A View Inside Tesla’s Gigafactory [VIDEO]

We have heard a lot about Tesla’s Gigafactory outside of Reno, Nevada, but we haven’t really gotten a glimpse inside yet. That changed with the National Geographics Channel and their series Super Factories. Tesla let a camera team into the factory and we get a first glimpse.

Here are some of the key findings:

• 492,000 square meters (5.3 million square feet) of operating space
• 1/3 of the area completed
• after completion, the entire factory is to be powered 100% by renewable energy
• 114 megawatts per month of energy are saved by the LED lights
• the waste heat of the machines and robots is also used
• the factory is aligned exactly north-south so that solar energy can be fully exploited
• 200,000 solar panels are to be installed on the roof in the final stage
• the huge tank with 36 million liters (10 million gallons) of water next to the factory in the Nevada desert heats up during the day and cools down at night and provides the factory with air conditioning in a natural way
• 13 million lithium ion battery cells are produced per day
• about 4,000 battery cells are needed per Model 3
• this produces 9,028 pieces per minute, which is a higher rate per minute than a machine gun (1,500 cartridges per minute) can fire (Elon Musk made this comparison)
• 7,000 employees are working there
• more than 700 robots are in use in the factory
• the north-south alignment also makes the movement of the autonomous robots easier, because the GPS satellites align themselves with it.

The article itself has some fuzziness, for example when the background voice speaks of Model 3, but all the time a Model S and X are shown. Enough talking, here is the video:

This article was also published in German.