Tesla Gigafactory

[DJ Frustration]

Blog post on Tesla Motors website now up:

Gigafactory | Blog | Tesla Motors

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From Tesla Blog.

As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible. In cooperation with strategic battery manufacturing partners, we’re planning to build a large scale factory that will allow us to achieve economies of scale and minimize costs through innovative manufacturing, reduction of logistics waste, optimization of co-located processes and reduced overhead.

The Gigafactory is designed to reduce cell costs much faster than the status quo and, by 2020, produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent. Here are some details about what the Gigafactory will look like.

Learn more about the Tesla Gigafactory

 

[Dutchie]

Also, Tesla wants to finance factory with convertible notes

Tesla to offer $1.6 billion in convertible notes

 

[heosat]

The factory is forecast to cost $4-5 billion (as per the PDF) with Tesla putting in $2 billion. I wonder who the remaining partner(s) are? Apple?

 

[Johan]

Panasonic is a given. LG chem?

 

[jdevo2004]

I dont understand, the 2020 Gigafactory cell output is 35GWh, while the 2020 pack output is 50GWh. Anyone able to fill me in here?


6500 employees! I wonder if that is for construction or for production.

 

[Johan]

I dont understand, the 2020 Gigafactory cell output is 35GWh, while the 2020 pack output is 50GWh. Anyone able to fill me in here?


6500 employees! I wonder if that is for construction or for production.

Recycling.

 

[Johan]

Very cool that they are going to do it all in house, starting with raw materials and making the anode, cathode, separator, casing and electrolyte themselves instead of having suppliers for that.

They only need to buy raw materials on the open market. They'll probably be the world's largest Lithium buyer, for example, which will get them great prices. (I know Li makes up only a fraction of the cells, but still). Same goes for all the other raw materials. Talk about vertical integration.

It's from the Tesla Fremont factory playbook. There they have 28% gross margin on a complex product like the Model S. Cells and packs are less complex. Think of what they could achieve here!

(When they "sell to themselves" for Tesla cars the "margin" would be how much cheaper Tesla Motors could buy cells/packs from the GF as compared to from an outside supplier, which in turn would affect margin on the finalized car substantially)

 

[Rarity]

What a breathtakingly enormous facility. At 10 million square feet, it would be over twice the floor space of the Boeing Everett plant.

jdevo2004: Looks like they would ship cells from other factories to be assembled into packs at the gigafactory.

 

[airj1012]

I dont understand, the 2020 Gigafactory cell output is 35GWh, while the 2020 pack output is 50GWh. Anyone able to fill me in here?


6500 employees! I wonder if that is for construction or for production.

I was confused by the same thing. Hopefully they talk through all this information tomorrow.

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The factory is forecast to cost $4-5 billion (as per the PDF) with Tesla putting in $2 billion. I wonder who the remaining partner(s) are? Apple?

No Apple! It will either be Samsung since they are supplying some batteries now, Solar City for the solar panels that they plan on leveraging or another utility company (I remember one referencing how they're going to have to shift their business model going forward but I can't remember the name at the moment).

 

[DriverOne]

Could it be 35GWh of cells going towards other uses (sell to other battery customers e.g. other EV manufacturers, phone builders, etc), plus the 50GWh for Tesla use?

 

[stoebs]

Could it be 35GWh of cells going towards other uses (sell to other battery customers e.g. other EV manufacturers, phone builders, etc), plus the 50GWh for Tesla use?

Well that's an interesting interpretation. I like it!

 

[ecarfan]

Could it be 35GWh of cells going towards other uses (sell to other battery customers e.g. other EV manufacturers, phone builders, etc), plus the 50GWh for Tesla use?

I think it will go into storage batteries for commercial and residential PV systems. Huge potential market.

 

[jdevo2004]

News sources are saying that the 50GWh of battery packs is from the 35GWh of batteries produced at the facility and 15KWh of batteries being imported to the facility from around the world to go into the packs. Looks like Panasonic and Samsung will not lose their contracts and all packs will be assembled at the new plant.

 

[dsm363]

What a breathtakingly enormous facility. At 10 million square feet, it would be over twice the floor space of the Boeing Everett factory.

Wow. The Boeing factory is huge so the Gigafactory would be a site to see.

 

[daveruns]

I think it will go into storage batteries for commercial and residential PV systems. Huge potential market.

If you assume the 500K cars are split 50/50 between 60kw and 85kw cars, you need 36GWh of batteries. (3 billion batteries? 8.2 million per day assuming 365 days of operation)

One thing that you can never say about Elon is that he thinks small.....

 

[jerry33]

Wow. The Boeing factory is huge so the Gigafactory would be a site to see.

They'll need a Hyperloop for travel between the various sections.

 

[Aphysician]

There is a duplicate thread for Gigafactory. Requesting mods to merge.

Official Tesla Gigafactory Discussion Thread

 

[bolosky]

Seems to me that the interesting ratio is that of cars to produced pack capacity. If they do 50 GWh/year of packs and 500,000 cars/year, that comes out to an average of 100KWh/car. Not sure how that breaks down between Model S/X and the mass market car, but it sure sounds to me like they're going to have some very large battery capacity cars in a few years.

Look at the math this way: if the Model E has a 50 KWh battery, and their production breaks down as 400K Model E, 50K Model S and 50K Model X, then the E's consume 50 KWh/car * 400,000 cars = 20 GWh of packs. That means that the average X/S must use 30 GWh/100,000 cars = 300 KWh/car. If the pack mass is the same as the current 85 KWh battery, that's about 850 miles of range. Personally, I think that seems ridiculous, so either they expect the mix to be more heavily weighted toward Model S/X than I assumed, or (more likely) they're going to put big batteries in the Model E.

If the Model E has 85KWh batteries on average, then that's 34 GWh for the E, leaving 16 for S/X for an average of 160 KWh average S/X and about a 500 mile range.

No matter how you slice it, if the 500K car and 50 GWh numbers are right (and all the packs go into Tesla cars), then they're going to be selling some loooog range cars.

 

[slipdrive]

Anyone have a rough breakdown of materials and/or cost inputs to the manufacture of Li-ion cells. And is it thought they will likely be Li-NiCoAlO4 design ?

 

[palmer_md]

Wow, with all these threads on the gigafactory, it looks like it might need its own forum section. It's getting hard to keep up.