter, and non-traditional marketing events such as Cyber Rodeo. However, he did not discuss his plans for Twitter at the company’s party on Thursday.