Elon Musk spent almost an hour interacting with the crowd at Gigafest and rolled out the company’s latest plan.
Tech giant Tesla will be shifting into a whole new mode this year as it begins to put more factories online, co-founder and CEO Elon Musk said on April 7.
Musk was making the remarks at the opening of the company’s new Gigafactory in Austin, Texas.
The lucky guests were treated to a remarkable — and flashy — opening, when dozens of coordinated drones sketched out the company’s journey from Musk’s brain into a variety of products and vehicles, all backlit by the Austin city skyline.
The company has bet big on producing its own specially designed and executed factories for building its waitlisted electric vehicles, which range from luxury sedans to an aptly named Cybertruck.
All of those models were on full display at the April 7 event, where Musk debuted the first trucks made at the Austin facility and talked about how the company will be engineering its latest products.
What Did Elon Musk Say?
Musk spent almost an hour interacting with the crowd at Gigafest and rolled out the company’s latest plan for how to get electric vehicles to the general consumer.
The sector itself has been plagued by supply chain delays, a lack of new inventory and a price that has skyrocketed by more than 25% since January for any EV.
Tesla’s pricing has gone up, but it does still have a substantial waitlist. Musk said at the event on April 7 that Tesla will start to remedy that by scaling up into “massive production” immediately.
“This is why scale matters in order to make a real difference, a really big difference, to sustainability,” Musk said.
“We have to make a lot of cars here, a lot of stationary packs to transition to sustainable technology as quickly as possible. So what’s next?” he said.
“I’m not gonna spill all the beans right now,” Musk said.
“What I can say is we’re gonna move to just truly massive scale scale that no company has ever achieved in the history of humanity,” Musk said. “And we need that and it has to happen in order to transition the world to sustainable energy.”
To read a full rundown of the main takeaways from Tesla’s event, click here.
What Else Was on Musk’s Mind?
Musk repeatedly apologized at the Austin event for any long wait times consumers have had to endure to actually receive a Tesla.
“Sorry for the delay,” 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.”
In a nod to his own almost real-time popularity and cult-like level of media scrutiny, Musk asked if Tesla could perhaps be understood as being under a level of unprecedented pressure.
He also had a few playful facts for the truly diehard.
“According to our calculations you could fit 194 billion hamsters in this building,” Musk said. “This is the machine that builds the machine and it’s the latest version of the machine that builds the machine.”
