Tesla is ramping up at Gigafactory New York, the possible location of the ‘Battery Day’

New York Assemblyman, Sean Ryan visited the Gigafactory 2 on this past Friday and he was amazed to see the amount of progress that Tesla has made in recent months at the 1.2 million-square-foot manufacturing facility, he reported his excitement through a tweet and an audio interview to WBEN Radio (audio below).

According to Sean, there are around 1,100 employees at the Gigafactory in Buffalo right now which has been struggling for so long since the Solar City acquisition, last year some big news outlets even reported that Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have almost forgotten about Gigafactory 2 and the SolarGlass production plans are destined to fail.

But like the rest of Tesla, the Gigafactory 2 is rising, a deadline in April is also approaching where Tesla has to employ at least 1,460 people at the factory or face a fine of up to $40 million by the state of New York.

Just yesterday Elon Musk announced that “Tesla April company talk will be from our Giga New York factory” — this is most probably the anticipated ‘Tesla Battery & Powertrain Investors Day’, where the company plans to highlight their progress in battery technology and the cost curve.

Tesla’s ‘Battery and Powertrain Investors Day’ is expected to be on the same format as last year’s Tesla Autonomy Day, which was discussed for the next several days and where the automaker unveiled its next-gen breakthrough AI Supercomputer chip for Autopilot 3.0.

Sean Ryan revealed that in addition to the solar panels and energy products, he witnessed battery production at the Gigafactory NY as well, He was happy that including a segment of the automotive department of Tesla, New York is becoming part of the company’s larger business model, this will surely help the economy of the state in coming years.

You can read the entire transcript of Sean’s report on Giga New York’s current status as he described in the audio call above:

I have report that I was pleasantly surprised, it’s been about 15 months since I was last in the factory and at that time it was a lot of vacant area, right now that factory’s built out, it’s got complete lines running, products moving around, people there, so it really transformed itself into largely what we as New Yorkers and taxpayers have been hoping for.

Well the last time I was there, one central part of the factory was open warehouse looking, and now in that same area there is a dozen manufacturing lines, they’re all catered out, they’re running, there are people operating them, so a complete transformation since my last visit there.

Question: How encouraging is this to see this amount of progress at the facility?

It’s super encouraging, you know we’ve all been holding our breath since we put the big bet down on Tesla to come into our economy, you know they have slow start and I must contest I am getting worried and we’re approaching this spring whether or not they’re going to be able to hit their employment deadlines but it sure looks like they’re on track, and the other encouraging aspect is not only are they making the SolarGlass panels for the roofing materials but they’re also making the Tesla solar charger stations that will be installed in locations all over North America and a 2nd onboard battery is also being produced at this facility, so it helps to diversify us and ties us closer to Tesla automotive section and that’s good news for our economy.

Questions: Have they given any indication about how many more people they’re going to hire and vendors going to hire before the deadline?

Yeah, they’re over 1100 now and they need to get to 1460, so they’re bringing in people every day, a few of the lines have all the tools and manufacturing there but they’re not running yet, they just got them installed, and they’re going to be hiring and have people work those line, so they were very confident that they’re going to meet their deadline.

Source: WBEN – 9:30 am

Recently Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted at the possible new Gigafactory coming to the state of Texas, which will probably be the best location to produce the Cybertruck near the SpaceX facility, this will be the fourth Tesla factory in the United States after Tesla Fremont, Gigafactory 1 Nevada, and Gigafactory 2 New York.

Tesla is aiming to start its solar roof business for China and Europe as well, Elon Musk tweeted yesterday. Interestingly Tesla has many job openings in New York that they have posted on the company’s official jobs page, meaning the company is seriously pursuing targets before the April deadline.

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