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Tesla and Panasonic Have Reached an Agreement On the Gigafactory
cartechboy writes: Tesla's been pretty quiet regarding its upcoming gigafactory lately, but that's about to change. It seems the Silicon Valley startup has reached an agreement with Panasonic in regards to the gigafactory, and Panasonic's going to end up having skin in the game. While the electronics giant was originally skeptical of Tesla's battery factory, it now isn't just on board, it's actually going to participate in the construction of this new facility. It's reported that Panasonic will invest 20 billion to 30 billion yen (194 million to $291 million at current exchange rates), and supply fabrication machinery necessary for cell production. That means Pansonic could end up footing the bill for $1 billion of the total $5 billion anticipated investment required for the gigafactory to get off the ground. If things continue to move forward, the Gigafactory should be online by the end of 2017.
The point, at least according to Musk, is that no one was actually competeting on economies of scale with respect to batteries. His allegation is that his cars need it, and everyone else dependent on rechargables can benefit too.
As to the truth of the matter, the number of people both qualified to understand the question properly(industrial engineers with expertise in battery manufacture) and the time to investigate the situation, probably already work for one of the companies.
None are journalists. So we get to eat our press releases and like it.
Its much bigger than a megafactory, that's all I can tell you.
Its much bigger than a megafactory, that's all I can tell you.
Yes, but is it 1000 times bigger or 1024 times bigger? That's the important part!
Which part do you find suspect? Tesla wants to make a major launch of a $35K all-electric car, which will require a huge number of batteries, above and beyond the current supply. The word "allegation" sounds as if you think the new Telsa model won't use batteries? Or that there's already enough production to support the new Tesla model, presumably going straight into a huge hole in the ground? Or what?
1000. 1024 would be a Gibifactory.
cos the factory makes cars that run on 1.21 gigawatts at 80mph.
Actually, a gibifactory would be ~1073.74 megafactories; you are mixing scales :) </pendantry>
According to Tesla, it will have as much production capacity as all current li-ion battery factories combined.
The giga does have some meaning, as the factory has a planned production of 35 gigawatt-hours of batteries per year.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I'm amused at the mental image of something being destroyed by a "drone stroke".
The Tesla/Panasonic plan gets cell and battery production back into the same plant. The battery industry has, for a while, had a model where cells were made in one country (usually Japan, Taiwan or S. Korea, or at least with machinery from there) and assembled into device-specific battery packs near where the end device was produced (usually China or the US.) For the Chevy Volt, the cells come frm LG Chem in Korea, and the battery packs are assembled at the Brownstown, MI Battery Assembly plant.
There's no good reason to do it that way now that the era of cheap labor in China is over. As a rule of thumb, labor has to be 4x cheaper to justify offshoring. The coastal provinces in China have reached that level with respect to US/Japan wages.
Done right, this isn't labor-intensive. Brownstown has only 100 workers in a 400,000 square foot plant, and they're doing battery assembly, which is the more labor-intensive part of the operation. Tesla claims to need 6,500 employees for their 10 million square foot plant, but they're probably counting construction-phase employees.
And even more confusion for folks from Boston. They would wonder why they would make a Terrahfactory... it's not even close to Halloween yet!
I believe you are on the wrong site, then
So? They weren't SI units, but they used SI prefixes (wrongly.) Now the SI has made SI units based on the old ones that do conform. They even threw in some binary units for the times that they are actually useful. You're just pissed because it turns out people respect the SI more they do grumpy old computer geeks.