Like any good Elon Musk project, there's a hint of magic to Tesla's planned "gigafactory" — it is secretive, ambitious and definitely larger than life.
Hidden away in the Nevada desert, construction of the gigafactory has been underway since last July. A February satellite image provided to Mashable by CartoDB shows how far the electric car manufacturer has come since then.
Tesla's lithium-ion battery factory aims to harness enough renewable energy — from a variety of sources, like solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric plants — to power 500,000 electric cars by 2020. When finished, the $5 billion factory will span somewhere north of 5 million square feet.
“This will be a giant facility," Musk told Forbes in 2013. "We are talking about something that is comparable to all of the lithium-ion battery production in the world — in one factory.”
While Musk has hinted about developments during the construction of the gigafactory, the site itself is blocked off by a security gate, and Tesla has not released any photos of the construction site.
This visualization provided to Mashable by CartoDB however, gives us an exciting new look at the factory.
If you compare the image to Tesla's preliminary mockups, you can see the outline of the factory even where construction has yet to begin. The roof appears to be covered in solar panels, consistent with Tesla's plans.
The visualization also notes the magnitude of the factory by comparing its size to a football field and Boeing 747. But really — just check out how tiny all those cars (perhaps Teslas?) look in comparison.
The satellite visualization was developed in a partnership between map-editing software CartoDB and satellite imager DigitalGlobe. The partnership will give journalists and analysts the ability to edit and visualize hard-to-find satellite imagery — secretive industrial projects included.
The gigafactory won't be completed until 2020. By then, Tesla may be using its stockpile of lithium-ion batteries to power their driverless cars.
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