Musk: Tesla will ‘strongly consider’ building Gigafactory in England
In an interview for The Wall Street Journal, Musk says Tesla is preparing to look for a location to build a new battery factory later this year and would assess England as an option.
I will strongly consider England for a future location of a gigafactory. We are not currently looking at new locations but we will probably towards the end of this year.
Tesla already operates several production facilities in Fremont, California, Austin, Texas, Berlin, Germany, and Shanghai, China. A factory in Mexico was announced in early 2023, but ground has not been broken yet.
Musk: Tesla will have a ‘ChatGPT moment’ with full self-driving cars
Comparing Tesla’s self-driving AI to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which came to sudden public attention at the end of 2022, Musk says that a similar situation will happen when Teslas are able to drive themselves without human intervention.
I think Tesla will have sort of a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I’d say no later than next year…Suddenly, three million cars will be able to drive with no-one [at the wheel].
Musk says he envisions a future where millions of Tesla cars would operate autonomously, gradually expanding to three million, five million, and eventually 10 million self-driving vehicles. When owners are not using the vehicles, they will be used as Robotaxis, licenced by Tesla.
Comparing Tesla’s self-driving capabilities to Google’s Waymo, Musk says that while Waymo has achieved limited success in a tightly-mapped geographic area, Tesla has a more advanced and generalized solution. Musk argues that if Microsoft, and Tesla was tasked with producing a large language model akin to ChatGPT, his company would emerge victorious.