Tesla Gigafactory Texas Is Expanding!
In today’s post, Giga Texas is expanding, Giga Berlin shuts down for a major upgrade, good news and bad news from Tesla’s Q2 delivery report, Elon says that he will avoid getting into the mining industry and the Boring Company connects their first dot in Las Vegas. So let’s get going.
Giga Texas is Growing
We have new filings from Tesla that show the company is already moving forward with a major expansion of their GigaFactory in Austin Texas.
Tesla’s brand new, flagship production facility is already one of the largest buildings on the face of the Earth, but new reports show that Tesla is eyeing a new, 500 thousand square foot addition to the site.
The current main building offers just over 4 million square feet of space, with enough volume to fit 194 billion hamsters inside its walls.
We’ve always known that Tesla would eventually grow their new home base of operations to include more buildings, the size of the land owned by Elon Musk is much larger than the initial factory, covering about 3.3 square miles. But honestly, even being optimistic, we did not expect to see them move forward with an expansion so quickly.
According to the permit application which was filed on June 29th, Tesla is describing this as “GA 2 and 3 expansion.” Now, we’re making a slight assumption by saying that this probably refers to ‘general assembly’ - seems reasonable, right?
So what might Tesla be assembling in their new building? That’s the really fun question. We know that the official plan for the main factory at Giga Texas is to mass produce the Model Y at extreme volume, in addition to building the Cybertruck and the Tesla Semi. We can also say that it would make a lot of sense to build the upcoming Robo Taxi vehicle in there as well because probably going to use a lot of the same parts, and the rumor is that Tesla will use the Cybertruck platform to build a van shaped autonomous taxi vehicle of the future.
In my mind that leaves one product remaining - the Tesla Bot, their human shaped worker droid. The robot seems to be the most recent addition to the Tesla product lineup, so they probably didn’t have him in mind when they drew up the blueprints for the factory. And there’s probably not going to be a whole lot in common between an android assembly line and a vehicle assembly line, so it probably doesn’t hurt efficiency to just have them under separate roofs.
That’s entirely just speculation though - what do you think?
Giga Berlin Shutdown / Upgrade
Tesla is shutting down production at Giga Berlin for two weeks. According to reports from German media, the GigaFactory will be going through a temporary interruption of operations while the company performs major upgrades to the production line.
We’d just learned that Giga Berlin hit a production rate of one thousand vehicles per week in June - which is pretty good for a factory that’s only been operating since late March.
According to the German report - the factory upgrade is being done to set up production of Tesla’s electric drive units in house. So far, all of the electric motors being used at Giga Berlin have been coming from Shanghai, and that’s been problematic for a couple of reasons, both with supply issues and there was some kind of a problem with the voltage converter that lead to a pause in vehicle deliveries from Berlin - we never really heard a resolution to that story, but this shift in production sounds like a good solution.
The other big advantage from this upgrade will be the addition of a third shift at Giga Berlin to work on drive unit production. We know that Tesla has about 4,500 employees at Giga Berlin and is hiring at a rate of about 5 to 6 hundred per month. So following this brief interruption, we should see production work going around the clock moving forward.
Tesla Q2 Deliveries - Both Record Breaking and Disappointing
Tesla’s Q2 vehicle delivery numbers are out and while most of this went pretty much how we expected, there was one really pleasant surprise in the data.
So, first off, this was the first time that Tesla’s productivity has actually regressed in a very long time. The company managed just over 250 thousand vehicles delivered between the start of April and the end of June. That’s not a bad result, especially given the circumstances, but it is down from the previous two quarters when the company hit over 300 thousand deliveries. Though it’s still very important to note that they are still far exceeding results from Q2 2021, when deliveries hit just over 200 thousand cars.
Anyway, I’m sure most people are well aware of the causes for reduced productivity, this mostly revolves around China and their full shutdown of the city of Shanghai in late spring - no one was allowed to go anywhere or do anything, and that included building Teslas. This was the case for about three weeks. After that, some workers were able to return to the factory, but only in a single shift. Then a few weeks later a second shift. And then after about two months of disruption, the factory was back to full force in June.
And that’s where the good news really lies - this is the key take away. Tesla’s production numbers in June 2022 were the highest monthly output they have ever recorded. So the company is back on their feet and stronger than before - which is pretty impressive in the face of factory shutdowns, factory ramp ups, inflation, supply chain, labor shortages and global political instability running rampant.
Q3 2022 is likely to be very good but still not spectacular, as Tesla continues to upgrade and ramp their production lines - both Germany and Shanghai will be going through temporary shutdowns for production line upgrades, while 4680 integration seems to remain challenging at Giga Texas. So we are still not seeing Tesla at full potential, that will likely come in the fourth quarter of this year, and it’s going to be nuts.
Elon Hoping Tesla Won’t Need to Mine
Elon Musk recently did an interview with a really interesting podcast called Getting Stoned - it’s all about gems and minerals and rocks and stuff. So a very different perspective from the usual interviews that we see Elon doing - which are mostly centered around cars, business, energy, artificial intelligence, rockets or going to Mars.
For this podcast they spoke in depth about natural resources - particularly battery metals, a subject that we know Elon is heavily invested in, and an area that we had pretty much expected him to enter with Tesla.
For basically the past year, if not longer, most of us had expected that Tesla would launch their very own mining operation to secure metals for their battery production. Tesla has been making their own deals directly with mining companies and they’ve been involved heavily in some mining operations, like in New Caledonia. But we’ve really been waiting for a full on, Tesla branded resource project.
Turns out, that’s the last thing that Elon Musk actually wants to do with his company.
Elon told Getting Stoned, “Well, we DON’T want to go into the mining industry or the sort of refining industry because the limitation, I think, is actually more. For example, with lithium, it’s more lithium refinement than it is the actual mining. It’s not the fundamental rarity of lithium. Lithium is very common. It’s one of the most common elements on Earth. But you’ve got to turn it into battery-grade lithium and that’s, that’s where the choke point is.”
Elon also talked about the fact that he just doesn’t have enough really smart, really capable people at Tesla to spread them out to *yet another* offshoot of the company - he can’t send people away from Tesla Energy to work on Tesla Mining, for example. Saying, quote, “There’s not like some magical source of super talented people. We’re not sitting around with our resources saying ‘I wonder what more we can take on?”
Elon says that he wants to maintain focus on the tasks that really make a difference in the company’s efforts to push the needle on the sustainability transition. Which all sounds pretty fair.
I would say one thing though, remembering that Elon can sometimes be very careful with his words - he’s usually very quick to rule out things that he won’t do, but will purposely leave a door partially open on things that he’s still considering. Elon told the interviewer, quote, “I hope we do not need to get into the mining business.”
Just something to keep in mind.
Boring Company Makes First Vegas Connection
The Resorts World hotel in Las Vegas has unveiled their very own Boring Company Loop Station - marking the first official expansion of the underground tunnel network outside of the Vegas Convention Center.
The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop is The Boring Company’s first full-scale loop project in commercial use. Elon Musk’s tunneling startup completed the 50 million dollar project in just over a year. Now the process is underway to expand the tunnel network to the full length of the Vegas Strip, with a connector loop running out to the Vegas International Airport as well.
Resorts World is the first of 55 new stations to be built under Las Vegas - and it now gives hotel guests the ability to travel directly to the Convention Center in a matter of minutes using a Tesla electric vehicle. As of right now, these Teslas are still being driven by human chauffeurs, but eventually - hopefully soon - the vehicles will become fully autonomous, which will allow for increased speed and efficiency in the tunnel system.
Now, you may be noticing that this new Loop station doesn’t look quite as flashy as the Convention Center - and on that you would be totally correct. I guess it would have been silly to expect every single station to have crazy lighting and cool colors and stuff… But this Resorts World thing is admittedly kinda bleak and janky looking. Not sure what happened there.
Anyway, we’re looking forward to seeing what the Boring Company can do now that they have full approval to take over transit across the entire city of Vegas. Stay tuned.
