Nevada Semi Shakeup
Tesla has begun construction on their new Semi truck production facility at Giga Nevada, but some drone footage released just last week seems to show that the location of this facility has changed.
On January 19th, drone photographer and Youtuber Zanegler Tesla Semi Stalker released a video on his channel reportedly showing a flyover he conducted of the Giga Nevada build site on January 17th.
The flyover begins with a shot of the site from December, showing the area in question as having been used as a “Warehouse on Wheels” up until quite recently. Warehouses on Wheels are large, roughly made parking lots where manufacturers store parts in trailers rather than create an enclosed warehouse building.
After the narration ends, we then get a view of the site being worked on, with the existing Giga Nevada complex in the background.
The first thing to note here - as Zanegler points out - is that the site we see getting worked on is well outside the established footprint for the Giga Nevada expansion plans. Large earth-movers can be seen prepping the site by levelling the ground and compacting the soil - exactly what we’d expect to see before a large building gets started.
But when Elon announced this facility last year, it was very clearly discussed as an overall expansion to the main Nevada factory complex - along with a 100 GWh 4680 battery manufacturing area that hasn’t been discussed since then. So if there’s been a change, why?
Well first off, we should say that we’re not even sure there has been a change. Zanegler reports that Tesla employees have been told that the new Semi facility will be detached from Giga Nevada proper - but there hasn’t been any confirmation of that, and no amendments to the original build permits have surfaced - yet.
The work being done on the former Warehouse on Wheels is expansive - but this sort of work we’d see if Tesla was getting ready to turn this area into a parking lot - which they might be doing to replace the current parking lot which is occupying the space where the original permits said the expansion was going to be put.
Build permits aren’t amazingly difficult to change - especially with the sort of resources Tesla has - but if they could keep the original plan without paying for redesigns and permit updates, you can bet they’d do that - so either the work we’re seeing is part of a larger, phased construction along the lines of the original plan, or something has changed with how Tesla wants to manufacturer their Semis in this facility.
Maybe they need more space, maybe they need to allocate the old space to a different project - it’s hard to know until steel begins going up on site.
When announced, this expansion was planned to add about 4 million square feet of production footprint, and would cost the company $3.6 billion. Tesla has reportedly been working on tax breaks to soften that blow, but that’s still a hefty investment.
However, the Semi had a great year in 2023 - with PepsiCo jumping headfirst into plans to expand their fleet of 21 Tesla Semis after a particularly good showing at last summer’s Run on Less event in California.
And a ramp-up of Semi production can’t happen without this new facility - so regardless of how the plans might have changed, construction has finally begun, and that means we’ll be seeing Semi production increase in just a few months from now.