Elon Musk0:03
[Applause] So it's a... this is now our sixth major factory, and now we're on three continents. So it's actually great for us to have two major vehicle plants in North America, an awesome factory in China, and one in Europe that I was just at recently. So this is going to be a huge improvement for Tesla. And it's also going to be better for the environment because you want to make the cars where the customers are, not put them on ships over the oceans. So it's going to be way better to make cars locally.
And we're really entering a new phase of Tesla's future with six giant factories around the world, scaling to extreme size as you can see from this building - it's not small.
And this is also Tesla's global headquarters.
Why Austin? Well, actually I asked the Tesla team, because California is great and we're continuing to expand in California, but we ran out of room. We need a place where we can be really big, and there's no place like Texas. So here we are, 10 minutes from the airport, 15 minutes from downtown, great central logistics hub, access to awesome talent. Thank you Austin, thank you Travis County.
And it wasn't easy building this incredible, humongous building and getting all this equipment here. I just cannot express enough appreciation, gratitude, and admiration for the Tesla team that built Giga Texas. Let's just give them a hand.
We went through deep freeze, rain, quicksand, incredibly fast build. It was very difficult, but it's done.
I want to give you a sense of the size of this thing. It's not small. So what we have here is if you put the building on its side, it would be taller than the Burj Khalifa. That's to scale. It's 80 feet tall. It's equivalent to three Pentagons. When a building is measured in units of Pentagon, it's quite large. This is the largest factory building in the world by volume.
I'm glad you asked that question. According to our calculations, you could fit 194 billion hamsters in this building.
This is the machine that builds the machine, and it's the latest version of the machine that builds the machine. I've said it before, but the factory is the product. Prototypes require imagination and they're not easy, but relative to production, prototypes are easy. Production is hard, and this building is the most advanced car factory that Earth has ever seen.
Alien technology. A factory is advanced if it feels like an alien dreadnought landed. The team's doing great work in Fremont, California, but here we took a lot of lessons learned. The buildings were all separate with a lot of movement between them. The thing that we thought makes sense is to really think of it like a chip, an integrated circuit, combining everything together in one package. And now this is what you get.
So this is a case of raw materials come in one side, they get formed into a cell, formed into a pack, then we cast the front and rear body. The pack itself is structural, and out comes a finished product. So raw materials in one side, cars out the other side.
We're building our own battery cells, the most advanced cell in the world here at Giga Texas. All the footage you see here is from this factory. Over time this will probably be the biggest cell factory in the world.
And then another major innovation is the structural pack. Basically, bring to fruition the things we said we would do. We said we would make the car out of three major pieces: a rear body casting, a structural pack where the cells themselves carry load, just like modern airplanes where the wing is a fuel tank. With the new model-wide architecture, the cells themselves carry load, resulting in a car that is lighter, with a small number of parts, costs less, and improves crash performance. So it's a safety advantage.
I don't know if this works... All right, as I was saying, it's revolutionary car manufacturing to make a car out of three major parts: a cast rear, a structural pack, and a cast front.
What you're looking at are the biggest casting machines ever made. It's kind of a crazy thing to make a car this way; it's never been done before. When we were trying to figure this out, there were six major casting manufacturers. We called six, five said no, one said maybe. I was like, that sounds like a yes. With a lot of effort and great ideas from the team, we've made the world's biggest casting machine work very efficiently to radically simplify the manufacturing of the car.
As I was saying, raw materials in, a bunch of stuff happens, car out. Yes, exactly, if you don't make stuff, there is no stuff.
We're aiming, just with the Model Y program alone, to get to half a million units a year. Then we're going to start manufacturing Cybertruck here next year. The Model Y line will be the highest capacity line, I think, of any line in the world. In fact, I'm confident it will be half a million units a year of one product in a single factory - the biggest of anything in the world. Definitely this will be the highest volume car factory in America.
Cybertruck always looks like CGI in real life, but that is not CGI. That is an actual Cybertruck driving around. I can't wait to have this baby in production. It's going to be epic.
