Tesla’s Mexico factory land nearly doubles the size of its Texas factory: official

By Daina Beth Solomon

MEXICO CITY, March 2 (Reuters) – Tesla’s planned new factory in Mexico’s northern state of Nuevo Leon will be built on a site almost twice the size of its Texas factory, and construction is expected to begin in three months, a Mexican official said Thursday. .

Jesús Nava, mayor of the municipality of Santa Catarina in Nuevo León, said in an interview that Tesla buys land from private owners. He added that the site is about 1,700 hectares in an industrial area, more than twice the size of Mexico City’s international airport.

The electric vehicle producer’s factory in Austin, Texas, spans just over 1,000 acres, according to its website.

Nava said Tesla will reveal the cars it will produce at its Nuevo León plant once construction begins, which it plans to do in three months.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the project on Wednesday, a day after Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the company would build an assembly plant in the north of the country. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Nava’s comments on Thursday.

Tesla will initially invest about $5 trillion and hire about 5,000 people, but the resources allocated to the project will eventually reach a total of $10 trillion, with up to 10,000 workers, Nava added.

“It brings many economic benefits,” the official said, noting that auto industry suppliers have already expanded their presence in the region, which has vast industrial space.

The Santa Catarina location, near the industrial city of Monterrey, one of the largest cities in the country, will place production just hours south of the US-Mexico border.

According to a Mexican official, the “gigafactory” would produce around one million vehicles a year, which would represent a third of Tesla’s global capacity.

Nava said the long-speculated deal was never in danger of failing, although López Obrador said he would refuse the permits if there was not enough water available in the arid region, which was hit by a drought last year.

“It was not in danger (…) it added another factor to the administrators’ decision-making process,” Nava said.

Tesla uses recycled water, and those companies typically use a minimum of liters of water per second, he added.

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Leslie Adler; Translation by Noé Torres)