Elon Musk’s grand plan to create a massive factory in the Nevada desert is said to be shaping up well as Tesla invited select journalists to visit the site last Tuesday. ‘Gigafactory’,
the $5 billion 5.8 million square-feet battery-manufacturing plant should start operations by 2018 and will be fully operational by 2020.
According to various reporters who were got the tour of the plant have confirmed that only 14 percent of the construction is complete with 1.9 million square-feet of operational space. About a 1,000 workers are working seven days a week to complete the plant which will be a jewel-shaped building having a roof covered with solar panels.
Until now the company was importing its batteries from Asia but to meet the demand of 5,00,000 electric cars per year, it has to produce them at this factory. By doing so, the company will be able to innovate faster and also save about 30 percent of the costs.
To manufacture the batteries at the gigantic plant, Tesla has partnered with Panasonic in spite Panasonic Executive Vice President Yoshihiko Yamada calling the idea ‘çrazy’. According Yamada, “the production capacity of this factory would exceed the global capacity of the industry.” However the overwhelming response for the upcoming Model 3 that saw close to 4,00,000 investing to buy the electric vehicle back in spring was enough to convince Yamada.
The partnership will let Panasonic install its own equipment and manage its own employees at a separate facility inside the Gigafactory. Panasonic has invested about $1.6 billion to make battery cells from raw material which will then be moved to the Tesla assembly lines, where they’ll be repackaged into battery modules for electric vehicles.This makes the production of Tesla’s new cars much more efficient as opposed to getting the batteries made overseas.
This is also a positive step for Musk’s Master Plan Part Deux where he mentioned a plan to create transform Tesla into a company that builds electric vehicles, batteries to store the power, and the solar panels to generate that power.
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