Nevada Newsmakers Audio Podcast
Oct 7, 2026 · 29 min · 29 segments
Guests: Clay Mitchell, Storey County Commissioner, District 1
They've been working on building it for about two and a half, three years now.
My understanding is they have six or 700 on the semi-team already there and hired and ramping up.
They really, it's very thoughtful in how they integrate the human workers and the robotics.
They ask themselves, this is what they told us, Tesla asked themselves, when does it make more sense to have a robot do a task and when does it make more sense to have a human do a task? And that might seem intuitive, but apparently it's not in some manufacturing situations.
And so, for example, some of the choices they made, they're powder coating the trucks instead of painting the trucks.
And as a result, it takes up a smaller footprint, there are fewer emissions, and they run parallel assembly lines for the different parts of the cab so that...
The middle is going down and each side is going down and then they all come together at one point.
They take what they learn from each factory they've built and the first gigafactory they built was in our county.
And so if you take the number that they're ramping up towards and they've quoted 50,000 as their target.
And so really, you can't have inefficiencies in your process if you're targeting a rate like that.
They've been working on building it for about two and a half, three years now.
My understanding is they have six or 700 on the semi-team already there and hired and ramping up.
They really, it's very thoughtful in how they integrate the human workers and the robotics.
They ask themselves, this is what they told us, Tesla asked themselves, when does it make more sense to have a robot do a task and when does it make more sense to have a human do a task? And that might seem intuitive, but apparently it's not in some manufacturing situations.
And so, for example, some of the choices they made, they're powder coating the trucks instead of painting the trucks.
And as a result, it takes up a smaller footprint, there are fewer emissions, and they run parallel assembly lines for the different parts of the cab so that...
The middle is going down and each side is going down and then they all come together at one point.
They take what they learn from each factory they've built and the first gigafactory they built was in our county.
And so if you take the number that they're ramping up towards and they've quoted 50,000 as their target.
And so really, you can't have inefficiencies in your process if you're targeting a rate like that.
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