Inside the Gigafactory That Will Decide Tesla’s Fate

[Zorro]

To get to Tesla’s Gigafactory, you drive east from Reno, Nevada, turn into a sprawling industrial center, and make a left on Electric Avenue. The high desert landscape dwarfs everything, even the vast white building with the red stripe along the top. As you reach the gate with the security guard, the breadth of Tesla’s ambitions becomes clear. Even the name itself suggests more to come: Gigafactory 1.

The lobby décor is classic Tesla: large windows, high ceilings, gleaming white floors, black leather chairs. One of the Powerwall home batteries made at the factory hangs like a piece of modern art. Guests receive hard hats, reflective vests, and safety glasses along with the complimentary bottled water and coffee.

The $5 billion Gigafactory was born of necessity. Tesla needs a hell of a lot of batteries, for both the forthcoming mass-market Model 3 sedan and the Tesla Energy product line. The timeline for getting those batteries made just became much shorter, too. On Wednesday, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk stunned investors by announcing a sped-up production schedule that calls for a half-million electric vehicles per year by 2018, not the previously stated goal of 2020. For a company that delivered just 50,658 vehicles in 2015, the ramp looks like a hockey stick.

Tesla has worked with Panasonic to collapse the supply chain and drive down costs. Battery production—all the way down to the cell level—will happen in one facility. Conference rooms are named after chemical elements that are key parts of the battery supply chain, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminum, and silicon.

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-inside-tesla-gigafactory/

Elon certainly thinks big.

[Trust Buster]

1. It's a medium sized building. What's so "giga" about it ?

[IDemo]

2. The Tesla Gigafactory Is Big; Really, Really Big--This Big, In Fact

Photos can be deceptive, as any online-dating aficionado will tell you.

So it's hard to tell from photographs just how large the lithium-ion cell gigafactory in Nevada that's being built by electric car-maker Tesla Motors will really be.

You need some other very large things to compare it to.

And that's exactly what EV Obsession has provided, in a post from last September that we'd missed until now.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1096212_the-tesla-gigafactory-is-big-really-really-big--this-big-in-fact

[Albertoo]

5. Right of the football field, I can't see the banana well

I probably should contemplate getting a pair of spectacles.

[IDemo]

6. It's plantainly visible n/t

[Albertoo]

7. Your corny joke is the cherry on top: I can't see, and I don't get no respect

[Eleanors38]

14. Built in sections: 'Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch!'

[jmowreader]

8. You can tell by looking at the trailers

At the right hand side of the building is a row of 14 semi trailers. They need 10 feet of space. I measured them and the row was 3.25" wide. A little math shows each inch in the picture represents 43 feet in real life.

The building measures 12.5 inches in width. Using math we get a building 537 feet long. 537 feet is a stupid number and measuring off a screen is not a fine art, so the building is probably 550 to 600 feet long. Which is a lot smaller than Green Car Reports' picture makes it out to be.

Still, it's a good-size factory.

[IDemo]

10. As mentioned below, it's an incomplete structure in the photo

The initial plans called for 5.5 million square feet, with options to go up to 10M ft². It's also on two levels, which is seen at the start of the video below.

The guy claiming to be the creator of the image explains in the comment section of the OP article:

Original Creator of the image here. I took into account two levels. Here's my methodology.

So we know from various sources that:

- The Gigafactory might look like a rectangle with beveled corners.

- It will be somewhere between 5 million square feet and 10 million square feet.

- It will be 1-2 stories tall.

With such huge ranges, it’s hard to nail down the what actual dimensions of the factory will be, but I didn’t want to make multiple images. So what is pictured could be either a 5M sq ft factory with one floor or a 10M sq ft factory with two floors. I assumed a 1:2.5 dimension ratio which is shown in the recent renderings.

I got a 3535 ft (1077 m) x 1414 ft (431 m) footprint using the knowns above. I fudged the length in the graphic a little to 1100 m to account for the beveled corners.

Here is a drone view showing more progress. You can see at the 23 second point that there are footings for additional vertical supports.

#t=24

[jmowreader]

12. That makes more sense, thanks

I wonder...what else does he plan to make in his factory? It looks like he'd have plenty of room to install composites lines if he wanted to change to carbon-fiber body panels rather than aluminum ones.

[IDemo]

13. It looks like it will be strictly batteries there for now

That's the individual lithium-ion cells, plus:

Powerwall batteries for the home and the larger Powerpack for commercial users are already made at the Gigafactory. Eventually battery packs for the Model 3 will be made there as well and then shipped by rail to Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-inside-tesla-gigafactory/

[Zorro]

3. The price tag, for one

[rollin74]

9. it's being built in sections. what's visible in the photo will only be a small part of the complex

[Kilgore]

4. It's yuuuuuge!!!

[Javaman]

11. "and make a left on Electric Avenue"