Tesla is building a series of Gigafactories across the world, which are some of the largest buildings on the planet. Inside these mega-factories are production lines for the lithium-ion batteries as well as the Tesla vehicles they go into.
Gigafactory 1 is located in Nevada, Gigafactory 2 is in New York and Gigafactory 3 is the first outside the United States. Located in Shanghai China, the third Gigafactory is slated to deliver batteries, vehicles and stationary storage products like Powerwall and Powerpack to this side of the world (including Australia).
The history of Gigafactories started back in 2013 when Tesla CEO Elon Musk first announced it, but it wasn’t until July of 2016 when the factory was officially opened.
By comparison, the latest Gigafactory in China is being built in record time. Tesla started construction in January of this year and just 5 months later, the exterior of the building looks to be almost complete.
Throughout the build, we’ve been able to keep tabs on the progress thanks to some passionate Tesla fans with drones. The latest flyover shows amazing progress in an incredibly short period of time. It’s important to remember the scale of this progress, this is a building that is many football fields in length, but has only taken as long as a typical residential home build in Australia.
Gigafactory 3 is expected to scale up to an annual production volume of Model 3 and Model Ys of around 250,000 per year, but this may grow to as much as half a million per year.
As construction of the outside of the building wraps up, we see a reduction in the number of cranes (still around a dozen), the crisp and clean white of the Gigafactory exterior has been added, with the end section higher and surrounded in black.
Fitting out the interior a building of this size is no easy feat, but one we may be a little more blind to given drone footage will cease to be useful shortly.
Now here’s a bit of a timeline.
As you can see, they’re on a path to set some crazy construction records. It certainly helps to have a large workforce to throw at the problem, but China is clearly a country that by necessity from population growth have made building processes that are incredibly efficient.
Now for the latest drone video in full, from Jason Yang on YouTube.
