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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 Rich on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:52PM
There must be more to it than quarter-to-quarter numbers business. As others have pointed out, Germany is badly stagnant at the moment, and if Musk was just caring about cost and productivity, he would have gotten a hell of a better deal a hundred km east in Poland. I presume he wants to create some kind of surge to get the German economy back on track to lead with sustainable/renewable development, maybe in general, because it is so close to the capital, or maybe just by setting a benchmark that Daimler/Mercedes and BMW cannot ignore (and VW too, wrt their pace towards electromobility).