From NUMMI to Cybercab: How Tesla Built Its Factories

On April 1, 2010, the assembly line at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. in Fremont, California, built its last car. NUMMI had been a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors, whose remaining assets by then belonged to Motors Liquidation Company after GM's bankruptcy. The plant now sat empty.

Tesla at that point was a small company that had not yet gone public. In May 2010 it signed an agreement to buy most of the NUMMI site for $42 million, not counting the manufacturing equipment. The deal covered about 210 acres, roughly 55 percent of the land, and all the factory buildings on it. Toyota helped broker the purchase and agreed to buy $50 million of Tesla stock when the company went public the following month. Tesla took title to the land and buildings in October 2010, and separately paid about $17 million for equipment and spare parts and about $7 million more for the transfer of operating permits.

Fremont became the home of the Model S, then the Model X, and later the Model 3 and Model Y. For more than a decade it was the only place in the world that built Tesla cars in volume.

Cars were only half the problem. A company planning to sell hundreds of thousands of electric cars a year needed more lithium-ion cells than existing suppliers made. Tesla's answer was a battery plant built with Panasonic in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Storey County, east of Reno near Sparks. Construction began in 2014, and Tesla and Nevada officials announced the site publicly that September.

Panasonic agreed to run cell production inside the building. Its president, Kazuhiro Tsuga, confirmed in early 2016 that the company planned to invest about $1.6 billion to equip the factory to full capacity. Tesla called the building the Gigafactory, and the name stuck to every plant that followed.

Tesla held a grand opening on July 29, 2016, even though the $5 billion building was far from finished. Tesla put the full plant at 5.8 million square feet. The following year Nevada became the choke point of the Model 3 launch, when the lines that assembled cells into battery modules could not keep up with demand, a reminder that owning the factory also meant owning its problems.

Tesla's next plant went up faster than anything the company had built before. On January 7, 2019, Musk joined Shanghai government officials at a groundbreaking ceremony for the plant. Production began that October. On December 30, 2019, Tesla China held a ceremony to hand over the first locally built Model 3 sedans, and the first 15 went to employees of the plant, less than a year after the first shovel went into the ground.

Shanghai was Tesla's first Gigafactory outside the United States and the first car plant in China wholly owned by a foreign company. It grew into Tesla's largest vehicle factory. By June 2023 it employed about 20,000 people, and by the middle of 2026 Tesla listed its installed capacity at more than 950,000 Model 3 and Model Y cars a year.

Germany was harder. Tesla chose a pine forest site in Grünheide, outside Berlin in the state of Brandenburg, and the plant spent much of its construction period running on preliminary approvals. The final environmental permit arrived on March 4, 2022. On the same day, the administrative court in Frankfurt (Oder) ruled that the water permit issued in 2020 was unlawful and unenforceable. Brandenburg authorities issued a toleration on the evening of March 16 allowing about 3.8 million cubic meters of water extraction a year, which restored the basis for supplying the factory.

Six days later, on March 22, 2022, Musk handed the first 30 German-built Model Y SUVs to customers at the plant's opening, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in attendance.

Opposition did not end with the opening. When Tesla proposed expanding onto more forest land, more than 60 percent of voters in a local citizens' survey rejected the plan, and Tesla scaled it back to about half of the 100 hectares it had originally sought. Activists set up a protest camp with treehouses in the woods near the plant. Then, on March 5, 2024, an electricity pylon near the factory was set on fire. The plant lost power and halted production. A far-left group called Vulkangruppe, or Volcano Group, claimed responsibility in a letter that attacked Tesla and Musk, and Germany's federal prosecutor took over the investigation on suspicion of terrorism. The factory was reconnected to the grid late on Monday, March 11, and production gradually resumed after a closure of about a week. Brandenburg granted a first partial approval for the scaled-down expansion in October 2024.

Two weeks after Berlin, Tesla opened its plant in Austin, Texas. It celebrated on April 7, 2022, with a party it called the Cyber Rodeo and delivered the first Texas-built Model Y SUVs. Tesla had already moved its corporate headquarters from Palo Alto to the Texas site on December 1, 2021.

Giga Texas became the home of Tesla's newest and strangest vehicles. About ten customers took delivery of the first Cybertrucks there on November 30, 2023. By mid-2026 Tesla listed the plant's installed capacity at more than 250,000 Model Y, 125,000 Cybertrucks and 125,000 Cybercabs a year.

The new plants were built around a different way of making a car body. In April 2020, Musk announced that Tesla had bought the largest die casting machine in the world to cast the rear underbody of the Model Y. The supplier was IDRA Group, an Italian machinery company. Between June and July 2020 Tesla assembled the first 6,000-ton Giga Press at Fremont, and by September the machine was producing castings, at first with a low yield.

The idea was to replace a rear structure made of dozens of stamped and welded parts with a single piece of cast aluminum. The Model Y started with a two-piece rear casting that Tesla planned to turn into one piece, and later cars used large single-piece castings for both the rear and the front underbody. More IDRA machines followed at the other plants, including Texas.

At its Investor Day on March 1, 2023, Tesla went a step further and described what it called the unboxed process. A traditional car is built as a painted shell that moves down a single line while workers reach inside it to install parts. In the unboxed process, major sections of the car, including the front, rear, underbody and cabin, are built in parallel on separate sub-assembly lines and joined in a final merge step. Tesla said the approach, applied to its next-generation vehicles, could cut production costs by 50 percent and shrink the factory footprint by 40 percent.

The next factory was supposed to build those next-generation cars. Tesla announced a Gigafactory near Monterrey, in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, at the turn of February and March 2023, and the plant was expected to make a lower-cost vehicle on the new platform.

The project stalled early. By the end of 2023 Tesla had slowed the project, citing high interest rates, and Musk said it would still happen but that timing would depend on how the economy recovered. On the company's earnings call on July 23, 2024, he was blunter: "We're currently on pause on Giga Mexico." He said Donald Trump had promised heavy tariffs on vehicles produced in Mexico, and added, "I think we need to see just where things stand after the election." Musk said Tesla would instead add capacity at its existing plants. After Trump won that November, Mexican officials publicly asked whether Tesla still planned to build there.

By 2026 the map had settled into a new shape, and the oldest plant was changing the most. On Tesla's earnings call on January 28, 2026, Musk said it was time to bring the Model S and Model X programs to an end with an "honorable discharge," and that the space they occupied at Fremont would become a line for the Optimus humanoid robot with a long-term capacity of up to 1 million units a year. The last Model S and Model X cars left Fremont in early May 2026, and Tesla took the old line apart in 46 days. Fremont still builds the Model 3 and Model Y.

In Texas, the first production Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals, came off the line on February 17, 2026, and volume production began in April. Berlin builds the Model Y for Europe, and Shanghai remains the largest plant, building the Model 3 and Model Y.

Nevada, where the Gigafactory name began, got a second life as a truck plant. The first Semi came off a new high-volume line there in April 2026, and on September 24, 2026, Tesla held a rollout event at the 1.8 million square foot Semi factory in Sparks and handed trucks to customers including PepsiCo, DHL and US Foods. Tesla says the plant can build 50,000 Semis a year. Sixteen years after it bought a closed plant in Fremont for $42 million, Tesla builds cars, trucks, robotaxis and robots on three continents, while its fourth country sits on pause.