Last night on Twitter Tesla CEO Elon Musk posed a question to the Twitterverse about the possibility of a new Gigafactory in the US, specifically in Texas. Maybe when Donald Trump said earlier that Musk would be building a plant in the United States, he knew something everyone else didn’t.
Included with the tweet was a poll, asking simply “Giga Texas?”, with the options of Hell Yeah or No. So far, not surprisingly, the response have been an overwhelming Hell Yeah.
Giga Texas?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2020
Tesla late last year completed the first phase of Gigafactory Shanghai. Also last year, Musk announced the location of the company’s next Gigafactory in Berlin, Germany. The addition of another factory in the US, specifically in Texas would make sense for a few reasons.
The first is the availability of cheap land. Another potential reason is the part of the manufacturing process that is currently limiting even higher production and expanded product lines from Tesla – the availability of battery cells.
If this new Gigafactory focusses on producing battery cells, it would allow Tesla to ramp-up production of other vehicles like the Tesla Semi, and even introduce the possibility of a vehicle like a minivan, which was brought up during the Q4 earnings call.
One potential drawback, that could be turned on its head to be a big win for the automaker, is the state of Texas currently does not allow Tesla to sell vehicles in the state. With the massive investment and job creation that would result from Tesla building a Gigafactory in the state, that could be used as leverage to help get Texas to remove the ban and finally allow Tesla vehicles to be sold in Texas. A similar agreement was recently reached in Michigan.
