Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) said the electric car manufacturer will soon name at least two sites for its planned $5 billion gigafactory.
According to him, the company plans to break ground on both sites to ensure that the needed supply of lithium-ion battery packs is always available. In a recent interview, Musk told Bloomberg, “What we’re going to do is move forward with more than one state, at least two, all the way to breaking ground, just in case there’s last-minute issue. The No. 1 thing is we want to minimize the risk timing for the gigafactory to get up and running.”
Last February, Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) said it is considering the states of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas as potential sites. Musk explained that California was not included in the list because the company would spend significant amount to time to obtain environmental and regulatory approval from the state.
“California has a lot of regulatory agencies, and although this will be a very green factory, we can’t have a situation where an enormous amount of data has to be processed by a regulatory agency to find no significant impact and then give us approval to proceed,” according to Musk.
Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) said its gigafactory could create as much as 6,500 jobs, and it will reduce the per kWh cost of battery packs by 30% by the end of the first year production of its mass market vehicle.
According to Musk, the design and preparation for the production of its third generation model should be in line with its gigafactory. “There are a lot of moving parts, a crazy amount of moving parts. If there’s a laggard there, we’ll have this massive facility and a ton of people trained and no ability to recoup revenue. It will be quite a bad situation,” said Musk.
The third generation model follows Tesla’s Model X sports utility electric vehicle, which will be available in 2015. Musk also said Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) aims to boost the production of its Model S vehicle by 56% this year. He went to China to kick off and personally supervise the delivery of the Model S cars to Chinese consumers last week.
