Tesla Is Building A Plant In Monterrey, Mexican President Says - Forbes

Topline

Tesla will build its latest factory in Monterey, Mexico, the country’s president announced Tuesday, as Elon Musk ramps up worldwide production to reach the firm’s production goal of 20 million electric vehicles per year by 2030.

Key Facts

The new facility will be “a considerable investment” with many jobs, according to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who did not offer specifics on the size or scope of the facility, but did say Tesla would announce further details Wednesday.

The electric car company could need an additional 10 to 12 production facilities, Musk said last year, on top of existing facilities—California, Nevada, Texas, New York, China and Germany—in order to ramp up production from the 1.3 million cars it produced in 2022 to the 20 million the company says it wants to produce annually by 2030.

Musk and López Obrador spoke multiple times in the days leading up to Tuesday’s announcement, according to Reuters, after the Mexican president said Friday Tesla would be denied permits to build a plant in the state where Monterey is located due to water scarcity issues.

At the press conference, López Obrador said Tesla made a number of commitments to address the region's issues of water scarcity including a commitment that all the water used in the manufacturing of electric vehicles will be recycled water.

Key Background

The announcement comes as Musk is pushing for increased production worldwide. On Monday, Tesla announced its facility in Germany was now producing 4,000 cars per week, four times more than the plant was producing in May. Last month, the EV maker announced 3,000 new jobs at its Nevada gigafactory.In August, Tesla’s Shanghai factory manufactured its one millionth vehicle and three millionth vehicle company-wide, Musk said. Over the summer Musk said Tesla was on track to achieve two million vehicles by the end of 2022, a number the company fell short of, only reaching 1.3 million cars in 2022. But new factories, like the one in Mexico, bring Musk one step closer to achieving his output goal of one and a half to two million units per factory annually.