Tesla are pretty great at building cars, but they’re also getting pretty great at building factories. Gigafactories have long been part of the Tesla story, it was really the success of the Shanghai, China Gigafactory that reframed the discussion.
Gigafactory Berlin, Germany is currently under construction and until now, we hadn’t really seen what the final product would look like. The answer is gorgeous.
The facility looks massive, and is expected to use that space for the production of batteries, battery packs and powertrains for use in Tesla vehicles. It looks like the Model Y will be assembled there and as we know, there are serious benefits to local production, predominantly, avoiding the time and cost of shipping large, heavy products.
As the company’s product portfolio grows, the need for increasing production facilities also increases. There’s already Tesla’s largest Gigafactory in Nevada, along with the Shanghai and soon to be Giga Berlin, but that’s not the end of the story this year.
It is expected that Tesla will officially confirm the location of it’s next US-based Gigafactory in the state of Texas, which will produce Cybertrucks.
The to-do-list is long for Tesla, with the RHD Model Y still to go, as well as Cyberquad and the big one, Tesla Semi.
While that inviting front door with a rooftop greenspace looks inviting, the most interesting detail on this for me is the blanket of solar panels that spans the entire roof of the plant.
This obviously fits with Tesla’s goals to be environmentally sustainable and to produce all the power they need to run their plants from renewable sources. It is notworthy that renders of the Nevada Gigafactory had shown rooftop solar across the entire building, which is yet to happen. Given Musk has said they are also ramping production of the energy productions, maybe we’ll start to see that start to change shortly.
While vehicle manufacturing in Australia is a really hard game, I would love to see a Gigafactory in Australia. We have one of the worlds largest lithium deposits, so making batteries here and assembling vehicles should be a viable option.
Pair that with the fact that Australia is one of sunniest locations on the globe and it feels like a match made in heaven. By way of comparison, Australia’s sunniest location is Alice Springs, with a massive 3,499 sunshine hours per year, compared to just 1,626 in Berlin.
