A high-volume factory for Tesla’s semi was announced late Tuesday by the EV company as part of a planned $3.6 billion investment in the sprawling facility near Reno, Nevada, known as Gigafactory Nevada.
The Semi entered limited production at Tesla’s plant near Austin, Texas, late last year, but the reservation process for the Class 8 semi-truck was completed last August, just months after it began. This means only some early customers like Pepsi got the delivery.
An update on the Semi program is expected later today during Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings call.
A new battery factory at the Nevada site is also planned as part of the investment. It will produce Tesla’s 4680 battery cell and have an annual capacity of 100 GWh, or enough batteries for 1.5 million light commercial vehicles, Tesla said.
Tesla Semi Delivery to Pepsi – Dec 2022
The investment, which is expected to create about 3,000 new jobs, comes in addition to $6.2 billion in investments Tesla has made at the Nevada site since 2014. Tesla currently produces batteries and other components at this location. The timing of the upgrades was not mentioned.
Tuesday’s investment announcement comes just weeks after details of a $717 million investment in Tesla’s Texas plant emerged. In addition to the small-series semi-finished product production, the plant in Texas also takes over the production of the Model Y for the eastern part of the USA. It’s also the planned site for production of the Cybertruck pickup truck, which could begin later this year.
Tesla is believed to be planning at least two more plants to add to its growing global portfolio. One is a second plant in Shanghai to expand capacity there to more than a million vehicles per year. Tesla mentioned the second plant in a letter sent last May to officials in Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area, where the existing Shanghai plant is located.
Another plant could be built in Mexico. Bloomberg reported last month that Tesla is close to announcing plans to build a plant in the auto hub of northeastern Mexico’s Nuevo León state.