Tesla Gigafactory will supply batteries for the $35,000 Model 3. (Credit: Tesla Motors)
Progress on the Gigafactory is reportedly going according to plan, boding well for Tesla’s future mass-market Model 3.
“Certainly by one year from now, that factory will be producing batteries,” Steve Hill, director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, told Nevada lawmakers last week, according a report in the Reno Gazette-Journal.
The fate of Tesla Motors' $35,000 Model 3 — slated for volume production in 2018 — is dependent on the Gigafactory staying on schedule, since the high-volume-production all-electric car will require a large, steady supply of batteries. (See image at bottom.)
Tesla broke ground on the Gigafactory in June 2014 outside Sparks, Nevada, and the company expects “to begin [battery] cell production in 2017. By 2020, the Gigafactory will reach full capacity and produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013,” according to a statement on the Gigafactory page.
The year 2020 may prove to be a watershed moment for Tesla. By that time, Tesla expects to be producing 500,000 vehicles per year, up dramatically from the last few years when annual vehicle production has been a tiny fraction of that. CEO Elon Muskreiterated the 500,000-vehicles-per-year goal at the June 9 shareholder’s meeting, where he said that a “new paint center…is intended to be able to match the production level that includes the Model 3, so we can produce…we can paint all of the cars at basically 500,000 unit per year level with this paint shop.”
And this goal also appears on the Gigafactory page as, more or less, a mission statement. “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transportation. To achieve that goal, we must produce electric vehicles in sufficient volume to force change in the automobile industry. With a planned production rate of 500,000 cars per year in the latter half of this decade.” Hill, in the article, also said that “more than” 740 construction workers have been hired since Tesla started the construction. The total cost of the project — not just the building construction — is $4-$5 billion through 2020, Tesla has stated in the past.
