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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The amount of publicity associated with this battery pack plant is a bit much. Tesla's battery factory is about the same size as LG's battery factory in Michigan.[1] That's the source of the Chevy Volt battery packs. (LG is adding a fourth production line for an undisclosed customer.) That's just one of LG's plants. They make the batteries for the Chevy Bolt in South Korea.

There are large EV battery plants in operation or under construction all over the place. US, UK, Germany, Korea, China... VW is planning a plant bigger than Tesla's full sized expansion.

Nissan has the largest lithium-ion battery plant in North America right now.[2] They're building a bigger one in the UK.

[1] http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101606_ford-wants-to-de...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBboW2Sw3Co

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I found some actual numbers for the LG Chem plant. They currently produce 650MWH worth of battery cells per year, and they expect to expand that to 3GWH within a couple of years.

This is definitely smaller than what is planned for Gigafactory.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20151214/OEM06/312149992/lg-...

Thanks. If that number is right, their top number is less than 1/5th of the originally planned Gigafactory top number.

Keyword: planned

The difference is Tesla owns the factory and therefore there isn't a profit layer being skimmed off. That could be passed off, or even just a portion, to the end consumer who buys Tesla products; this has similar characteristics as to why Elon wants Tesla to buy SolarCity.

Actually, Panasonic makes the cells and owns that part of the factory. Tesla just puts them in a box. A fancy box with a titanium bottom, yes, but a box.

There's more to the battery system than cells in a box. The battery system needs to charge quickly without catching on fire, and after an accident that damages cells, needs to minimize the size of a fire.

I imagine that's a bridge for now. Once Tesla starts pumping out 500k vehicles per year they should be able to leverage that for large future expenditures.

Considering Panasonic is funding quite a bit of the factory that would be an unexpected a turn of events. I'm sure it's contracted for the foreseeable future.

Also considering that the manufacturing of these cells is a highly complex and closely guarded proprietary process, which Tesla knows next to nothing about, it's highly unlikely Tesla will ever be making cells.

Think of laptops: Tesla is like Lenovo; they buy CPUs from Intel, RAM from Corsair, SSDs from Samsung etc. Then they put all the parts in a box. Sure, it's a complex and nice looking box made from aluminium or carbon fiber, with quite a bit of custom electronics in it, but it's still a box. Nobody in their right mind thinks Lenovo is going to start manufacturing CPUs any time soon (or ever).

Elon seems to understands economies of scale and the value of owning or controlling a larger percentage of an ecosystem. It could certainly be in their timeline to become experts in batteries, or it is possible the costs by partnering with a third-party is better - at least for a time.

Are we sure Tesla has no hand in the manufacture or know-how of building the actual cells? If that is true, why would they be contracting Jeff Dahn to do battery research for them? It is my understanding that the types of partnerships between companies like the Gigafactory are usually designed to allow both companies to learn from the other as part of the process.

Of course we can't know without seeing the agreement between Panasonic and Tesla but it seems a little misguided to suggest Tesla has no hand in the design of the cells.

Why would Panasonic share their industrial secrets with Tesla? They have nothing to gain and plenty to lose from doing so. There are plenty of other EV manifacturers with equally large (or larger) need for cells, like VW, Nissan, Mitsubishi etc.

I won't speculate as to their motives, just the evidence I see that Tesla is deploying their own battery know-how to the project, so some sharing of some sort must be going on.

Edit: Found some info straight from the source[1].

Panasonic executive vice president Yoshihiko Yamada thought Elon and Co. were crazy initially when they proposed this idea. Eventually he saw the light and now the companies are closer than ever. Here’s how he put it: “Three years ago I thought this gigantic Gigafactory idea was crazy. Because then the production of the factory would exceed production of the industry. I thought it was a crazy idea. But I was crazy, and I was wrong after seeing extreme success of the announcement of the Model 3 and the strong demand…I want to explain to you the relationship with Tesla and Panasonic. I used to be in charge of components five or six years ago. At that time our relationship with Tesla was one of supplier and customer. A conventional business relationship.“But since we started discussion on the Gigafactory that’s completely changed. One example, is production capacity is now two or three times more. Why? Because Tesla and manufacturing people worked together. We are discussing these details. This type of relationship is quite new for business. We are not the simple buyer and supplier relationship.” (emphasis mine)

1. http://electrek.co/2016/07/28/tesla-gigafactory-tour-roundup...

Elon seems pretty smart when he is leveraging his position, and he seems to understand what is fair for what his position is. He might be locked in, or maybe for this location only, or only locked in until a point. I can't imagine in any scenario that he would agree to forever.

Well Panasonic literally owns big parts of the factory (and will be the ones making the batteries!). They are going to be partners for a very long time. In my opinion it's actually a lot more likely that Tesla goes bankrupt and it becomes a solely Panasonic factory than it does a solely Tesla factory.

Your first link says nothing about the size of LG Chem's battery factory.

Sorry. Here's a picture.[1]

LG had a problem for a while - more manufacturing capacity than Chevy needed. They shut down the battery plant briefly. But that turned around.

[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2014/09/25/lg-chems-troubled-chevy-v...

That still doesn't lead me to believe that it is a larger battery factory than the Gigafactory, either in square footage(the Gigafactory will be the largest factory in the world when completed, not just battery factory) or in total battery output(the Gigafactory's output is obviously unknown, but there are at least design targets that put it at greater than the entire WORLD's 2014 battery production). It may be larger than the Gigafactory is now(14% complete) or produce more batteries(not very hard, since Gigafactory isn't producing any yet), but those aren't really meaningful comparisons when judging the newsworthiness of the Gigafactory.

If there are actual hard, numbers that put the Gigafactory's to shame out there, please share. As a Tesla investor I want to know :)

"the Gigafactory will be the largest factory in the world when completed"

No way. Not even close. One of the largest single buildings, yes. Largest factory, no. See Ford's River Rouge plant, which once was the largest factory in the world.[1] Today, Foxconn has a whole walled city.[2] (Foxconn makes 40% of the world's consumer electronics. They're getting into auto manufacturing.)

What Tesla has actually built is much smaller. Right now, LG has more battery factory in operation than Tesla does. Looking ahead, VW is talking about building a $15 billion battery factory, bigger than Tesla's.[3] VW can come up with $15 billion.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/EvoyvV2HB3K2 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/LZKdTUpz8ck [3] http://www.techtimes.com/articles/161873/20160530/volkswagen...

Satellite map pictures are not a measure of size. And yes, I misspoke, it will be the largest building in the world by footprint/square footage, not the largest factory.

VW's plant is still in the conceptual stages, but if it ever happens it will indeed be impressive. But none of that makes the Gigafactory less impressive, especially once completed.

Largest factory building, but according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings_in..., not the largest building in footprint. The Aalsmeer flower auction beats it by the relatively tiny margin of 8,000 square meters

By the way, the BBC recently had a documentary about the flower industry that I think is worth watching if you are interested in manufacturing and logistics. For Brits in England, it is on iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07czwfd, but Flora Holland seems to have it available for everyone at https://www.royalfloraholland.com/en/speciale-paginas/search....

In particular the parts about an army of marching lilies (starts about 26:50 in) and the way the auction clocks work (about 34:00 in) may be of interest to those interested in automation and efficiency (it seems they manage to make a sale every 5 seconds or so on one clock, with seven of them in the room)

That's a comparison with the Tesla Fremont factory, where they assemble the actual cars. The Gigafactory in Nevada will be 538,837 square meters(if my math is right, 5.8 million square feet for the Gigafactory is the number I have), handily beating the Aalsmeer flower auction at 518,000 sq meters.

Thanks. I guess I was wrong-footed because of limited knowledge of US geography and because Wikipedia (erroneously, I guess) states the Fremont factory is under construction.

Also, the Fremont factory is actually an old GM-Toyota factory.

Your first link made no mention of factory size, and after someone pointed this out, you've provided a picture of a concept drawing.

This does not inspire confidence in your assertions.

I think your comparisons are misguided because you got the original claim wrong.

The claim is not about "largest factory". It is supposed to be the "Largest footprint of any building in the World" [1]. That is, the square footage of a single building.

Several buildings in the same area (which is usually what we understand by "factory", or maybe more accurately a "plant") is not the comparison you should be looking for if you want to disprove this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings_in_t...

As an aside, I typically associate a single building with the word "factory", and a complex of buildings that work together to manufacture a product a "plant" or "facility". Not sure how common that usage is, or if the distinction really even matters outside these measuring contests.

Now here's something interesting. Here's Tesla's Gigafactory and nearby buildings in Google Earth.[1] There are three buildings about 3000 feet northwest of Tesla's that are about the same size as Tesla's building. There's another big one about 400 feet to the west. What are they? This is an industrial park zoned for Really Big Rectangular Buildings, the Reno-Tahoe Industrial Park.

The building to the west is PetSmart's distribution center. It's almost as big as Tesla's building. Just to the west of it is a WalMart distribution center. That's two buildings, but they add up to about the size of Tesla's.

The identically-sized buildings to the northwest are the Eagle Valley Industrial Center.[2] CBRE seems to be building two rows of 500,000 square foot buildings and leasing them to companies that need distribution centers. They have Amazon, Diapers.com (owned by Amazon), chewey.com (not owned by Amazon), and other tenants in the third building. Markings on the ground indicate that buildings #4 and #5 are coming along soon. The distribution centers aren't built as big single buildings because they need lots of outer wall for loading docks. Zoom in and you can see that semitrailers are docked along most of the east and west exterior walls. That's a distribution center - stuff comes in one side, and goes out the other.

So, while Tesla does have the biggest single building in that industrial park, CBRE has more floor space than they do.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/4rWXYqxa1Eo [2] http://ktrcapital.com/PDF/Brochure/NV%20-%20Eagle%20Valley%2...

They have only built like a tenth of the Gigafactory though.

I think you're either just Tesla's target market or align with it in media consumption. They certainly have a PR division putting in work but without HN practically no Tesla information would hit my eyes.

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