Tesla Gigafactory Texas Is Officially OPEN Tesla's Giga factory in Texas is now open! This factory will help Tesla produce more cars and accelerate the shift to sustainable transportation.
The Tesla Gigafactory in Austin texas is officially open for business this now joins Fremont California shanghai china and berlin Germany in a growing list of international locations where the company produces its electric vehicles with an official cyber rodeo opening party on April 7th.
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| Tesla Gigafactory opening in texas |
Elon musk will deliver the first model y vehicles from Giga texas which is also the first in a new generation of tesla vehicle architecture that incorporates their in-house developed 4680 battery cell and structural battery pack these cars may look like a regular tesla model y on the outside but on the inside.
The made in texas vehicles are a great leap forward in design and technology this is all made possible by one of the largest and most advanced manufacturing plants in the entire world and unlike the odyssey of its sister factory in Germany Giga texas has come together at a spectacular pace and will be a legitimate game changer for tesla's operations in North America so today we are talking about everything that has gone into making Gigatexas what it is today and where this factory will take us in the future.
How big is the Texas Tesla factory?
- let's get going the sheer size of this factory is pretty difficult to grapple with the middle section is three-quarters of a mile long with a one-quarter mile in width to walk a lap around the entire thing would be nearly two miles in distance.
- There are four levels to the factors that make up a height of about seven stories and the total floor space adds up to around 8 million square feet underneath that monolithic diamond shape that we see today is actually three individual buildings running lengthwise across.
- The factory the reason that tesla did this was to allow for covered roadways to run through the interior of the Gigafactory this way they can drive full tractor-trailers in the center of the plant to make pickups and deliveries directly to the location where they are needed tesla did something similar with the new Gigafactory in Germany they surrounded the entire perimeter of the building with docking bays for semi-truck trailers to allow targeted deliveries.
- But this still would require internal transportation for supplies to reach the center of the factory floor Giga berlin though is much smaller by comparison to Gigatexas so it doesn't matter as much so far the best look at the interior of the factory we have seen has come from this guy DJ Skee I don't know who he is either but for whatever reason tesla gave him a tour of the factory and let him record some video for Instagram that was published on march 24th.
So the first thing that we can see is that tesla has a model y hanging from the ceiling at a weird angle like it's about to crash into the floor or something I don't know about that either but as DJ Skee moves through the factory we can see a lot of model y vehicles and parts in various stages of construction seemingly all painted either black or blue.
We can also see that there is a lot of wide open space inside the factory that has yet to be developed model y production at Giga texas is just step one at some point in the next year this will be joined by production lines for the tesla cyber truck and even their gigantic electric semi-truck.
There is also going to be a full production line for the 4680 battery inside the factory as well Gigatexas is the closest thing that we have seen yet to Elon musk's grand vision of an alien dreadnought factory that can produce full vehicles purely through automation a machine that builds machines in order for that to be possible then we need every aspect of the vehicle produced under one roof or at least on.
The same factory site tesla's plant in Fremont California is a very bad example of this concept they can't even fit all of the necessary production equipment for the vehicle body under one roof.
They had to resort to installing the Gig press machines in the parking lot and putting up giant tents to build the model 3 and model y batteries and packs from Fremont vehicles are manufactured in Nevada and shipped over for final assembly it's pretty far from full automation but hey you got to start somewhere.
The Gigafactory in shanghai is a pretty close approximation to the autonomous alien dreadnought idea they did manage to fit all of the vehicle production equipment inside the factory they don't have to make any parts in the parking lot and they may not have on-site battery production but they do have tesla's battery cell manufacturing partners in china like call very close by.
Renewable Energy at Giga Texas
We've known for a while that Tesla is planning to cover the entire Gigatexas roof with solar panels, and observers have already noticed that they're planning to flash the word tesla across the top with strategically placed gaps in the panel something new we just made.
The learning is that Tesla has plans to install a large battery storage facility next to the plant that will manage the power generated from those panels in a permit application submitted to the City of Austin Tesla proposes building and associated facilities Improvements to the 53.27-acre site at 12601 Tesla Road adjacent to Giga Texas.
The application was filed on March 25 in the name of Project Giga The permanent switch yard texas car permanent switchyard and Bess gave a few hints about those utilities and associated improvements.
Will be that abbreviation stands for battery energy storage system which in this case would be the tesla mega pack unit enough to cover 53 acres. But needless to say, they are looking at installing a very substantial energy storage system alongside the factory.
Made in Texas Model y
As we said off the top the model y that is being produced at Giga texas is a different internal design than the model y made at Fremont that American consumers have been receiving for the past two years Gigatexas is making full use of die-casting technology with a large section of the production floor dedicated to tesla's Gig press machine.
These are humongous mechanical presses that use 6 000 tons of force to press molten aluminum alloy into molds these casting machines are powerful enough to create both the front and rear quarters of the vehicle frame using one single piece for each no other automaker and maybe no other manufacturer of any kind has ever been able to implement such a large single piece casting into their product design.
- The upshot of this technology is pretty simple instead of sticking together a bunch of small parts to try and make one big one tesla can use this injection method to form liquid metal directly into one large solid part tesla has been doing this successfully for about a year now with the rear section of the model y frame that's one of the parking lot additions at the Fremont factory a Giga press.
- But production at the Texas Giga doubles that with a molded front section as well, so the entire frame from the driver's foot to the front fender is a solid single piece of aluminum, which helps make the car stronger, lighter, more wear-resistant and less prone to abrasion.
- Manufacturing defects And because that's not enough, these cars also get the latest and greatest battery and pack design from Tesla, and the 4680 battery and pack design are in a chassis package, so in the next article, I will talk about it about the real reason why Tesla developed the 4680 battery for more than that But in short form.
- This is a new, very efficient, and powerful battery design that Tesla is currently making in its California production line, aiming to produce a battery that is much faster and cheaper than its current production.
- Generation of cells introduced into the Model 3 and eventually the Model Y Tesla will soon manufacture the 4,680 on-site in Giga Texas and eventually Giga Berlin as Well, in a separate building right next to the existing car factory.
- A special aspect of these cells is that they will blend into what Elon Musk calls a structural battery pack much the same idea as the fore and rear casting tesla replacing a bunch of small parts which go into the pack which then get bolted into the frame of the vehicle like a box within a box within a box kind of deal.
- The new cells go straight into a pack without the need for modules and then that pack is attached between the front and rear Giga castings without the need for a separate frame the pack is the frame the top of the battery becomes the floor of the car and the seats are actually direct mounted to the top of the pack and same story again stronger lighter more efficient and lower margin for error.
- The simplest path is most often the correct one unfortunately we are still very much in the dark about what the particular specs of this texas made model ys will be we can clearly see that hundreds of them have already been produced and staged in the parking lot surrounding the factory most of them have been black and blue but recently we've also seen white and even red cars coming out of the production floor.
- So we know the paint shop is up and running at nearly full capacity right now at first we were only seeing the long-range model y variant with the standard silver wheels but recently we've also been catching vehicles with the black coated rims so these could be more long-range vehicles with the induction wheel upgrade or even the performance variant of the model y that is only available with the blacked out uber turbine wheels.
- This is already a big step up from Giga berlin which by the time of its first deliveries was only producing the model y performance in black and white not much variety at all the only thing we don't really know about this texas made model y is whether or not the specs in regards to range and acceleration will differ at all from the Fremont made car given the advancements in battery cell and pack technology.
- It's certainly possible that Tesla can set these things to be performance-enhancing in both classes, but that complicates matters with the production line and sets customers' expectations about what car they'll actually get, a Texas sedan and a California sedan.
- The car would be identical on the spec sheet even if it was completely different in physical design, 90% of consumers wouldn't even notice or even care about that difference. It's people like us who care about these things, but of course, we're not normal after we've said all that now Elon Musk will likely announce a lot of new details about the Model Y on his Twitter.
- The big question remains Just how many vehicles can they manufacture in the first year of production at Giga Texas, let us know your predictions in the comments.
Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas is now officially open! This is a huge milestone for the company and we’re very excited to see what the future holds. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the Gigafactory Texas in the comments below.