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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

The map of the intended extent of the factory is interesting. It's not even halfway completed yet. When people say that this is the largest factory in the world, do they mean that it is currently the largest, or that it will be the largest when fully completed (presumably by 2020)?

And even if Tesla does end up going kaput, the factory shell may very well be a mecca for urban explorers. :)

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It will be the largest by sqft when completed. Boeing has a factory that will still be largest by volume.

If you are ever in the Seattle area, I highly recommend the Boeing factory tour. It's sort of like visiting the Grand Canyon - the scale of the structure is so massive that it's a bit hard for the brain to process what it sees.

That's really interesting to hear and makes me want to visit, because that was my reaction when seeing the Grand Canyon the first time. My brain took a little bit to accept what it was seeing.

When I saw their buildings I literally thought "I didn't know doors could be this big".

I have done that tour and one of my favorite parts was the view from the balcony of a three story office building inside.

Yes, the inside views were what captivated me as well. From the outside, I didn't think the buildings looked as massive as the claims I'd read. But as soon as I was inside, I realized that my mind just wasn't equipped to judge the size of the building from the outside.

I'm the wrong side of the ocean to pop in, but now I'm picturing it as Magrathea from hitchhikers.

... where you have this hugh lift running you through the planet building hall. Had immediately the same idea.

My best bit of the tour was the explanation that if the climate control system ever goes down, the building's large enough to develop its own weather systems, including potentially clouds and rain.

Hmm, I recall the tour differently - they said the building has no hvac, instead they just open/close the doors.

It's been decades, so I'm probably remembering it wrong.

Point is: building's big.

You may be stretching the definition of sort of. The Boeing factory, while indeed large at 13.38 million cubic meters, is sort of smaller than the Grand Canyon at 4.98 trillion cubic meters. This is like saying that the number 1 is sort of close to the number 372,457 (number of Boeing factories that fit in the Grand Canyon). Tongue-firmly-in-cheek I'm definitely going to go check out the Boeing tour now.

If most of the numbers you encounter yer day-to-day are on the order of 0.00005 (the relative volume of my house), then perhaps 1 would seem as unrealistically massive as 372,457!

With all due respect, I think you have sort of overinterpreted the point he was trying to make.

You are of course right, the Grand Canyon is vastly larger. The effect on my brain was still the same. I think maybe what happens is that some object break our ability to relate a thing back to human dimensions.

I don't get the same effect when looking at a skyscraper; maybe that's because each floor is usually visibly marked, so it can be related back to the self.

The article reads:

> a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions

I'm not seeing a diamond shape anywhere. It's all very rectangular to me.

The eventual layout looks like an emerald-cut diamond to me.

I wondered the same thing. There's a Wikipedia page about it that is less fluffy, but it still isn't clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1

"Tesla had said that the factory will be up to 10 million square feet [1 million square meters] in one or two stories"

And to be a nitpicker - calling it a gigafactory is kind of an insult to SI prefixes. Gigafactory implies 10^9 factories... So if 1 Testla gigafactory is 10^7 sq. ft, that means to Tesla, a typical factory is 0.01 sq. ft (1.44 sq. inches)? Hmmmmm... gotta love marketing.

Megaman is also not a million men.

> Giga is derived from the greek word meaning "giant"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-

Yea, Mini or Micro USB, Mini and Micro sim cards. If I buy a Megapack in the Supermarket I don't expect a literal Megapack either.

They are just cool words :)

I had always thought that giga was primarily a reference to the annual capacity of batteries it was producing, not its size. i.e. `Its projected capacity for 2018 is 50 GWh/yr of battery packs` per the wikipedia page you linked. Perhaps there is a bit of wordplay though in its size also being gigantic.

i think op knows.

Based on my quantity of down votes, I don't think many people got it. That will teach me to joke about Tesla on HN! Or maybe it just wasn't funny.

Tongue-in-cheek writing is really hard to distinguish in plaintext when you play it so straight. And especially when you transitioned into it so abruptly from a legitimate, honest answer.

If your comment had contained only the facetious part more people might have picked up on it. But probably not even then since humor is often downvoted on HN so people don't expect it like they do on other sites.

It was funny but yeah I didn't think you were joking when I first read it. Unfortunate that you played it so straight :p.

There really are people who would get legitimately annoyed that Tesla is abusing the "giga" prefix when they're not actually building a billion factories. Hard to tell when it's one of those or when it's actually a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

https://electrek.co/2016/09/25/tesla-gigafactory-aerial-shot...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings#Larg...

it will be the largest when completed. it's a long way from a 530m^2 footprint right now.

The gigafactory is in Nevada, that wiki link shows Fremont, CA, which is its vehicle assembly plant.

Picture in the first link is correct.

The wiki link does talk about Fremont, which is kinda relevant to the discussion, being the current footprint champ.

It's amazing that all that factory space is for producing these little guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Factory#Battery_pack_con...

10 million square foot laser tag game.

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