Panasonic will add 3 production lines by the end of 2018. This will bring the number of production lines to 1s. The production capacity will be 35 GWh per year and meet Tesla’s production goal of consistently building 5,000 Model 3 per week.
Tesla plans to have sustained production rate of 10,000 Model 3 per week by the middle of 2019. This will mean more upgrades and expansions for Gigafactory 1 will be made.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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That’s fine, just saying what I’m seeing from my own perspective.
Place your bets. I wouldn’t bet against Elon.
Tesla electric semis will do the work just as efficiently and have other side benefits for tesla. The solar panels are already being set up on the roof.
Panasonic is not likely to cut corners in battery production. You can’t expect anybody to believe a source only you know. Tom is absolutely right to question it.
Anonymous for you, perhaps. I know the guy, I’m just not going to mention his name, because, who knows, he might decide to keep working there, and some companies do regular searches for their employees’ names.
And we have not yet seen the surge in replacement batteries as each Tesla on the road is wearing out its batteries.
You have a point. Rail definitely can slash transportation costs … provided that “the load” doesn’t need to be broken up too many times along it way from factory to customer. But it does also introduce another whole level of materials handling. More special equipment and smarmy rail union workers to add overhead to the otherwise cost effective service.
The roof-top not being paved in solar panels is something of a mystery. Since GigaFactories are visible from drones and overflights (think News helicopters), I’d kind have thought that Tesla would at LEAST have paved the roof with solar panels … perhaps in the iconic form of their TESLA logo.
However, being “out in the desert”, its also the case that they have PLENTY of desert land to invest with solar panels, if they really want to. Could be a few miles away even… electricity travels quite efficiently over distances of a few miles at “in-a-city” tensions. 60 kV is good. Transforms down to 12 kV quite readily in substation-sized string-of-pearls loading schemes. Might as well put the cells where they’ll least be likely to be disturbed, covered in roadway dusts, all that.
[b]Goat[/b]Guy
Tesla will end up like pretty much any “startup” auto manufacturer. The “big boys” will use their power and $$$ in DC, to roadblock them at every turn. That, and the ambitious plans of Musk, were too pie in the sky.
” Based on his stories, they’ve taken some ugly shortcuts in scaling up production, which are pretty much certain to bite them on the reliability side of things. ” Uhuh.
Anonymous FUD with no evidence is still just FUD. They have taken no shortcuts which have hurt reliability to any evidence yet, and anonymous trolls have been saying such things for a long time.
I’m a tooling engineer in the deep draw stamping industry; The exact technology used to make battery cases.
As it happens, I’ve got a friend who’s working production at the Tesla Gigafactory. If he hasn’t quit in disgust yet; He was talking about returning to work here again, at a substantial pay cut, he’s finding working there so unpleasant. (Albeit remunerative!)
Based on his stories, they’ve taken some ugly shortcuts in scaling up production, which are pretty much certain to bite them on the reliability side of things. Either reliability of production, or reliability of parts, depending on their QC. (Likely both, as our head of QC says, “You can’t inspect quality in.” The key to quality parts is tuning your process so you don’t produce bad parts in the first place, inspection just keeps it tuned in, “capable”.)
Multiple presses making a given component, and each tool is slightly different… Now, I would never say that tools have to be identical to make the same part, that’s not true; There are a lot of ways to skin a cat. But sooner or later somebody is going to put die five from tool A into tool B by mistake… Which is why you take care not to do things that way, unless you’re in too big of a hurry to do things right.
What I’m hearing does not sound good, in short.
Why no railway, and why no solar on that enormous roof? A railway line would seriously improve logistics and slash transport costs
Dear Brian… I’m going to make a gentle request: when talking about batteries — especially for vehicular or domestic storage use — instead of talking about [i]gigawatt hours[/i] of production, why not normalize that to the same tridecimal units used by the individual composed batteries?
35,000,000 kWh ≡ 35 GWh.
Almost any engineer or STEM person ought to be glibly comfortable doing that conversion in their head of course. But how many of this site’s readers aren’t as well learned? I’d imagine quite a few. Moreover, by normalizing the units to the same tridecimal scale, it then becomes transparent to make other equivalences.
35,000,000 kWh × 3.5 miles per kWh → 122,000,000 miles of road range! … or …
35,000,000 kWh ÷ 90 kWh (Model S) → 390,000 Model S batteries … or …
35,000,000 kWh ÷ 50 kWh (Model 3 base) → 700,000 Model 3 batteries. 210 mile range, ea.
Also, once down-converted to kWh, it gives the average person who is more of a home-owner contemplating a big Solar Panel array for their roof AND a “power-wall” from Tesla … an idea of just how much capacity the expanded gigafactory line would be adding.
Just saying,
[b]Goat[/b]Guy