Tesla revealed last week that it plans to produce electric semi trucks in a $1.1 billion Gigafactory in Austin, TX starting next year.
The Austin location beat out Tulsa, OK as a potential site for production.
This news comes after CEO, Elon Musk, commented earlier this year “It’s time to go all out and bring the Tesla Semi to volume production.”
In February, Musk hinted at Texas being in the running as a location when he tweeted a poll.
In a conference call following Tesla’s Q2 2020 financial results last week Musk said “we’re going to be doing a major factory there. And it’s also where we will be doing Cybertruck there, the Tesla semi program, and we will be doing Model 3 and Y for the eastern half of North America.”
“We’ll start production next year, as we announced before. I personally care very much about the project. I can’t wait. We do have a few trucks that keep driving around and that can deliver cars. But we’re going to accelerate that. I want to be clear that the first few units, we will use ourselves, Tesla, to carry our own freight, probably mostly between Fremont and Reno, which is a fantastic test route. We’re going to prove that we have very good reliability. So far, the early units do have it, but we’ll do that at a larger scale. And we have also promised some early units to some long-term, very patient, and supportive customers, and we’ll do that,” said Jerome Guillen, Tesla’s president of automotive and the head of the Tesla Semi program.
The factory will be approximately 2,000 acres near the Colorado River.
Musk said in the call “it’s right on the Colorado River, so we’re actually going to have a boardwalk, we’ll have a biking-hiking trail, it’s going to basically be an ecological paradise – birds in the trees, butterflies, fish in the stream, and it’ll be open to the public as well.”
“Tesla is one of the most exciting and innovative companies in the world, and we are proud to welcome its team to the State of Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement.