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Tesla Is Investing $350 Million In Its Gigafactory, Hiring Hundreds of Workers (cnbc.com)
Just weeks after the massive Gigafactory started producing batteries, Tesla has announced plans to hire more workers and use the facility to make the motor and gearbox for its upcoming Model 3 electric sedan. CNBC reports: Tesla will invest $350 million for the project, and hire an additional 550 people, according to the governor's comments. That will be over and above the company's existing commitment to hiring 6,500 people at the Gigafactory, according to comments made by Steve Hill, the director of the governor's Office of Economic Development, to Nevada newspaper the Nevada Appeal. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made manufacturing efficiency a high priority for the company, but Tesla will require a lot of factory floor to meet its goal of to pumping out 500,000 cars by the end of 2018, and then making one million cars by 2020. Meanwhile, the city of Fremont recently approved Tesla's application for an additional 4.6 million square feet of space there.
Thanks Donald! Great job!
I was curious as to why Tesla needs special gearboxes, but apparently the Model S uses a 9.73:1 single-gear reduction. I guess this lets the engineering team tweak the voltage to torque ratios (as opposed to rewinding the motors and modifying the drive circuitry). https://forums.tesla.com/forum...
Well that's $350 million wasted. I drive 200 miles each way to my ranch each weekend, no way I could do that in an electric vehicle. Electric cars are a fad.
The tech isn't there yet, and it's moving slowly, but it's still moving in the right direction. Give it time and you'll get to your ranch on an all-electric vehicle.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I drive 200 miles each way to my ranch each weekend, no way I could do that in an electric vehicle.
I realize you are trolling, but still want to point out that a Tesla could handle that easily, as long as your ranch has electrical outlets.
I thought it was stranger s/he's making a 400mile road trip across states on an every-week basis. Willfully. Whatever the scenario, it's hardly one I'd inflict on myself.
Using it as a vague yet fact-consistent length of measurement rather than something you're able to pedant.
Using pedant as a verb, DWI.
You were in the running for the Gigafactory but then decided that repaying political favors to your car dealerships was more important and blocked Tesla's ability to sell directly to their customers.
The entry level will have a 200 mile range. I'm sure there will be versions with more than a 200 mile range. As long as there is charging at the ranch it isn't a problem. I drive over 200 miles in my model S without any problems. Also, adding 20-50 miles of range at a supercharger doesn't take very long. When the supercharger kicks in on my model S it charges at over 300 miles/hour and my car is a 1st generation. The current ones charge faster since mine is limited to 90KW (revision A battery pack) and the new ones charge at 135KW and may soon hit 150KW. With my car, if I had to add 20 miles of range and my battery were at 20-40% it would take approximately 4 minutes to add 20 miles of range.
Being smaller and lighter I expect the model 3 will gain range quite a bit faster than the model S, since the same amount of power will provide more range.
On my last trip to Reno I had to stop in Truckee to use the restroom at the nearby grocery store. In the time it took me to use the restroom and buy a couple items I had another 50 miles of range.
I generally find that the speed of charging at a destination isn't all that important as long as I can be fully charged overnight.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
This is what racists actually believe.
We have to get back into the mode where we can make verifiable statements without the other side calling "racist" all the time.
At this point, I think it's a knee-jerk reaction that the left "just always does". Always call "racist"! If it shuts down the conversation, great! If not, you've lost nothing and can try something else.
It's historically clear that local Democratic rule of minority areas has failed. Areas like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Ferguson, Watts, Memphis, Flint, and so on.
Saying this is not being racist.
Detroit, as an example, is well known for graft and corruption. Democratic policies at the national level encouraged manufacturing jobs to leave the area, resulting in massive unemployment and a long drift into squalor.
Saying this is also not being racist.
The situation can realistically be described as an experiment that failed, and perhaps the reverse experiment should be tried: hold local governments responsible for their actions with stiff penalties and jail time, and reversing the national trend to bring back local jobs.
Saying this is also not being racist.
This is what racists actually believe.
Racists actually believe that blacks are inferior to whites.
Actually believing that we have political problems, failed policies with suggested improvements, and pathos for the state of our inner cities, is most definitely not something that racists believe.
Press releases from Tesla are not necessarily news for nerds.
I thought it was stranger s/he's making a 400mile road trip across states on an every-week basis.
400 miles is "just down the road" is Texan mileage units. Anything farther than 400 mile is "just down the road, aways."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
yeah, blame it all on electric vehicles
After all, the electric bullet trains of Japan can only go....1500 miles
Any reason we can't have Charge stations every 50 miles, like we have gas stations?
Only politics, only politics.
" Tesla will require a lot of factory floor to meet its goal of ... making one million cars by 2020. "
Tesla produced about 25,000 vehicles in Q3 2016, so they'll have to increase that by tenfold in 4 years. Not impossible, but sustaining that kind of growth brings all kinds of challenges, and the auto industry seems to be heading into a bit of a slump. And the incoming administration doesn't seem very green-friendly. Unless you mean the color of money.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Eeeehh....I wish I could agree. But I drive a Tesla X with a 90 kWh battery. If I ever get it to drive 200 miles on a "full 250 mile" charge, I'll wet myself with glee.
Last weekend left a Supercharger with 230 miles remaining range, drove 90 miles at 68 mph and reached my destination with 110 miles of range remaining. Thankfully I found a L2 charger to plug into while I visited friends so I could make it the 90 miles back to the Supercharger on the way home.
I wish I could do 200 miles without white knuckles or driving 55 mph with the climate control off.
p.s. I agree the author was probably trolling, and with 100 kWh batteries and larger he totally is a troll, but at 90 kWh and below...sort of right.
I really hope these cells become cheap and available to the general public for puchase in small quantities.
Yep, because everyone's driving habits are the same as yours. That makes it a fad. Love the logic.
Silence is a state of mime.
The weekend ranches my friends in Texas have are just land with animals for investment grazing on them. No buildings much less outlets. Basically a camping trip to monitor and move animals, have vet stop by, etc. But that's far removed from Tesla normal use case...
No, economics. There aren't enough electric cars in the USA to justify that and won't be for a decade. Other countries like China and some European countries could justify that perhaps. If it was profitable here someone would do it.
Certainly there won't be while oil continues to get subsidies to the tune of 40 BILLION per year, not counting the hundreds of billions spent to, as Dick Cheney said in 1999 his open letter to Bill Clinton demanding an attack on Iraq, "secure ...a significant portion of the world's oil"
now, what were you saying about economics?
Let the profiteer pay the costs and electric cars will dominate the road
buddy of mine moved to another city once to get a job. Better job, but not amazing job (he lived in a po-dunk town, no college degree). Took months before he'd saved enough to move the wife/kids up with him. He was commuting 150 miles every weekend (300 total) so 400 isn't a stretch. You'd be amazed what you can do when you have no choice.
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If I ever get it to drive 200 miles on a "full 250 mile" charge, I'll wet myself with glee.
I suspect that you are "doing it wrong". My wife has a Tesla, and had the same problem, but when I drove her car, I got even better mileage than the indicator. So I watched her drive, and then I mansplained what she was doing wrong. Since then she has gotten much better milage.
In an ICE car, the "accelerator" pedal controls the rate of power going to the engine. If you push on it with your foot, the car speeds up. If you take your foot off the pedal, you coast. On a Tesla, the "accelerator" controls the SPEED OF THE CAR. If you lift your foot, the car thinks you want to slow down, and engages the regenerative brakes. This feeds power back into the battery, but only at about 60% efficiency, so 40% of the power is wasted. Try driving with the power graph displayed, and watch how often it turns orange (regeneration engaged). Practice keeping your foot steady to minimize that. It will make a big difference.
trump is just a fad, at most, he'll stay there 8 years. Tesla, on the other end, is here to stay for a bit longer...
you mean, to replace those extra expensive victron energy power pods ?
If I ever get it to drive 200 miles on a "full 250 mile" charge, I'll wet myself with glee.
My neighbour is a Taxi driver for Schipol airport. Their entire fleet is made of Teslas. He gets that mileage twice daily with one stop at the Zuidoost supercharger for a lunchbreak.
You're doing it wrong.
Yeah...nope. But I do appreciate the mansplaining. For the record, my wife (who expends no effort to drive conservatively) gets WAY worse mileage than I do. It's staggering.
But I've tested the heck out of this thing. I have tested this out with and without cruise control. City driving and freeway driving. Long drives and short drives. With and without climate control. I've shut it down to "Sport" and even tested it out locked down in Valet mode. I've drafted, I've coasted, I've driven it like the Prius I used to own. I have compared it to a Model S in which I can effortlessly pull 290 watts/mile and in which I had to actually try hard to break 325 watts/mile.
But nope, my P90D Model X typically struggles under any conditions to be below 425 watts/mile. It's so ridiculous I've even taken the numbers to Tesla Service and seen if they think something is wrong, and their answer is that it's "within normal limits." But even on their best test drive with the car sitting in a warm shop prior to testing and with a previous drive to get the battery packed warmed up, they were only able to get 390 watts/mile with climate control off and Sport mode on. In their words "your lifetime consumption of 410-420 watts/mile seems good". That means 215-220 miles of range at best on a full tank and in practice I find it to typically be worse at normal freeway speeds.
p.s. The power graph is orange when you're burning energy. It's green during regen. Get your colors right before you try and "explain" to someone how an EV works.
On a Tesla, the "accelerator" controls the SPEED OF THE CAR.
Also inaccurate by the way. If you keep your foot on the accelerator at the exact same point and the car moves from a flat to a hill, you will slow down, not maintain speed. Here is Seattle we have a lot practice with the hill thing. You need to press further if you want to maintain speed on the hill.
It's good to see that the problems are being worked on, even to the level where the most miserable arguments (what if i'm driving through the sahara and there are no charging spots) are being invalidated.
The only thing is getting the supercharger network even more densely connected.
Those are all Tesla S cars at Schipol, which get much better mileage. I have driven an S and had no problem getting good mileage. The X is a different car and notably harder to achieve good mileage on. If I can drive an S efficiently without any difficulty but struggle with an X, it seems unlikely I'm "doing it wrong."
How did an article on something as positive as the Gigafactory degenerate into a War of the Trolls?!
Right, sorry missed that. Agree the X has quite underwhelming range.
Would be nice to know that citizens are filling these jobs, especially those looking for work.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"Well that's $350 million wasted. I drive 200 miles each way to my ranch each weekend, no way I could do that in an electric vehicle. Electric cars are a fad." You, sir, have had your head stuck up your butt for more than ten years now if you think that is true... If you weren't such a Luddite determined to badmouth anything that does not run on fossil fuels, you would have noticed that not only have there been powerful, extremely efficient EVs for the last many years capable of making that 200 mile trip, but if you weren't so pig headed you could have been saving some VERY serious cash meantime--- surely you've been spending thousands of dollars a year on gasoline. That money could have been spent more reasonably on a solar roof for the ranch, and a Powerwall to store the electricity at the ranch for when you are there and need to recharge, Not only would you be saving the cost of gasoline and oil changes, but tune-ups and related costs as well. You have the IDEAL situation to be driving electric and not even realizing it. And if you think it does not apply to YOU because you happen to need a pickup truck, you are STILL WRONG on that count--- I have been driving a fully electric Chevy pickup for years now... yes, a rugged, powerful conversion... but Tesla will be selling EV pickups and big rigs soon. You have NO excuse for NOT driving electric, saving lots of cash, and stop making those oil ogres richer than they already are.
I have a problem. End points of my main long journey are about 350 miles apart, I usually fill up on petrol (gas) at half tank so never go more than 200 mile between fill up stops. I would want electric vehicles to have same ability, . i.e . top up to full in say 15 minutes during half way stop. This is the critical factor to occasional long distance use, when normal commutes etc are about 60 miles per day.
I rejected a hybrid because of cost, and until electric-top ups are both cost ( money) and time (short time) they do not have any benefit except in commuter areas, which I appreciate helps urban living and health. It might leads to an urban person have a short distance car and hiring a petrol( gas) cas for weekend or long trips.
Regards Eion MacDonald
Seems hugely counter-intuitive to normal cars. When I take my foot off the accelerator, I want the car to coast.