San Francisco : Electric car-maker Tesla has opened its Austin, Texas-based Gigafactory, as Elon Musk aims to take his electric car company to the next phase of growth with the production of Cybertruck.
Tesla held an event, billed as a “Cyber Rodeo,” to which it invited 15,000 people to listen to live music, eat food, and pay homage to Elon Musk and his company, The Verge reported on Friday.
“We are really entering a new phase of Tesla’s future. I can’t wait to see this baby in production, it’s going to be epic,” said Musk at the event late on Thursday.
Along with Cybertruck, the company also displayed a new Roadster vehicle that is likely to go into production next year.
Texas Gigafactory is fourth Tesla manufacturing facility in the US, after Fremont, California, a battery factory in Sparks, Nevada and a solar factory in Buffalo, New York.
Tesla also has a factory in Shanghai and recently opened its first European factory near Berlin, Germany.
“We need a place where we can be really big, and there’s no place like Texas. We going to move to a truly massive scale,” Musk was quoted as saying.
Tesla delivered 310,048 vehicles in the first quarter of 2022, despite what Musk said was an “exceptionally difficult quarter”, citing global supply chain issues and a brief closure at Tesla’s Shanghai factory.
Tesla said the Model 3 and Y made up 295,324 of these deliveries, while 14,724 were for the Model S and X, reports The Verge.
At its Texas factory, Tesla will make its long-delayed Cybertruck.
The automaker aims to complete Cybertruck development this year for production in 2023.
When Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck back in 2019, Tesla said that the electric pickup truck would make it to market by the end of 2021. As the deadline was approaching, the automaker confirmed that production slipped to 2022.
Musk later said that Tesla was targeting a start of production for the electric pickup truck in “late 2022” at Gigafactory Texas.
–IANS