Just curious... why some are hoping for a Texas built Y vs Fremont built Y...?
Texas Built Y would 100% come from the GigaPress with single body construction.
Fremont would mean it's possibly built the old way. The Fremont factory was a former Toyota factory (used to make the Matrix, interestingly enough the last new car I bought) so the construction line is really built to be more of the traditional model of building ICE cars.
Texas, and any GigaPress factories, are essentially rewriting the car building process to make it work best for EVs like Tesla, where an ICE isn't part of the equation.
Now let's break down the benefits. One big part for Texas is the GigaPress producing a single body construction frame vs. the Factory line. If you're not familiar with what a GigaPress is, it creates molds of the car frames (it's like they're 3D printing the car frame as compared to bolting the pieces together.). For Tesla, single body means less parts. The Texas builds will be optimized much like China, which means, less moving pieces, etc.. Again, for Tesla, this reduces their costs. Not really my concern.
What IS my concern is that the new body construction is much safer than the traditional method, in particular when it comes to rear body impacts. This is increased if they integrate the battery pack as planned. The fewer parts bit also means fewer things to go wrong on my panel gap check list.
When Tesla has gone to new plants (Shanghai data has shown this) quality control has gone up exponentially. They've done a great job of learning from the past. Given Tesla owners are the only ones known to have to show up with 60-point checklists for a brand new car, this is not a minor thing.
This excludes discussion around the battery - there was a chance that we could get the new battery packs (4680 cells) in the new cars. Again, integrated with the car making it more efficient, safer - but could also offer greater range (but that is if Tesla were to put the same number of cells in the car vs. reducing them.). Battery upgrades feel like more of a Willy Wonka golden ticket at this point.
In summary, anything built from Texas means that it has the benefit of everything Tesla has learned from the building process across all of their plants and now you have it built the best way possible. Fremont was their first plant to get things up and running. So there is more confidence in a car built from Texas even tho it's a brand new plant that hasn't produced cars yet.
electrek.co
