Turkish GigaFactory?
More countries are lining up to get Tesla’s attention - and hopefully their own Gigafactory.
On September 17th, Tesla CEO Elon Musk met briefly with Turkish President Erdoğan in New York City. Erdoğan’s hope was to convince Elon to make Türkiye the new home of the company’s next Gigafactory.
The pair also talked about increasing Starlink internet service for the country, but there was far more talk of making Tesla’s vehicles available.
Tesla began importing their Model Y to Türkiye just this May - but it’s the only vehicle sold there out of their entire fleet, despite the company also opening a Design Studio, and a series of supercharger stations there in April.
So it’s clear that Tesla is going to be expanding their offerings in the Mediterranean country - but it’s not clear that a Gigafactory is in the cards for them just yet.
Obviously the current Gigafactory project is just getting started in Mexico right now - with Tesla reportedly sending their letter of intent to begin putting up steel sometime around the 15th of September.
But Elon has been hinting that another location would be announced around the end of 2023 - and just a couple of months ago, India came in hot with some very strong offers for their own Gigafactory - which Tesla seemed to take very seriously, even purchasing a large office space for future development.
Not to mention Tesla’s work with the Canadian government, and even rumours that he is in talks with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - though Elon has flatly dismissed that last one.
There’s nothing saying that the company couldn’t pursue multiple places of course, but it would seem to be an odd choice to stretch Tesla’s holdings so thin right when they start really recovering from the Pandemic.
Regardless, Tesla and Türkiye have a fairly strong relationship right now, so there’s no telling what a little more time and a few more meetings will accomplish.
Türkiye makes sense as a stable place to build a production hub near the Middle East - and Tesla still hasn’t named their next gigafactory location, so perhaps we’ll be seeing an announcement with Erdoğan around the end of this year?