Tesla Mexico factory may start construction this month and put into operation next year
Tesla's Mexico factory, which was just announced recently, has a new development. Recently, the governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo León, Samuel Garcia (Samuel Garcia) said to the public, Tesla is about to get the final permit to build a factory in Mexico, and will probably start producing the first electric cars in Mexico next year.
"Tesla is waiting for the final permit ...... Once we get the permit we can start building the factory, which we hope will be in March." Samuel Garcia said in an interview, "I think that by 2024 Tesla Mexico factory will produce the first cars."
On March 2, Tesla announced at an investor day event that it will build a new full-vehicle factory in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, Tesla's third overseas factory. The specific location of the project is in Santa Catarina, adjacent to Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon, just a few hours from the U.S.-Mexico border.
In addition, a Mexican diplomatic official said that the Mexican Tesla factory will invest more than $5 billion and cover thousands of acres, about twice the land area of Tesla's U.S. super factory in Texas. The plant will produce Tesla's next-generation platform models and is expected to create 7,000 jobs.
In a video interview, Samuel Garcia quoted Tesla Vice President Tom Zhu as saying that Tesla's Mexico plant could be built in record time, breaking the previous record set by the Shanghai superfactory.
As Tesla's first overseas factory, Giga Shanghai began construction in January 2019 and was completed in August, put into operation in October and delivered in December of that year, setting an amazing pace. Since then, Tesla has made several expansions and production line upgrades to Giga Shanghai, and now has an annual production capacity of more than 750,000 units, mainly producing the Model Y and Model 3 models.
In 2022, Tesla will deliver a total of 1.31 million vehicles worldwide, with Giga Shanghai delivering over 710,000 vehicles, accounting for 54.2% of the total. The previous figure was 51.7% in 2021.
However, the construction of Tesla's second overseas factory project is not so smooth. Tesla founder Elon Musk was optimistic that the first European factory would be ready for production in about a year when he announced its location in Berlin in November 2019. However, in the actual process, due to environmental and approval issues, the plant's construction start was delayed from early 2020 to the second half of the year, and the original July 2021 start-up was delayed to March 2022.
The Tesla Giga Berlin plant is a 5 billion euro investment with an annual capacity of about 500,000 vehicles. After being completed and put into operation, the Berlin plant is going through a climbing process, with weekly production of ModelY reaching 1,000 units in mid-June 2022 and breaking through 4,000 units in February this year, but there is still some distance to reach the designed annual capacity scale.
In addition to the three overseas factories mentioned above, Tesla has two other complete vehicle factories producing passenger cars on U.S. soil.
The Fremont plant in California is Tesla's first super factory, which was acquired in 2010. The Fremont plant produces four models, Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y, with an annual capacity of 650,000 vehicles.
The Giga Austin, Texas plant will be completed in April 2022, and Tesla will move its headquarters from Silicon Valley, California to this location upon completion. The plant will mainly produce Model Y-based models, with a planned annual capacity of 500,000 units, comparable to the Park plant.
In addition, Tesla is expanding the Nevada Super Factory, which was originally a battery production plant built by Tesla in cooperation with Panasonic and started production in the first quarter of 2016, mainly producing energy storage batteries and type power batteries. The expansion will allow Tesla to build its first manufacturing plant for the Semi, an electric semi-trailer truck, and a 4680 battery factory with a capacity of 100 GWh.
Tesla's goal is to achieve an annual sales target of 20 million units by 2030, and the capacity that has been built and will be built is far from enough to meet its sales ambitions. Even though Tesla recently announced at an investor day that its future goal is to produce a new car every 45 seconds, which could greatly improve the productivity and capacity of individual factories, Tesla still needs to build more factories.
