Elon Musk Reveals Giga Texas & More At Tesla's Cyber Rodeo!
Elon Musk’s Cyber Rodeo at the brand new Giga Texas factory was a massive celebration of Tesla’s past, present and future. Elon used this opportunity in front of thousands of eager Tesla fans to acknowledge the hard work that his team has put in to get the company to this point where we are today - and then he laid out his vision for where Tesla will go in the future. Elon made it very clear that we are still in the early days of a company that will change the entire world as we know it.
So, when we saw Elon Musk roll onto the stage in an original, black Tesla Roadster with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg blasting over the speakers and he hopped out wearing a black cowboy hat and dark glasses looking like a bizarre, multiverse variant of Johnny Cash, we knew this was going to be an interesting talk.
Giga Texas
So, of course the star of this whole show was the factory itself, Giga Texas, this was opening night for what Elon called, “The most advanced car factory that the Earth has ever seen.” Bold statement for sure, but also, just look at this thing - it has the streamlined minimalism of an Apple store combined with what feels like alien robot manufacturing technology. And enough floor space to fit 194 billion hamsters inside.
Elon reiterated the long standing mission statement of the GigaFactory, this is the machine that builds the machine. The factory is the product. Because, while prototypes require imagination and creativity, they’re a relatively easy part of the process compared with production. Manufacturing is the hard part.
Elon said that we can think of Giga Texas like a computer chip, particularly the kind that powers your smartphone, a system on a chip, an integrated circuit with everything in one package. He broke the process down into its simplest form, saying, “Raw materials go in one side, some stuff happens, cars come out the other side.” - We never claimed Elon was a great orator.
Giga Texas is Tesla bringing to fruition the things that they said they would do back in the fall of 2020 - front and rear castings with a structural battery pack where the cells carry the load of the vehicle. This results in a car that is lighter, with a smaller number of parts, a lower cost to build and a higher crash safety performance.
Elon says that over time, Giga Texas will be the largest battery cell manufacturing factory in the world, and that Tesla’s 4680 is the most advanced cell in the world.
Giga Texas also features the largest casting machines ever made, the Giga presses. Elon says that he approached the 6 largest companies in the business of making casting machines and proposed his idea of making a 3 piece vehicle frame - he says that 5 said no and one said maybe. That one was the Idra Group, and by working together with Tesla they made casting work efficiently to greatly simplify the manufacturing of the car. A true revolution in vehicle manufacturing.
The Model Y
Of course when we talk about the car here, we are specifically talking about the Tesla Model Y - this is job number one for Giga texas, bringing the Model Y to insane new heights of volume production.
Elon says that Tesla is aiming to get Model Y production up to half a million units per year at Giga Texas - this would make it the highest capacity vehicle production line in the entire world. And going even further, he believes that Giga Texas will become the highest volume car factory in America.
Even though Elon himself refused to give us any direct details about the new Model Y at Giga Texas, we can still piece together some information for ourselves. So, we have confirmation that there is a new version of the Model being made at giga Texas that is a Standard range Dual Motor All Wheel Drive with the 4680 cells. We know this because Tesla Raj and Whole Mars Catalog from Twitter just hopped into one of the cars on the factory floor like they owned the thing and started poking around on the display screen. So the car is named Model Y Standard Dual Motor, it has an Austin VIN number showing that it was built in that factory and they found it with 53 miles of range remaining or 19% battery charge, which would work out to a total range of about 265 miles on a full charge.
We do not know if all of the Model Y’s so far from Giga Texas have this spec, but we know that at least some of them do.
We also got some interesting looks at how the new structural battery pack design is constructed at the factory. So, the interior of the pack has 4 main rows of cells that run front to back, and there are large cooling channels in between the rows, each row is 6 cells across in this particular cross section that was on display.
We can also see a finished version of the pack that is ready to go into the car, with the carpet, seats and center console all attached.
There was even a video that shows how the final assembly of the body works. It’s basically like two halves coming together, a top and a bottom. The bottom is the structural pack with interior, the drive train, the suspension and brakes all attached. And the top is the two giga castings with the upper frame and all of the painted body panels attached. And the bottom half with the pack just gets lifted up to meet the body and bolted in.
The Future
Elon Musk also spoke a bit about his vision for the future of Tesla. He didn’t give away any super crazy details, but he did give us a pretty good idea of what to expect over the next couple of years.
One big hint was the sheer amount of empty space that still remains at Gigas Texas, aside from the Model Y production line, the majority of the factory is just an endless void that is just waiting to be filled with new machines that will build new machines.
Cybertruck
Cybertruck is a big one that came up often. Elon is still very much dead set that Cybertruck production will happen next year at Giga Texas. Elon wouldn’t give away any details on the vehicle, but he did say it would be Tesla’s magnum opus. Cybertruck will blow our minds. We did get some really detailed closeup views of the latest Cybertruck prototype that was on display, but we can very easily see that this is nowhere close to a finished product, it’s still very rough around the edges.
They even awkwardly joked about throwing a steel ball at the window again, but I guess ultimately decided not to.
Full Self Driving
The Beta version of Full Self Driving will be rolling out to all paying customers in North America by the end of this year - so even if you can’t manage to nail the safety score, just wait it out, the beta will come. Elon says that ultimately this software will be 10x safer than if you were driving the car yourself and it will be a software that changes the world, the kind of innovation that comes along very rarely.
In that regard, Elon dropped a teaser that the next new product release from Tesla will be a dedicated robo taxi vehicle - he didn’t say what it would be or when it would happen, but Elon promised that it would look quite futuristic.
Tesla Bot
And then there is the Tesla Bot, Elon is still optimistic that there will be production of a version one humanoid robot before the end of next year. Elon genuinely believes that this robot can change the world to an even greater degree than Tesla vehicles, it can rewrite the definition of the economy and spearhead a new age of abundance. Not to be melodramatic or anything, but that sounds pretty dope.
The Importance of Giga Texas
And all of this is going to be possible thanks to Tesla scaling up their operations drastically over the course of this year, and Giga Texas plays a starring role in that accomplishment. Elon says that Tesla is growing at the fastest pace of any large manufacturing company in the history of the world. But even so, they only account for about 1% of all cars sold worldwide. Elon says the goal long term would be to reach around 20% of the global vehicle market. There’s still a long way to go.
This is why scale matters, in order to make a big difference, Tesla has to make a lot of cars, there is no other way to accomplish their goal of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. So Tesla is going to move to a truly massive scale over the coming years, a scale of manufacturing that no company has ever achieved in human history.
So that’s going to be the story for the rest of 2022 and probably much of 2023, just scaling up production volume to meet demand and bring those major goals into reach. But once we scale up a significant amount, then we can get back to having some fun with a few really awesome new products. Elon says that next year will see a massive wave of new products - he went as far as to say that Cybertruck, the Semi and the Roadster could all hit production in 2023. I think he is 100% right about Cybertruck, I think he is probably right about the Semi, I find the Roadster very hard to believe, that sounds like Elon time to my ear, but I’m not going to completely rule it out either, because things are starting to get nuts over at Tesla and we might all have to recalibrate our expectations for what this company is actually capable of achieving - it is only going up from here.
