Check out a complete transcript of Musk’s remarks.
Elon Musk’s appearance at the Texas Gigafest has been hyped for weeks.
Musk, the mercurial leader of cutting edge tech companies Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company, hosted the must-attend tech event in Austin this week.
Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report is opening another factory, dubbed a Gigafactory, in the heart of Texas tech, and the accompanying festivities have been closely watched on social media.
Now, after weeks of speculation about why the event was “adults only” and what Tesla might possibly have to announce that could be as exciting the recent disclosure that Musk is now the largest shareholder of Twitter, we finally have an answer.
For a complete transcript of Musk’s remarks, see below:
Elon Musk:
Welcome, welcome to Cyber Rodeo! Are you guys having a good time? So … This … All right. So, we’re going to talk about past, present, and future. This is the first production car Tesla ever made. All right. Thanks. Good. So, where we started. Started off with a very simple car, the Tesla Roadster. And we manufactured this thing, believe it or not, in an old Ford dealership in Menlo Park, California. And we made the power train, Lotus made the non power train portion, and we did final assembly and checkout literally in an old Ford dealership in Menlo Park.
Elon Musk:
And here we are today. Damn. When we first started out Tesla, I thought maybe we had optimistically a 10% chance of succeeding. When people say, “Hey, car companies are dumb.” I’m like, “I know.” I know it’s dumb. But thanks to the incredible work of the Tesla team, uh … Thanks to the incredible work of the Tesla team, over many years, we got here. So, we now have, this is where we are today, we’ve got the Model S, we have the Model 3, we’ve got the Model X, we’ve got the Model Y. We’ve got the most expensive joke in the world. But we did bring sexy back.
Elon Musk:
So, we’ve got cars in major vehicle segments, we’ve got residential and commercial energy products. We’ve got Powerwalls, we’ve got Megapack. And yeah, it’s insane. And again, thanks to the incredible work of the Tesla team, two thirds of the electric vehicles in the United States have been made by Tesla, by the hard work of the Tesla team. So, take it away … construction of the Gigafactory here.
Elon Musk:
All right. And we have a full self-driving in beta. Anyone here used the full self-driving beta? Great. So you can see, the car will take you anywhere you want, ultimately 10 times safer than if you’re driving it yourself. And it’s going to just completely revolutionize the world. This is one of those things that comes along very rarely. The Tesla autopilot team and AI team has done an incredible job building real-world AI. So … And we’re aiming to go to wide beta for all full self-driving customers in North America this year. To the moon indeed!
Elon Musk:
This is now our sixth major factory, and now we’re in three continents. So it’s actually great for us to have two major vehicle plants in North America, an awesome factory in China, and one in Europe that I was just at recently. So this is going to be a huge improvement for Tesla, and it’s also going to be better for the environment, because you want to make the cars where the customers are and not put them on ships over the oceans, so it’s going to be way better to make the cars locally. And we’re really entering a new phase of Tesla’s future with six giant factories around the world, and scaling to extreme size as you can see from this building, it’s not small.
Elon Musk:
And this is also Tesla’s global headquarters. So. Why Austin? Well, actually, I asked the Tesla team, because, you know, California’s great, we’re continuing to expand in California, but we ran out of room, and so we needed a place where we could be really big. And there’s no place like Texas. So here we are, we’re 10 minutes from the airport, 15 minutes from downtown, we’re a central logistics hub, we’ve got access to awesome talent, thank you Austin, thank you Travis county! And it wasn’t easy, building this humongous building and getting all this equipment here. I just can not express enough appreciation and gratitude and admiration for the Tesla team that built Giga Texas. Let’s give them a hand!
Elon Musk:
We went through deep freeze, rain, quicksand, incredibly fast build, it was very difficult, but it’s done. I want to give you a sense of the size of this thing. It’s not small, as I said. So. So what we have here is, if you put the building on its side, it’s taller than the Burj Khalifa. That’s to scale. It’s 80 feet tall, it’s equivalent to three Pentagons. When a building is measured in units of Pentagon, you know it’s quite large. This is the largest factory building in the world by volume, so, yeah. I’m glad you asked that question. According to our calculations, you could fit 194 billion hamsters in this building.
Elon Musk:
This is the machine that builds the machine, and it’s the latest version of the machine that builds the machine. So, I’ve said it before, but the factory is the product. Prototypes, they require imagination, and they’re not easy, but relative to production, prototypes are easy. Production is hard. And this building is the most advanced car factory the earth has ever seen. Alien technology. Exactly. You know a factory is advanced if it feels like an alien dreadnought landed.
Elon Musk:
The team is doing great work in Fremont in California, but we took a lot of lessons learned from that, where the buildings were all separate, there’s a lot of movement between the buildings, and the thing that we thought makes us, so really think of it like a chip. Like an integrated circuit. Combine everything together in one packet, and now this is what you get. So, this is a case of raw materials come in one side, they get formed into a cell, they get formed into a pack, we cast the front, rear body, the pack itself is structural, and out comes a finished product. So it’s raw materials in one side, cars out the other side. Yeah.
Elon Musk:
So we’re building our own battery cells, we think the most advanced cell in the world here at Giga Texas. All the footage you see here is from this factory, so. And we think over time this will probably be the biggest cell factory in the world. And another major innovation is Structural Pack. So we’re basically bringing to fruition the things we said we would do. We said we would basically make the car out of three major pieces, a rear body casting, a structural pack where the cells themselves carry load, just like modern airplanes where the wing is a fuel tank in wing shape. With the new Model Y architecture, the cells themselves carry load. And that results in a car that is lighter, a smaller number of parts, costs less, and improves the crash performance. So it’s a safety advantage too.
Elon Musk:
Yeah. I don’t know if this works. So. All right. As I was saying, it’s revolutionary car manufacturing to basically make a car out of three major parts, a cast rear, a structural pack, and a cast front. So what you’re looking at are the biggest casting machines ever made, and it’s kind of a crazy thing to make a car this way, it’s never been done before, when we were trying to figure this out, there were six major casting manufacturers in the world we called. Five said no, one said maybe. And I was like, “That sounds like a yes.” So, with a lot of effort and great ideas from the team, we made the world’s biggest casting machine, worked very efficiently to create and radically simplify the manufacturing of the car.
Elon Musk:
So as I was saying, raw materials in, bunch of stuff happens, car out. So. Hmm. Yes, exactly, if you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff. And we’re aiming, just with the Model Y program alone, to get to half a million units a year, and then we’re going to start manufacturing Cybertruck here next year.
Elon Musk:
The Model Y line will be the highest capacity line, I think, of any line in the world. In fact, I’m confident it will be. Half a million units a year in a single factory of one product is the biggest of anything in the world. And this will be the highest volume car factory in America. And yeah. So, Cybertruck always looks like CGI in real life, but that is not CGI, that is an actual Cybertruck driving around. So, I can’t wait to have this baby in production, it’s going to be epic. So … Tesla is growing, actually at the fastest pace of any large manufacturer in history. Yeah. So.
Elon Musk:
We’re now exceeded, in the trailing 12 months we’ve delivered over a million cars worldwide. Now that said, there’s still a long way to go. Because that red bar chart is Tesla. So we can definitely, and then the blue is global vehicles. So we can see, even though we did a million cars in the last 12 months, we’re still maybe a little over 1% of total vehicle output in the world. And we wanted to try to get to, I don’t know, 20%, as much as we can, to move the needle. And this is why scale matters. In order to make a real difference, a really big difference to sustainability, we have to make a lot of cars, we have to make a lot of stationary packs to transition the world to sustainable technology as quickly as possible.
Elon Musk:
So, what’s next? I’m not going to spill all the beans right now. But what I can say is we’re going to move to just truly massive scale. Scale that no company has ever achieved in the history of humanity. And that has to happen in order to transition the world to sustainable energy. So massive scale, full self-driving. There’s going to be a dedicated robo-taxi that’s going to look pretty … It’s going to look quite futuristic, and of course we’ve got the Tesla robot, Optimus. I think Optimus will [inaudible 00:03:33] what an economy even means. So, it’ll build to, you know, basically anything that humans don’t want to do, Optimus will do it. And it’s going to be an age of abundance. I think it’s fairly hard to imagine it, but as you see Optimus develop, we’re obviously going to make sure it’s safe, no Terminator stuff and that kind of thing.
Elon Musk:
But it’s really going to transform the world, I think to a degree even greater than the cars. And I think we have a shot at being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year, so. And then Cybertruck is coming next year, we’ll be in production with Cybertruck next year. We’ll be in production with the Roadster, and with Semi. So that’s all coming. So, this year is all about scaling up, and then next year there’s going to be a massive wave of new products. So.
Elon Musk:
And now, let us deliver our first Tesla cars made in Texas.
Elon Musk:
Yeah, well worth the wait, this is going to be awesome. I think this will be our Magnum Opus. And I mean, you can see some of the changes we’ve made already. There are no handles. Who needs handles? The car can tell that you’re there and it just knows that it needs to open. So, I think we’re going to have an incredible Cybertruck product for you next year. It’s going to blow your minds. And … Yeah, so-
Factory supervisor:
Yeah, there is no other truck.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Factory supervisor:
Everything else fails in comparison. This is the only one you need.
Elon Musk
We can’t wait to build this here and deliver them to you. Sorry for the delay. It’s been an intense couple years, but we’re going to have this for you next year and it’s going to be great. And it’s going to be just one kickass product after another, starting next year, and then some cool stuff that we haven’t even talked about. So let’s see. Thanks again for coming. I hope you are having a great time. Here at Tesla, we believe in throwing great parties. So, let’s get this party started. And have a fantastic time tonight. I love you guys.
