Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his company's Travis County gigafactory is on track to begin operations sometime in 2021 during the electric carmaker's third-quarter earnings call Oct. 21. This timeline confirms Tesla's initial projection the project could go online by the fourth quarter of 2021 when the factory was first announced in July.
Musk said on the earnings call that "Giga Texas," located east of Austin, is on a similar timeline as the also under-construction "Giga Berlin."
"For Berlin and Austin, we do expect to start delivering cars from those from those factories next year," he said. "Because of the exponential nature of the scaling up of a manufacturing plant, it will start off very slow at first, and the output will become very large."
Within 12-24 months of the factory beginning initial operations, it will operate at full capacity, he estimated.
