Tesla’s next factory is going to be in Austin, Texas, and it’s going to happen quickly

A source familiar with the matter told Electrek that Tesla has chosen Austin, Texas, for its next factory, and it’s going to happen quickly.

The race to secure Tesla’s next factory is apparently over.

According to a reliable source familiar with the matter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is set on bringing the next Tesla Gigafactory, or now Terafactory, to Austin, or at least close to the city.

The people familiar with the project said that Musk has tasked the engineering team working at Gigafactory Nevada to start the process for the new factory, which is expected to make the Tesla Cybertruck electric pickup truck and the Model Y.

Tesla’s CEO also reportedly wants to move extremely fast.

We are told that the decision for the site is not set in stone since Tesla was apparently given a few options in the greater Austin area, but Musk is said to want to start construction extremely soon and aims to have Model Y vehicles coming out of the plant by the end of the year.

It would be an even more aggressive timeline than Gigafactory Shanghai.

However, we are told that Tesla would aim to only have a general assembly line ready on that timeline and it would keep building the factory around the first phase in order to increase production capacity of different parts next year.

By late next year, the new Texas factory would be producing Tesla’s new Cybertruck electric pickup.

Tesla already has some connections to Austin.

When Tesla started building a team of chip engineers for its Autopilot hardware 3.0, it hired several engineers from AMD’s corporate offices in Austin, and Tesla decided to open an office there for its Autopilot hardware engineers.

Recently, Musk has been talking about moving Tesla’s California operations to Nevada and/or Texas due to the automaker’s difficulties working with the local government to reopen the Fremont factory, where it currently produces most of its vehicles.

This project is not directly related to that announcement.

We are talking here about Tesla’s previously announced plans to build a “Cybertruck Gigafactory” in “central US.”

Update: After we published this report, three different publications happened to “coincidentally” report, each based on a single anonymous source, that Tesla was in talks with Austin and Tulsa last week:

This is so funny. All 3 publications get the same anon source saying the same vague thing just an hour after my report. @tesla this is sloppy work to try to muddy my report. https://t.co/Ilq7Wj1pdq

— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) May 15, 2020

Electrek’s Take

I think most people won’t be surprised by the news. Elon seems to have been leaning toward Texas for a while now.

But the timeline was really surprising to me.

This source has been really reliable in the past and they seem adamant that Tesla is pushing to have cars coming out of the factory by December, which just sounds crazy.

Although we are talking about just general assembly here, so it’s not like Gigafactory Shanghai, which was built on a quick timeline too, though not as aggressive as this.

Tesla had Gigafactory Shanghai producing cars within a year after starting construction, but it was also producing the body of the vehicles, and for now, it sounds like the bodies of the Model Y vehicles coming out of the new Texas factory would be produced in Fremont.

Therefore, I don’t think it’s impossible, but like it’s often the case with Tesla, the timeline is extremely aggressive.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.

We will try to keep you updated on Tesla’s plans for the new factory. If you know anything about it, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at Fred@electrek.co, via Wickr: Fredev, or through my social media: Twitter and Instagram.