Tesla plans to build a new car factory in Texas

"Part of the Tesla story was that it could be a California pride thing."

Lol.

Can humans ever drop the tribalism, I wonder? To be fair, Musk is totally playing the same game.

I've held out for a long time, denouncing both sides as stupid. But I'm getting tired of seeing everyone else just say fuck it, grab a beer, a bible, a shotgun, and go full blown alt-right. Or say fuck it, grab a cell phone camera, and go full blown virtue signaling gotcha culture alt-left.

Seems like everyone needs to play on some team, and needs somebody to hate these days.

I just want a cool car that doesn't pollute the planet, because I believe thats a shitty thing to do. If you don't feel the same way, it's all good brother.

this is an awesome take- musk has been playing 4d chess all along, getting hard-core conservatives to buy into renewable energy..

I think it's helpful to remember that Musk being in the media is the primary plank in Tesla's marketing effort. So being controversial and therefore being in the media is literally a part of his job. Even before covid-19 got serious Tesla had already said they were looking for a factory location "in the midwest possibly Texas". So that's not some reaction to being shut down in California.

Another aspect though is that right now Tesla is building a new factory in Germany and will start very soon a new factory near Austin. Building these simultaneously will be such a severe drain on Tesla's cash flow that they can ill afford having their California factory shut down for long. In this circumstance Musk could well become hot under the collar especially if he feels Tesla has done enough to mitigate risk to Tesla employees.

I don't agree with his behavior but I don't feel how he's recently acted is extreme for him. The whole covid-19 quarantine has been painful for everyone, and it obviously causes a specific pain point for Tesla because of state and county-specific orders. Him flipping out about it is mostly expected, or at least more expected than his random $420 tweet, or his concerted effort to keep talking/emailing about Vernon Unsworth months after the cave rescue.

He could be beta testing the neural link tech.

A lot of Tesla's customers came to it because of the politics of buying a car that doesn't use gasoline.

Now that other companies are finally catching up (or at least I hope they do), those same customers will have choices. Tesla has really been the only long-range choice, so of course they are going to dominate. They also make a really good car, that makes their customers happy.

Marketing and branding have huge impacts on a lot of car purchases. If Musk narrows his brand appeal by contributing to the US's partisan divide, that has a lot of potential to dent his consumer base. How many of those expensive trucks out there are ever used for truck things? So many car purchases are about image! (Though obviously not all.)

That’s the scale most don’t realize he’s operating at. With a goal of settling 100,000 on Mars, he has to reach a point of practically commoditizing production of factories.

Maybe he should get better at building cars.

Chinese labor? That's the machine that built their most recent machine that builds the machine.

Over-indexing on fancy production automation is part of what made the Model 3 launch so painful for them, as admitted by Elon himself. They probably could have had a much happier path spending less capital on a slower, more traditional production ramp-up.

But didn't he say a couple of weeks ago that Tesla's stock price is too high? So is he trying to increase or decrease the stock price?

That is such nonsensical believe that is blows my mind that people actually think it.

Do you really think Elon has a whole communication strategy design to 'keep the stock high' but then tweets 'the stock is to high'. How exactly does that make any sense at all?

He does the exact same thing with SpaceX and there is no stock market there. Why would he do that?

This has been his method before Tesla was a stock company as well. The same for the Boring company that only has a few investors, mostly him.

The reason he says what he says is the same as it has always been and he has explained this 100 times already, he sets targets that are very optimistic and he sets them publicaly, and even if they are off by 10% it still very fast. You can't achieve high goals unless you set them, and that is what he believes and how he has run his companies.

Elon has also said 100x that the short term stock market really doesn't matter to him, and he has proven that over and over again.

The reason for the stock price is not because what Musk says but what people believe the company can do and because Elon makes it clear what the priority is for them. It does not mean more then 1% of inverters believe Model Y will actually roll of the line in Texas by the end of they year.

Well, construction in China != construction in the US.

US has permits, environmental reviews, inspections, labor laws, etc etc that all add time.

To be clear China built Tesla a factory in a year, it is a big difference.

Back in 2013, they targeted 35GWh of battery production in 2020 for 500K/y vehicles (source: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...)

They've already exceeded that run rate on production and delivery (both batteries and vehicles) while being profitable.

They do have ~a million cars on the road but the software is neither capable of self-driving nor car sharing. They year isn't over, though, and the comment about robotaxis was that the car would be feature-complete[0], not operational.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_complete

Rest of the companies doing that are in more or less the same boat. Tesla ahead of all of them in bringing some pieces of the autonomy to market.

I assumed this was due to Chinese experience building factories and a large labor pool, would be impressive to replicate that time here.

The safety requirements are so much more lax that I'm willing to bet it makes building a factory much quicker in China.

Musk rarely gives estimates, but targets (used to motivate people, for instance, and to overcompensate any unexpected issue or mistake).

I'm looking for his most ambitious and oldest targets and so far, most of them have been reached/exceeded. The most important one being the 500,000 production vehicles run rate for 2020 and 35 GWh battery production for Gigafactory Nevaga. Multiplying that duration by 2 or 3 would bring us to 2027 or 2034... If you can find an even bigger and older target, please share so we can re-evaluate.

Shanghai GF was built in time, for example.

Though, I guess in this case it's to put some pressure on Texan government burocracy to hurry up with permits etc.

Over here at Giga Berlin, the local government issued temporary permits extremely quickly (for German standards) but it takes still longer to get all the paperwork done than it took to actually built Giga Shanghai.

> But I'm sure it serves a purpose in giving his employees an aggressive target to aim at. Even if they miss it, at least they probably got there sooner.

That only works until the employees quickly realize the estimates are impossible bullshit, and stop taking them seriously.

It always stuns me what people are able to explain away when it comes to these Captains of Industry.

If we can realize the goal is ridiculous, surely the engineers who work on this full time will realize it's ridiculous.

He does occasionally hit the estimates - people have provided examples in this thread.

I think he tries to just publicise the unpadded, best-case-scenario estimates rather than the best-guess estimates to push people to eliminate any slack in the project.

>I think the rule with Elon Musk is all his estimates are extremely optimistic and you need to multiply them by two or three to get closer to reality.

What about all the promises that have been made that never came to fruition? Do we just exclude those from this formula?

Reminds me of the iterated prisoners dilemma style party planning I've experienced with my compatriots, where the host expects everyone to be at least an hour late and sets the party start time an hour earlier than they want, and of course the guests expect this and show up two hours late, and so on. The few people (host or guests) who take start time literally are slowly driven insane.

Well, it depends on a lot of initial conditions that outsiders can't see. If Tesla wants to throw up a steel frame building in an already empty field in Texas or Oklahoma, that's not hard to do. It would take a few months. And during the Model 3 production ramp up, Tesla put together an entirely new assembly line using on-hand spare parts in a matter of days. So if they have an entire Model Y assembly line sitting in storage rooms in California, Nevada, and New York, which very likely they do, it might only take a few weeks to truck all of that to Texas or Oklahoma. Of course that completely ignores quarantine complications. Which might actually help Tesla. Right now, red states are so eager to get positive "restart the economy" news and millions of recently unemployed people are so eager to get jobs that Governor Abbott of Texas might cut mountains of red tape to green light whatever Tesla needs. I would say it's totally feasible for Tesla to be producing Model Y's from a new facility in Texas by the end of 2020. Certainly not at high volume. Potentially from a tent in the parking lot of an unfinished factory building. They've done it before.

No. Unrealistic schedules don't help getting anything done.

I hope they have real plans for the real work, while the CEO throws out PR bombs.

> But I'm sure it serves a purpose in giving his employees an aggressive target to aim at. Even if they miss it, at least they probably got there sooner.

That would require an executive board entirely detached from both reality and what their own experts have to say regarding the feasibility of those plans.

Perhaps they got there sooner, but at what cost to their health, relationships, and sanity?

Look at the time line for the model 3 factor in China.

$20/hr for blue collar work in a lot of Texas is very high. For example, Amazon was paying $12/hr in the San Marcos facility until they raised wages recently, and that was considered decent pay. $8-10/hr is pretty common for unskilled labor here. We have a lot of tech and oil and gas that influences the average income but tons of people here are working for way less than $20/hr.

> I just googled the average as being less than twenty dollars, which can't possibly be right,

It's right. You don't go to Tesla to make tons of money or have a good work-Life balance, you're there to contribute to a passion project with like minded individuals with certain known sunk opportunity-costs: this includes salary. (The engineering and software people are paid well, or so I'm told, but most of the bulk is on the factory side.)

In terms of compensation its not great, but at least they're honest about it; you do get somewhat generous stock options if you stay/last there for over a year, really good health care plans, and depending on the department all the hours you could possibly want or handle. I knew going in my schedule would be 60+ hours, I just didn't see it happening within a swing-shift model so had to decline the offer.

Job security, however, is not exactly a given either. Mass layoffs have been a regular occurrence, one occured right after my first interview process and many have sought to unionize so its a contentious affair even to this day, as Germany ended up getting a Union due to strict EU/DE Auto Union pressure.

> The thought that they might pay even less in Texas is depressing.

Why? Cost of living differs quite a bit in the US. While in Texas in February for my SpaceX interview I knew I was going to have to go down in salary in relation to my current role, but I was assured by several locals that my salary estimates could net a 2-3 bedroom in town with no problem, whereas I have roommates back home.

Besides, where else would I want to be than at the Factory where feeling bad about salary figures feels entirely moot and misses the entire point of why you go to these places?

> I get the feeling this was already planned. Freemont doesn't have much spare land to increase manufacturing capacity.

It was, in February Elon was already teasing about where the new Giga factory was to be located, with Texas being mentioned. Fremont factory has been over capacity even before 3's assembly line change(s) and optimization. I don't if you can find it anymore but there were pictures of Employee parking being the most chaotic thing ever, cars taking every square inch.

The supply chain guys were all pretty sore about those days, but Tesla started bussing people in from the Woodland Park building and many people just commuted that way.

As 3's numbers started to get rolling things got more and more creative, and they ended up getting more parking/staging space near the area. That much was documented [1], and people even commissioned drone pilots to do regular fly-overs over the Factory as more and more progress was being made. I haven't looked, but I wonder if people are that excited about Y.

1: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/found-a-lot-of-model...

So East of town (Austinite here) there's a lot of wide-open space. My money is on something East of 130 toll road near the Circuit of the Americas. I could see a lot of incentives being thrown that way from the Red McCombs family (major funder of COTA, highly influential in TX politics) to build alongside or nearby.

They also briefly partnered with Toyota on a Rav4:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-notifies-sec-agreement-toyo...

It's a former GM plant that later hosted the joint GM/Toyota venture NUMMI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

Not really? They still have to ship them out of Texas to another state that will allow them to sell directly. Then customers will have to drive back to Texas.

Looks like I was incorrect, they were planning to shift production to Mexico in 2017 but didn't.

Austin is still dirt cheap compared to the Bay Area if you're not living in the core area. The housing around where the Gigafactory is going to be is very affordable.

Fully Automated Luxury Traffic Jams

Average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Fremont is 70% more expensive than one in Austin right now:

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/tx/au... https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/fr...

If you drive even a little further out, living costs are far cheaper, too. Austin proper is not that large. In a nearby town less than 15 miles from downtown Austin, I see 2800 sqft. houses renting on Zillow for $200-300/month cheaper than what I paid in Bay Area rents for a 1 bedroom ~600 sqft. apartment almost 10 years ago.

Not that it won't ever get there, but Texas cities have a ways to go to catch up with some of the CA housing prices.