- Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, arranged to speak at 10 p.m. Central time tonight as part of festivities for the opening of the company’s massive Giga Texas facility, the sixth Tesla factory worldwide and now named as Tesla global headquarters.
- Giga Texas, first announced in 2020, is the plant slated to build the long-awaited Cybertruck, and that vehicle was an important part of Musk’s talk.
- Earlier in the day workers were seen setting up for a large-scale event that Tesla’s calling the ‘Cyber Rodeo,’ and Electrek and other sources noted that Cybertrucks were spotted on the grounds this week.
UPDATE, 10;45 p.m. ET: Musk has officially promised the Cybertruck and the Tesla Semi in 2023. “We’re going to move to . . . scale that no company has ever achieved in the history of humanity,” he said. Among the planned future product will be a “dedicated robotaxi [that] is gonna look quite futuristic,” and the Tesla robot Optimus, he said, which will help create “an age of abundance . . . that’s gonna transform the world to an extent even greater than the cars.” This, too, he said is coming next year. Following that announcement, Musk rolled out the first Texas-built cars next to a sign saying “Deliveries begin now.”
Showing the Cybertruck (pictured above), he said, “It’s been an intense couple years, but we’re gonna have this for you next year, and it’s gonna be great.” He and design chief Franz von Holzhausen pretended to consider, then reject, the idea of smashing its window with a hammer as they famously did at the original reveal of the Cybertruck in 2019.
At 10:28 p.m., Elon Musk arrived in an original Tesla Roadster from 2008, wearing a black cowboy hat, to an enthusiastic reception from cellphone-wielding invited guests. He called it, the company’s first production vehicle, “a very simple car” and recalled saying at that time that he thought “optimistically we had a 10 percent chance of succeeding.”
Musk also doubled down on his enthusiasm for Full Self-Driving, saying it will “revolutionize the world,” and promised that it will go into wider beta usage during 2022.
At 10:15 p.m., the Austin sky was briefly dominated by a light show that created images of cars, a human head [which one reader IDed as that of Nikola Tesla], the Giga Texas logo, the dog symbol of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, and eventually the Cybertruck, to the cheers of spectators. Musk has not yet taken the stage.
The Giga Texas facility near Austin where Tesla expects to build the Cybertruck is having a big party tonight. Musk promised he would have an announcement as part of the grand opening festivities. There is speculation he will have more to say about the truck.
At the time the plant was first announced, in 2020, Musk said the 2500-acre facility will be where Tesla will build Model 3 and Model Y vehicles that will be delivered to the East Coast, along with the Tesla Semi and the Cybertruck. More recently, the company acknowledged that 2022 would not see any Semi or Cybertruck vehicles built. In January Tesla took the edgy electric truck’s production timeline off its website entirely and, until today, had not given further information about when (or if) it will be built.
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Source: Motor - aranddriver.com
