Our 1.1 million sq. ft. manufacturing expansion in Normal, Illinois continues to advance as our team gets ready to start R2 deliveries in 2026.
We are launching R2 from our existing 4.3 million square-foot manufacturing plant, where we already build R1 and our commercial vans. Leveraging our highly skilled team and expanding our existing footprint in Normal, we’re able to launch R2 as quickly as possible. When the expansion is complete, our Normal plant will have a planned capacity of 215,000 total units.
To house the body shop and general assembly operations for R2, we are building a new 1.1 million square-foot building on the east side of our manufacturing campus, as well as several other new additions for paint, battery and material flow.
Despite the Illinois winter, construction has progressed well. Shortly, we expect the roof work to be complete and in some areas the interior work has already begun.
How close are we to the start of production?
[Tony Sanger, VP of Production Facilities]: Construction is on track and we’re all looking forward to handing the new buildings over to operations as soon as we can. We are on track to bring R2 to market in 2026, as planned, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Are there any efficiency gains we are working towards with the R2 site plan?
Tony: One of the key efficiency gains that we have created is removing all parts painting from the main paint shop and moving it to the new Parts PTED facility. This allows main paint to only be required to paint top-hats (vehicle bodies). The conveyance we are constructing between Body-to-Paint and Paint-to-General Assembly, combined with their respective Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS), gives us efficient buffers between each of the shops so we can build to the necessary high volume.
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