Austin, Tulsa are finalists for Tesla factory
Tesla has picked Austin, Texas, and Tulsa, Okla., as finalists for its new U.S. assembly plant, a person briefed on the matter said Friday.
The person says company officials visited Tulsa in the past week and were shown two sites.
It wasn’t clear whether there were any other finalists in the mix. The person, who didn’t want to be identified because the site selection process is secret, said no final decision has been made.
The new factory will be Tesla’s biggest so far. The electriccar maker has said it wants the factory to be in the center of the country and closer to East Coast markets.
The stakes are high for state and local governments, which covet auto factories because
they have a lot of workers and normally pay well, generating income and property taxes.
Tesla’s vehicle assembly factory in Fremont employs 10,000 workers.
The company has a second U.S. factory in Reno, where it builds batteries for its vehicles and employs about 6,500 people. It also has a factory in Shanghai and another one under construction in Germany.
Companies typically use proposals from finalists to bargain for the best package of tax breaks, site investments and other incentives.
The new factory would build Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck and would be a second site for building the Model Y small sport utility vehicle.
On the company’s earnings conference call in April, CEO Elon Musk said that the site of the company’s third U.S. factory could be announced within a month. Musk calls his plants Gigafactories.
Messages were left Friday seeking comment from Oklahoma and Texas officials.
This week, Musk threatened to move the manufacturing plant and Tesla’s Palo Alto headquarters out of California in a fight with health officials over whether the Fremont plant could reopen after being closed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. He defied an order to stay closed and the plant was running for two days before the Alameda County Public Health Department announced a settlement. The department said the plant could run above minimum basic operations this week and that it can start producing vehicles on Monday, as long as it delivers on promised safety precautions for workers.
It would be difficult for Musk to move out of Fremont, though, because Tesla would have to take its only U.S. assembly plant offline for months while it moved heavy equipment to another location.
It also would be hard to move the headquarters to another state because software engineers and other technical workers probably wouldn’t want to relocate and could find work elsewhere in the area.