Mexico wants to ask Elon Musk if Tesla still plans to build its ‘Gigafactory Mexico’ now that Trump has won the elections.
After months of speculations, Tesla officially announced Gigafactory Mexico back in March 2023. At the time, Tesla talked about moving fast and building the plant in about a year, like it did in Shanghai.
However, it didn’t happen.
By the end of 2023, Tesla confirmed that it was pumping the brakes on the project amid concerns about the global economy.
CEO Elon Musk said that the project would happen, and Tesla is ordering “long lead items” for it, but the timing would depend on how they see the economy recover. In the meantime, the automaker prefers investing in Texas.
As we reported at the time, we suspected that the delay had more to do with the US elections and the fact that front-runner Donald Trump has been talking about imposing stiff tariffs on Mexico. It was later revealed that Musk was financially backing Trump’s reelection.
Sure enough, even though the local Mexican government invested in infrastructure for the factory project in Nuevo Leon, Tesla officially paused the project this summer.
Now, Mexico’s Economy Minister Ebrard wants to know the status following Trump’s win.
He said during a radio interview today (via Reuters):
I’m going to set up a meeting with (Musk) soon so that he tells me exactly what he’s thinking and see what we can do so this project moves forward,”
It sounds like he still believes the project could move forward.
However, Tesla has already changed all its production plans around not having Gigafactory Mexico, which was supposed to produce cheaper new vehicle programs based on Tesla’s new ‘unboxed’ manufacturing process.
Instead, the automaker now only plans to build its new Robotaxi on the platform in Texas and has canceled plans for other cheaper vehicles on the platform.
Top comment by Michael
So to confirm Trump renegotiates NAFTA in favor of usmca, which Trump rushed to get signed, only to turn around and want to tariff products coming from our newest largest trading partner??? So not only will companies pass this costs onto you, but let's say that company decides to move manufacturing back to America, Trump can claim that tariffs are working. What this does is it'll keep the cost of goods high because now you're paying American's and we don't work cheap but the company is also paying a higher wage so their costs will stay high, eventually leading to the business sector saying they need to reduce costs. Do businesses turn on Trump? Or does he say, fine I'll give you a tax cut? Remember folks, it takes years for gov economic policies to work their way thru the economy so if Trump is successful in getting what he wants, this should be felt ~1 year before be leaves office. That is of course, If Trump leaves office or Republicans are successful in getting Trump a 3rd term, in which case he'll have to fully own the problems he's caused. I'm sure by now he's deflected blame onto others like he's been doing since the 70s, but can he get out of it? $37 trillion in debt, there are no more bailout options unless we quadruple the size of the economy in the next few years to make our national debt seem so small in comparison but I don't think that'll happen under Republicans.
Remember, if you voted for Trump again, fully own what happens in 4 years don't try to deflect.
Tesla will instead build new cheaper vehicles on its existing Model 3/Y platform at its current factories.
Electrek’s Take
Mexico got Musked.
We know that they invested in building roads and bringing electric infrastructure to the factory site that Tesla selected, but hopefully, they didn’t spend too much money on this because I give it a very low probability of happening.
Tesla simply doesn’t have a need for it anymore and with Trump taking power, it probably too risky to build anything in Mexico to sell in the US.
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