Tesla goes on hiring spree to finally bring Tesla Semi to volume production

Tesla has started to hire for a lot of positions meant to deploy a volume production line for the Tesla Semi electric truck at Gigafactory Nevada.

The more we learn about the Tesla Semi, the more it sounds like a critical product to help slash emissions from heavy trucking.

But it needs to be deployed in volume in order to have an impact, and we recently learned that Tesla only built about 70 of them after almost a year in production.

In January, Tesla announced a Gigafactory Nevada expansion to build the Tesla Semi in the factory in high volume.

However, we noted that Tesla has yet to expand the factory nine months later.

In August, we reported that Tesla hired a new manufacturing leader to specifically take charge of the Gigafactory Nevada expansion – giving us some hope that things would start moving.

Now, the automaker is making another move that gives us some hope that things are about to get moving for Tesla Semi at Giga Nevada.

Tesla has listed 10 new jobs related to building designing and building a high volume Tesla Semi production line at Gigafactory Nevada over the last few days:

• Sr. Architect, Semi
• Structural Modeling Lead, Semi
• Factory Design Engineering Leader, Semi
• Lead Plumbing Engineer, Semi
• BIM Manager and Virtual Design Coordinator, Semi
• Staff Iot Network Engineer, Infrastructure Network Engineering
• Electrical Construction Project Mangement, Infrastructure Programs – Semi
• CAE & CFD Thermal Engineer, Battery Engineering, Semi
• CAE Analysis Engineer, Structures & Durability, Semi
• Mechanical Design Engineer, Structural Design, Semi

Tesla writes in the job description for the senior architect role for the Tesla Semi:

Tesla is looking for a Senior Architect to work on large scale ground-up Engineering-Procurement-Construction projects. The product portfolio is expanding with never-built-before production lines and our Architects are expected to have the skills to translate new manufacturing requirements into efficient, code compliant, and aesthetically appealing spaces. In a cross functional organization, our team works side-by-side engineering, construction, and procurement teams to design, and build, the future of Tesla. In this role, you will be asked to be the technical Project Architect for the design and engineering efforts to support construction projects, from concept to start of production.

Here’s the new section for Tesla Semi manufacturing that the automaker is planning to build:

Electrek’s Take

While it is encouraging that Tesla is hiring, based on that description, it also sounds like there’s still a lot of work to do to design the project. We could still be months away from seeing work done on the Gigafactory.

The latest satellite images show that Tesla has yet to expand its footprint as planned in this render released in January.

I would be surprised if we see Tesla Semi production at Giga Nevada before at least the second half of 2024.