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Tesla announces its next car factory will be near Berlin
Tesla's next "Gigafactory" will be in the Berlin area, Elon Musk announced at an event in Germany on Tuesday evening. Techcrunch's Kirsten Korosec reports that Musk made the comments during an on-stage conversation with Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess at the Golden Steering Wheel awards show.
The original Gigafactory was Tesla's massive battery factory in Nevada. Musk dubbed it a "Gigafactory" because it was designed to produce batteries with gigawatt-hours of storage capacity. Batteries are made in Nevada and then shipped to Tesla's car factory in Fremont, California, for final assembly.
When Tesla built a car manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China, the company dubbed that "Gigafactory 3." (Tesla's beleaguered solar panel factory in Buffalo, NY, is Gigafactory 2.) Tesla took a more integrated approach in China, building batteries and cars in the same facility.
It's a reasonable guess that Tesla will take the same integrated approach for its Berlin Gigafactory, which will likely be called Gigafactory 4. Musk said Tuesday that the new facility would be "near the new airport," Korosec reports.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:53PM (8 children)
So Musk is betting on the new Berlin airport actually getting finished?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:54PM (2 children)
It’s Germany, they’ll finish it and it’ll be amazing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)
Germany has stagnated under Merkel. While the airport is the fault of Berlin politicians, the whole country is sort of in a torpor.
The airport won't be done soon, won't be amazing, but there's decent road transport available to the rest of Europe.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:50PM
German manufacturing is up. [businessinsider.com]
You must be confusing them with the U.S.: U.S. manufacturing dives to 10-year low as trade tensions weigh [reuters.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:30PM
By the time it will be finished, it will be a spaceport. For FTL flights, no less. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:39PM
Perhaps. Or maybe he considers rail as an alternative.
What this is really about is that he was considering a factory in Britain, but the BREXIT idiocy is going to lead to a lot of paperwork getting parts in and out of Britain, so it was a ridiculous risk. JIT manufacturing means that you need to ship a lot of parts around on short notice, and customs barriers are a big impediment to that.
Of course, Britain may eventually decide to reject BREXIT, but nobody with any sense would invest money betting that way. If they do, perhaps he'll put some parts factories in Britain, but currently he's even shelved his plans for a research center there.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:41PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday November 15 2019, @06:59AM
Managers. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:55PM
He's also petitioning Kraftwerk to have Autobahn edited to include a Tesla