A new video has surfaced showing construction progress at Tesla’s third Gigafactory outside of Shanghai, China. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, the new Gigafactory has already been the source of much contention. Self-proclaimed shorters of TSLA stock have visited the site and shared videos of fields of dirt, empty office buildings, and the like. (Sound familiar?)
Meanwhile, Tesla is working towards standing up the new Gigafactory in record time, with a target of delivering the first Model 3s and Model Ys from the factory in 2020 (and some even speculate it could be in late 2019).
The property was given a flyover by a drone that shows the clearly fenced-off property with not much of anything happening yet on the abysmally saturated field that sits at the edge of a river.
The field has been cleared and leveled in preparation from construction and has just the very beginnings of construction starting in a small corner of the property. A small construction office has been assembled alongside a few containers and some construction equipment.
The video by no means provides certainty that Tesla is on track with construction, but it is exciting to see that things are actually starting to happen in Shanghai at the location of the new Gigafactory. It all starts with cleared, fenced property and an office from which to manage everything.
Tesla stated early on that it believed it would be able to stand up its first Gigafactory outside of the United States in record time, thanks to the lessons it learned at its first Gigafactory outside of Sparks, Nevada. The more stabilized plans will be turbocharged with an injection of Chinese ingenuity and construction expertise that is expected to see the massive factory come online in around 2 years.
The irony is that when the foundations are poured and the walls start going up, that is just the start of the work. The magic all happens on the inside where Tesla’s unique approach to battery assembly, automotive manufacturing, and testing put the magic of Tesla’s Grohmann Automation to practice. It’s the machine that makes the machine. The Alien Dreadnought that we were all warned about is coming to China, and that’s worth getting excited about.