Mexico wants to ask Elon Musk if Tesla still plans to build its ‘Gigafactory Mexico’ now that Trump has won the elections.
After months of speculations, Tesla officially announced Gigafactory Mexico back in March 2023. At the time, Tesla talked about moving fast and building the plant in about a year, like it did in Shanghai.
However, it didn’t happen.
By the end of 2023, Tesla confirmed that it was pumping the brakes on the project amid concerns about the global economy.
CEO Elon Musk said that the project would happen, and Tesla is ordering “long lead items” for it, but the timing would depend on how they see the economy recover. In the meantime, the automaker prefers investing in Texas.
As we reported at the time, we suspected that the delay had more to do with the US elections and the fact that front-runner Donald Trump has been talking about imposing stiff tariffs on Mexico. It was later revealed that Musk was financially backing Trump’s reelection.
Sure enough, even though the local Mexican government invested in infrastructure for the factory project in Nuevo Leon, Tesla officially paused the project this summer.
Now, Mexico’s Economy Minister Ebrard wants to know the status following Trump’s win.
He said during a radio interview today (via Reuters):
I’m going to set up a meeting with (Musk) soon so that he tells me exactly what he’s thinking and see what we can do so this project moves forward,”
It sounds like he still believes the project could move forward.
However, Tesla has already changed all its production plans around not having Gigafactory Mexico, which was supposed to produce cheaper new vehicle programs based on Tesla’s new ‘unboxed’ manufacturing process.
Instead, the automaker now only plans to build its new Robotaxi on the platform in Texas and has canceled plans for other cheaper vehicles on the platform.
Tesla will instead build new cheaper vehicles on its existing Model 3/Y platform at its current factories.
Electrek’s Take
Mexico got Musked.
We know that they invested in building roads and bringing electric infrastructure to the factory site that Tesla selected, but hopefully, they didn’t spend too much money on this because I give it a very low probability of happening.
Tesla simply doesn’t have a need for it anymore and with Trump taking power, it probably too risky to build anything in Mexico to sell in the US.