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Tesla Flips the Switch on the Gigafactory
- kibwen 10y agoThe map of the intended extent of the factory is interesting. It's not even halfway completed yet. When people say that this is the largest factory in the world, do they mean that it is currently the largest, or that it will be the largest when fully completed (presumably by 2020)? And even if Tesla does end up going kaput, the factory shell may very well be a mecca for urban explorers. :)
- extrapickles 10y agoIt will be the largest by sqft when completed. Boeing has a factory that will still be largest by volume.
- abtinf 10y agoIf you are ever in the Seattle area, I highly recommend the Boeing factory tour. It's sort of like visiting the Grand Canyon - the scale of the structure is so massive that it's a bit hard for the brain to process what it sees.
- strictnein 10y agoThat's really interesting to hear and makes me want to visit, because that was my reaction when seeing the Grand Canyon the first time. My brain took a little bit to accept what it was seeing.
- wfunction 10y agoWhen I saw their buildings I literally thought "I didn't know doors could be this big".
- mulmen 10y agoI have done that tour and one of my favorite parts was the view from the balcony of a three story office building inside.
- abtinf 10y agoYes, the inside views were what captivated me as well. From the outside, I didn't think the buildings looked as massive as the claims I'd read. But as soon as I was inside, I realized that my mind just wasn't equipped to judge the size of the building from the outside.
- IanCal 10y agoI'm the wrong side of the ocean to pop in, but now I'm picturing it as Magrathea from hitchhikers.
- moritzsimon 10y ago... where you have this hugh lift running you through the planet building hall. Had immediately the same idea.
- blakeyrat 10y agoMy best bit of the tour was the explanation that if the climate control system ever goes down, the building's large enough to develop its own weather systems, including potentially clouds and rain.
- khedster 10y agoYou may be stretching the definition of sort of. The Boeing factory, while indeed large at 13.38 million cubic meters, is sort of smaller than the Grand Canyon at 4.98 trillion cubic meters. This is like saying that the number 1 is sort of close to the number 372,457 (number of Boeing factories that fit in the Grand Canyon). Tongue-firmly-in-cheek I'm definitely going to go check out the Boeing tour now.
- matthewmacleod 10y agoIf most of the numbers you encounter yer day-to-day are on the order of 0.00005 (the relative volume of my house), then perhaps 1 would seem as unrealistically massive as 372,457!
- abtinf 10y agoYou are of course right, the Grand Canyon is vastly larger. The effect on my brain was still the same. I think maybe what happens is that some object break our ability to relate a thing back to human dimensions. I don't get the same effect when looking at a skyscraper; maybe that's because each floor is usually visibly marked, so it can be related back to the self.
- hyperbovine 10y agoWith all due respect, I think you have sort of overinterpreted the point he was trying to make.
- planteen 10y agoI wondered the same thing. There's a Wikipedia page about it that is less fluffy, but it still isn't clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1 "Tesla had said that the factory will be up to 10 million square feet [1 million square meters] in one or two stories" And to be a nitpicker - calling it a gigafactory is kind of an insult to SI prefixes. Gigafactory implies 10^9 factories... So if 1 Testla gigafactory is 10^7 sq. ft, that means to Tesla, a typical factory is 0.01 sq. ft (1.44 sq. inches)? Hmmmmm... gotta love marketing.
- m00x 10y agoMegaman is also not a million men. > Giga is derived from the greek word meaning "giant" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-
- nickik 10y agoYea, Mini or Micro USB, Mini and Micro sim cards. If I buy a Megapack in the Supermarket I don't expect a literal Megapack either. They are just cool words :)
- benjaminjackman 10y agoI had always thought that giga was primarily a reference to the annual capacity of batteries it was producing, not its size. i.e. `Its projected capacity for 2018 is 50 GWh/yr of battery packs` per the wikipedia page you linked. Perhaps there is a bit of wordplay though in its size also being gigantic.
- DesiLurker 10y agoi think op knows.
- planteen 10y agoBased on my quantity of down votes, I don't think many people got it. That will teach me to joke about Tesla on HN! Or maybe it just wasn't funny.
- notatoad 10y agohttps://electrek.co/2016/09/25/tesla-gigafactory-aerial-shots-september-2016-update/ https://electrek.co/2016/09/25/tesla-gigafactory-aerial-shot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings#Largest_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings#Larg... it will be the largest when completed. it's a long way from a 530m^2 footprint right now.
- csours 10y agoThe gigafactory is in Nevada, that wiki link shows Fremont, CA, which is its vehicle assembly plant.
- webXL 10y agoPicture in the first link is correct. The wiki link does talk about Fremont, which is kinda relevant to the discussion, being the current footprint champ. It's amazing that all that factory space is for producing these little guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Factory#Battery_pack_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Factory#Battery_pack_con...
- yessql 10y ago10 million square foot laser tag game.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoThe article reads: > a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions I'm not seeing a diamond shape anywhere. It's all very rectangular to me.
- ceejayoz 10y agoThe eventual layout looks like an emerald-cut diamond to me.
- hacker_9 10y agoEpic.
- abduhl 10y agoMeanwhile, Tesla has missed on vehicle deliveries for the third time this year (out of four quarters). The stock is, obviously, up over 4% on this great news. http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/tesla-motors-inc-tsla-misses-on-deliveries-again-time-to-sell-tsla-stock-514546/ http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/tesla-motors-inc-tsla-miss...
- Mikeb85 10y agoIn economics and trading, you learn that future (expected) price = present price. So expectations are already priced in, whatever those expectations are. Bad news doesn't necessarily lower the stock price, and good news doesn't necessarily raise the stock price. In the end, it's about demand for the stock, trading dynamics, and people buy if they think the future of the company is greater than expectations, no matter how good/bad the current mood is.
- rcdmd 10y agoAmusingly, the article you linked titled "Time To Sell TSLA Stock?" itself links an article by the same author titled "Buy Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) Stock Now Or Regret It Later."
- aetherson 10y ago...you get that at two given points in the history of a stock, it might be a must-buy and a must-sell, right?
- roninb 10y agoThis isn't correct. These articles were posted 8 days apart from one another with nothing but positive news inbetween. That's not going to shift TSLA from a must-buy to a must-sell... What OP missed was that the author is actually another website that just reposts all of their content elsewhere. The originals are here[0][1] [0] http://amigobulls.com/articles/buy-tesla-motors-inc-tsla-stock-now-or-regret-it-later?ref=im http://amigobulls.com/articles/buy-tesla-motors-inc-tsla-sto... [1] http://amigobulls.com/articles/tesla-motors-inc-misses-on-deliveries-again-time-to-sell-tsla-stock?ref=im http://amigobulls.com/articles/tesla-motors-inc-misses-on-de...
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoMusk and Tesla are masters of marketing. Tech in the Gigafactory and probably much more production and process knowledge for running battery production is from Panasonic. Nevertheless all positive spin is benefiting Tesla. If it fails, I'm sure Tesla will spin the failure as Panasonic.
- schiffern 10y ago>Tech in the Gigafactory and probably much more production and process knowledge for running battery production is from Panasonic. I'm not so sure. Tesla has been applying their "first principles" physics-based optimizations in this area. One example from the recent Gigafactory tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib1KKHGYmLQ&t=6m06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib1KKHGYmLQ&t=6m06s >Welcome everyone. So what you just walked through was the cathode mixing section. We're now in the coat-and-dry section. >We receive both our active anode and cathode material as dry powders, however to apply them to our substrates we need them to be liquids. So what we do is take a solvent and mix it with the material to turn it into a solid-liquid slurry. We take that slurry out of those vessels in that last room, pump them up and all the way down to the end, to the last chamber on the ground floor here. There we have this very large roll of aluminum foil that we unwind as we pull it through the oven section on the bottom floor here. We have a coating head, which is very similar to how ink is actually deposited on a piece of paper, and we use that to deposit a very thin layer of slurry onto this metal substrate. >As it comes towards us, we have several sections of air addition and removal. We use that air at very specific flow rates and temperatures to dry the solvent and evaporate [it] off of the substrate in a very prescribed fashion. By the time it gets to the end here, all the solvent has evaporated off, and we now have this dry solid layer of active material that is stuck onto our metal substrate. >We take that and we turn it vertical here, go up to our second coating booth. What was the bottom is now the top. We coat that new top section and run it back through the top of the oven in the same fashion. So when we get to the end, we have one very thin piece of metal substrate and active material stuck to both sides of it. >As the air enters each chamber, and as it leaves, it's picking up solvent from the liquid phase and into the vapor. As all the air leaves, instead of just venting it to the atmosphere carrying all this solvent with it, we combine all those outlet ducts together into one large duct, which you see at the very end of the room when it's horizontal there, which then goes through that wall up to our second floor. We have a solvent recovery system where we scrub that solvent back out of the air (to clean the air), and the air turns right around and comes back through another duct and back into the oven. So the air is in a closed loop and never leaves the building. >The solvent we just pulled into the liquid phase then comes out to our utility yard, where we treat and clean the solvent, and the solvent itself is sent right back into our mixing room too. So both the air and the solvent are closed loop, never leaving the building. >This single tool here, this large oven, used to be the largest power consumer in of any part of the factory. But over the past year, Tesla and Panasonic engineers have worked together, and we've been able to re-engineer how this oven operates and how the solvent recovery system operates, and in doing so we've been able to cut the power consumption of the system by about 80%. >So this is oven 1 of phase 1 of Gigafactory 1. And by investing these resources up-front to optimize these systems, all those savings then propogate to every other oven we have in the future. So this is oven 1 for the whole building, and right here in a few months will be oven 2. This was already a mature coat-and-dry process designed by Panasonic, and Tesla was able to wring an 80% reduction out of the energy cost of the largest power user in the factory, while closing a material loop and eliminating emissions. All that from "just" conserving the latent heat of evaporation!
- imdsm 10y agoAnother milestone towards the singularity.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago>By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is less than a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 full-time Reno-based workers, according to a new hiring forecast from Tesla. Unless those workers will be putting in thousands of hours per week (impossible, I know), this implies some truly prodigious productivity statistics: that by using the best available manufacturing techniques, they can double the world's battery production on 260,000 hours/week of labor.
- RoboTeddy 10y agoAnyone know how many full-time workers are employed in battery factories currently? With that figure we could estimate the Gigafactory productivity multiplier for labor.
- digikata 10y agoI think a lot is only possible when you aren't tying you own hands with re-using/preserving already built capital equipment.
- toomuchtodo 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
- digikata 10y agoI'm not sure I'd class the Gigafactory as a disruption in the "Innovators dilemma" sense. I think some of the genius of Musk is that his bets actually minimize the big unknowns in a physical realm while at this point in the business dimension, the demand for Tesla's new model is known to sufficient certainty that this factory is needed to fill the capacity. The core battery tech isn't new, but the machinery and the automation of the process is.. but that's a much smaller risk than say trying to build this factory on a "disruptive" new battery tech.
- 10y ago
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoWhere is all that Lithium coming from? Top producing countries, US is #8: http://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/energy-investing/lithium-investing/lithium-producing-countries/ http://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/energy-inv...
- moxious 10y agoWell, at their scale, the answer would be pretty obvious -- from all of those places probably. Although interestingly, US production isn't far from the factory and has an undisclosed volume, not strictly the 8th largest
- theandrewbailey 10y agoI heard that much of it for this factory is coming from Mexico: http://fortune.com/2015/08/28/tesla-lithium-mine-mexico/ http://fortune.com/2015/08/28/tesla-lithium-mine-mexico/
- cptskippy 10y agoClayton Valley Nevada has the only commercial Lithium Mines in North America. Clayon Valley's Sliver Peak mine is operated by Albemarle who is one of the top 3 lithium suppliers in the world. Clayton Valley South is operated by Pure Energy. Both are working with Tesla. * Clayton Valley is ~3.5 hours from Tesla's Gigafactory.
- lightedman 10y ago"Clayton Valley Nevada has the only commercial Lithium Mines in North America" Oceanview Mine (part of the Pala Chief group) in San Diego county California is a commercial lepidolite (micaceous lithium ore) mine. They're shipping out TONS of that nice purple rock every time I'm out there buying it from them.
- prefect42 10y agoAh, what pray tell, does one do with all that fancy purple rock?
- _ph_ 10y agoNow witness the power of this fully operational Gigafactory :).
- albertTJames 10y agoMusk will yet again need to kick those nay sayers butt with sheer awesomness. Maybe when we will have a colony on mars will they start believing.. But probably not.
- user837387 10y ago>>The start of mass production is a huge milestone in Tesla’s quest to electrify transportation, and it brings to America a manufacturing industry—battery cells—that’s long been dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea. Anybody wants to guess how long before Trump claims credit for this?
- wfunction 10y agoQuestion: How much lithium can we rely on being able to extract for the foreseeable future? Do we not have a shortage of any kind?
- aerovistae 10y agoWhenever I see people asking this, or worse suggesting outright with great self-assurance that the lithium supply will soon run out, here is my thought process: 1. Musk is a seasoned business leader with 12+ years' experience running SpaceX and Tesla simultaneously, overseeing every aspect of the businesses, so far very successfully. 2. Clearly Musk knows he will need a large lithium supply, since Musk is not literally an idiot, which you would have to be in order to start the largest lithium battery factory in the world without thinking about lithium supply. 3. Clearly Musk investigated this matter. 4. Musk is moving forward as if lithium supply is not a problem. 5. QED, either lithium supply is not a problem, or Musk is investing billions into something that he has no plan for how to make work. 6. One of these seems more likely than the other.
- alexfisher 10y agoSpace X rockets and asteroid mining are next!
- wfunction 10y agoWell, I'm not literally an idiot either. Your fallacy is that I'm worried about Musk's business encountering a shortage of lithium. I'm not. I'm only wondering if a massive worldwide transition to lithium-based batteries triggered by his move might cause or otherwise encounter a lithium shortage in the foreseeable future (say, 40 years from now). This is not a worry about him or his business, this is a worry about the longer-term effects quite beyond that.
- extrapickles 10y agoAt current consumption there are ~430yrs of known reserves, with factoring in projected growth, they will last ~200yrs. I suspect people don't search for lithium deposits with much vigor right now as there isn't much demand for it and the known deposits will last for quite a while (why look for something we run out of in 200yrs, when there are things at 60yrs). At ~250mg/kwh (15-25kg per Tesla car) the current reserves of lithium could make enough batteries for nearly a billion cars without recycling any of them. Since the packs will be large, uniform and contain expensive metals like cobalt, they will be recycled so I would suspect demand for lithium would go down when the market becomes saturated (probably not in our lifetimes), just like how lead-acid car batteries don't need much new lead as quite a bit of it comes from old batteries. Between these two points, I don't think lithium is worth worrying about.
- jscheel 10y agoHoly crap, this factory is three times the size of K-25, which was used to enrich uranium during WWII (and was the largest building in the world during its time).
- CodeSheikh 10y agoLet's say that in the midst of current political climate in the US, if the new administration does succeed in bring back manufacturing jobs (questionable) to the US and take credit for this new momentum, we all should take a step back and give Tesla's Gigafactory its due credit for pioneering this momentum.
- adventured 10y agoI disagree. Toyota and other foreign manufacturers deserve drastically more credit. They pioneered on-shoring for US manufacturing, as a practical solution to several big problems, decades prior. A US manufacturing renaissance has regularly been touted in the business press for a decade, since it became apparent natural gas was about to become extremely plentiful and cheap. If the Trump Administration succeeds in lowering the corporate income tax rate to ~15%, they'll prompt an accelerated manufacturing expansion in terms of output; an increase in manufacturing jobs will be very subdued but will also likely come with it (it'll be a drop in the bucket compared to job creation spurred eg by the natural gas & oil boom, or renewable energy). Tesla gets the award for among the best PR when it comes to US manufacturing.
- microtherion 10y ago"a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions is emerging from the sweat and promises of Tesla CEO Elon Musk" I can't help being reminded of the Bertolt Brecht poem: Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? https://allpoetry.com/A-Worker-Reads-History https://allpoetry.com/A-Worker-Reads-History
- zem 10y agobeautiful poem, thanks for the pointer!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- obstinate 10y agoAs with everything, there is not one single cause. However, if you ask which cause of the gigafactory was least interchangeable with the rest, Musk seems like as good a candidate as any.
- friedman23 10y agoAsk yourself this, would spacex or tesla exist if Elon Musk weren't here?
- TheSageMage 10y agoNot OP, but he's not saying Elon doesn't deserve credit, he's just saying he doesn't deserve all the credit. The quote makes it sounds like Elon himself build everything alone, rather than being a successful leader, as well innovator.
- kasparsklavins 10y agoTo be fair, Tesla existed before Elon took over it.
- adventured 10y ago
- burntrelish1273 10y agoDoes Panasonic or anyone else have preliminary/actual part numbers for 21-70 (aka 2170 or 21700) cells?