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Tesla Giga Texas is a clean slate for launching its next-gen manufacturing processes
Tesla’s new Giga Texas facility will the second United States-based location for the all-electric automaker to manufacture its vehicles. With its first being located in Fremont, California, which has been in operation for Tesla since 2010, it may be planning to use its new Texas plant as a “clean slate” for manufacturing testing. With a widespread focus of the company being primarily set on making its vehicles faster, in larger amounts, and with better quality than ever before, a fresh spread of production lines in a new plant that is close to home is ideal for CEO Elon Musk, who announced the Texas plant during the Q2 2020 Earnings Call.
But apart from the new plant, the Q2 2020 Earnings Call included another big piece of information that was repeatedly discussed: manufacturing efficiency. With engineers who can help Tesla solve the manufacturing puzzle in high demand, the automaker can begin to set its sights on reaching a more sizable annual production and delivery rate.
However, it starts with the right personnel, and Tesla is surely searching for some highly-capable individuals who can help introduce new techniques and processes to the supply chain.
Tesla has been seeking individuals to help revolutionize its manufacturing processes. It starts with Giga Texas.
Manufacturing is where Tesla begins its process of delivering a car to a customer. After rounding up all of the material and necessary parts and people, a car can be built on production lines. However, there is always room for improvement, and as demand continues to grow in the face of an ever-changing automotive industry, Tesla needs to adapt. Without a doubt, the company recognizes that the key to keeping up with demand is building vehicles faster than ever before.
Musk, for one, is all-too-familiar with the struggles of building cars. When the Model 3’s introduction of “production hell” brought Tesla to a crossroads in 2017, it was evident that things needed to be solved. More lines and more personnel were brought in, but there is a better strategy than just adding more volume. There is a chance to revolutionize the way cars are built, making the entire process easier, more refined, and better for the company as a whole.
Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For Tesla, manufacturing half-a-million units of the same two cars every year is far from monotonous and repetitive. It is an opportunity to learn.
“…They sort of put manufacturing is like, oh, this is for some boring, just making copies, whatever. But actually, there’s far more opportunity for innovation in manufacturing than in the products itself, order magnitude,” Musk said during the company’s second-quarter Earnings Call. “If you work on manufacturing engineering, but you don’t just get force-fed a sandwich. You get to change the product design. So it’s super exciting.”
A focus on manufacturing has put Tesla at the forefront of automotive technology and design. Musk has even said himself that the company’s long-term sustainable advantage would be manufacturing. Eventually, other automakers will create and build a line of sustainable, functional, and operational EVs. However, Tesla will be able to put themselves ahead of the pack simply because the company’s manufacturing efficiency will be “head and shoulders” above everyone else.
Tesla will be absolutely head and shoulders above anyone else in manufacturing. That is our goal.” -Elon Musk
“Eventually, every car company will have long-range electric cars. Eventually, every company will have autonomy. But not every company will be great at manufacturing. Tesla will be absolutely head and shoulders above anyone else in manufacturing. That is our goal,” Musk said.
The problem is that testing these new techniques and ideas becomes difficult when you have two functional production plants and two others that are being constructed. Without a doubt, trying new things in terms of manufacturing could be detrimental to current lines and could interrupt the much-needed production efforts that are going on currently. So the only way to really test it is to build a new facility and try things on lines that have yet to be used.
This is where Tesla’s advantage lies with Giga Texas. It becomes the perfect place to test new techniques as lines have yet to be built, and none of the company’s current infrastructure is dependent on Giga Texas’ output. Not only is it a fresh start, but it is also close to home, and Musk will have the opportunity to oversee new production and manufacturing methods by simply hopping on his private jet and darting off to the Lone Star State.
Elon Musk giving YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee a tour of the Fremont factory. (Credit: MKBHD/YouTube)
Tesla is currently looking for proven manufacturing leaders to take charge of the Giga Texas plant as well. This job won’t be business as usual or the same monotonous challenges day in and day out. Tesla is looking for a change, and it is dead set on coming up with new ways to make cars efficiently. As the company nears a 1 million vehicle a year production rate, Giga Texas may be the way Tesla sets itself apart from all other car companies by showing new and innovative techniques that could drive the company’s manufacturing practices to become more efficient and groundbreaking for the future.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
