DETROIT (AP) – Tesla has picked Austin, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, 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 if 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 electric car maker has said it wants the factory to be in the center of the country and closer to East Coast markets.
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt issued the following statement Friday regarding Tesla potentially choosing Tulsa as the location for a new factory:
“To the press, we can’t comment on any pending proposals.
To Elon Musk and Tesla, the people of Oklahoma love our trucks, we love our rockets and we would love to partner with you here in our great state. As a Tulsan myself, I can tell you that confusing the names Tulsa and Tesla has happened more than once, so it would only be appropriate to have a Tesla factory right here.
Oklahoma is open for business and our world-class workforce, business-friendly policies and caring people make us an excellent choice for companies worldwide. When you consider our state’s central location – providing access to a wide customer base – and Tulsa’s nationally-recognized quality of life and strong manufacturing workforce, we would make a great long-term partner for a world-class company like Tesla.
When you factor in our state’s automotive engineer workforce tax credit, it makes even more financial sense for Tesla to set up shop in Tulsa.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt
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 current U.S. vehicle assembly factory is in Fremont, California, which 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” as well as be a second site to build the Model Y small SUV.
On the company’s earnings conference call in April, Musk said 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.
Earlier this week, Musk threatened to move manufacturing and Tesla’s headquarters out of California in a fight with San Francisco Bay Area health officials over whether the Fremont plant could reopen after being closed to stop the spread of coronavirus.
Musk 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 start producing vehicles this coming Monday, as long as it delivered 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 in Silicon Valley to another state because software engineers and other technical workers likely wouldn’t want to relocate and could find work elsewhere in the area.
