A couple of weeks later, Chinese media outlets
got their first view of the site, part of Shanghai’s Lingang New City. And two weeks after that, just one month ago, we reported that
Tesla had increased the registered capital for Gigafactory 3 from 100 million yuan ($14.6 million) to 4.67 billion yuan ($681 million).
Progress is rolling. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai may seem like a mythical dream, but so did Gigafactory 1 once upon a time. In fact, it probably wasn’t until
July 29, 2016, that Gigafactory 1 genuinely demonstrated to the public it was the real deal. Gigafactory 1 is now
two years ahead of its original schedule and Tesla’s production ramp is matching up more or less perfectly with
Elon Musk’s 2015 forecasts.
While Musk is no super-robot and is sometimes too optimistic with near-term or mid-term forecasts, he appears to have a special skill when it comes to long-term planning. After all,
over the course of approximately one decade, he somehow nailed a rather detailed, ambitious, and many said impossible “secret master plan.” With that
history of executionbehind him, those of us who have been following Tesla closely for a long time see it as more or less impossible that Tesla won’t deliver on Gigafactory 3.
Furthermore, given how quickly China and Tesla like to get stuff done and how eager they both are to cut transportation emissions, a widespread assumption is that Gigafactory 3 will also run ahead of schedule. We’ll see if Elon would like to drop us a comment on Twitter (or below this article) about his forecasts for Gigafactory 3 and its construction timeline.........