GigaMexico to Get New Vehicle Line
A new announcement from Mexico says that Tesla’s new gigafactory there will now be taking anywhere from 12 to 15 months from breaking ground to start of production. The good news though, is that the increased time is so that Tesla can build a whole new production line - for a whole new vehicle.
On April 15th, Samuel García Sepúlveda - the governor of Nuevo Leon, where the new gigafactory is set to be built - gave a brief interview with the Spanish news company Milenio. In it, the Governor explained that originally Tesla had wanted to break the record they had set with Giga Shanghai - which had been constructed in just nine months.
But the plans have shifted to include an entirely new production line for a new vehicle. Three new vehicles were announced in the Master Plan Part 3 - a 53 kilowatt hour Compact, a 100 kilowatt hour passenger van, and a 300 kilowatt hour bus.
There’s been no real confirmation as to what this new line is, so it could be for any of those - but given that Tesla plans for their To Be Determined compact vehicle to be a sizeable chink of their global fleet - the compact EV seems more likely.
Adding to that, the company has already been making big changes to their other vehicles in order to get in on the American Inflation Reduction Act - and all the tax breaks and incentives that come from that legislation - which is seeking to aid the transition from I C E vehicles over to electric ones with some of the largest infrastructure spending in decades.
A more affordable Compact vehicle is something Tesla has been rumoured to be developing for years now, with a target price of around 25 thousand dollars - which would be a great fit for the predicted EV boom.
A big part of Elon’s Master Plan Part 3 outlined a new vehicle platform - with the implication that older Tesla vehicles would be updated to utilise the new production methods that would be developed for it.
During the Investor Day event on March 1st, the presenters went into greater detail - discussing their plans for this new platform - and capping the presentation off by announcing their new factory location in Neuvo Leon, Mexico.
It would certainly make a lot of sense to experiment with a new production method in a new factory, and this announcement seems to line up with that idea.
Governor García Sepúlveda reported that the construction process is now in the rendering phase - which is when the architects take their finished work and provide polished - and final - images and construction templates, so it can’t be long before they break ground.