Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk says a new gigafactory location could be announced before the end of the year, as the US electric vehicle giant’s production lines play catch-up to huge global demand.
Speaking at the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders on Thursday from Giga Texas, Musk told a lively crowd – with at least one 10-gallon hat in attendance – to expect a record-breaking second half of 2022, as the company’s existing four gigafactories built momentum.
“We’re aiming to achieve a two million-vehicle run rate by the end of the year,” Musk said, noting that in the last few weeks the company had turned out its three-millionth electric car – a milestone a long way from the production total of less than 3,000, 10 years ago.
“Depending on how the rest of this year goes, we think we might get close to … the one and a half million mark and be exiting the year at a 2 million unit run rate,” he told the meeting.
But Musk also stressed that there was a lot of work to do in the first four gigafactories – in California, Texas, Shanghai and Berlin – to achieve those numbers, and still some supply-chain difficulties to contend with.
“There’s a host of problems. None of the problems are individually all that difficult, but there’s like 10,000 of them,” he said.
“So … the rate of production is like, how fast can you solve the 10,000 problems? Essentially. And we’re solving them pretty fast, but there’s a lot of work to do.
“And we might be able to announce another factory location later this year,” he said, getting a big response from the crowd, which was wanting some hints on where this might be. So Musk invited suggestions…
“Got a lot of Canadas,” he said after the shouting stopped. “I’m half I’m half Canadian, so maybe I should, yeah.”
In the end, we’re none the wiser about where this new factory might be, but market watchers suggest somewhere in northern America is a good bet.
Musk said that, ultimately, Tesla was likely to end up building at least 10 or 12 giga factories around the world to churn out its electric cars, including the most recent introduction to the commercial on-road fleet, the Model Y.
“And they will, they really will be giga factories,” he added, “like average output of one and a half to 2 million units per factory which is enormous.”
Musk also hinted at “some cool stuff happening on the Supercharger front,” after noting that the company’s charging technology had a pretty record in terms of actually working when people pull up to charge – not something that can be said across the entire industry, apparently.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.