pedal to the metal
Tesla gears up for 500,000-square-foot expansion of Texas factory
Less than a year after Tesla opened its factory in Texas, the maker of electric vehicles is already plotting an expansion.
A permit application filed June 29 with the City of Austin and approved July 1 shows Austin-based Tesla plans to build a two-floor, 500,000-square-foot space to enlarge its General Assembly 2 and General Assembly 3 operations. Currently, Tesla produces Model Y vehicles at the 2,500-acre site, which is along State Highway 130 near State Highway 71 East.
The 500,000-square-foot expansion, first reported by Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt, would grow the size of the factory by more than 11 percent.
Production at the plant began late last year. In April, Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk hosted an invitation-only grand opening bash at the factory.
The Tesla permit doesn’t indicate how much the expansion will cost. But we can get an idea by looking at how much the factory cost to build.
Paperwork filed last year with the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration identified $1.06 billion in construction expenses for nearly 4.3 million square feet of space. That works out to $247 per square foot. If you apply that figure to the proposed expansion, it would cost nearly $124 million. Of course, that’s a rough estimate, and construction costs have gone up since the existing factory was finished.
The proposed expansion comes as overall production at Tesla’s plants has tapered off. According to the Reuters news service, analysts predict Tesla will report second-quarter deliveries of 295,078 vehicles. That would be below the record-setting total of 310,048 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter.
It’s not known precisely how many vehicles Tesla is producing at the Austin plant, but industry insiders estimate the total ranges from 2,000 to 5,000 vehicles per week. The Electrek blog says Tesla is aiming to manufacture 10,000 vehicles per week there by the end of this year.
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This article originally ran on CultureMap.