Inside the Gigafactory, Where Tesla is Building its Future

This is the Gigafactory, for those times when mega

is just not enough.

It's still under construction, but when it's finished

this will be the largest building in the world,

by footprint, at 5.8 million square feet.

That's around 107 football fields.

From the hills surrounding the Gigafactory, you begin

to get a sense of the scale here.

This is only 14% complete, we've got sections A, B and C,

D under construction, and E just an open site right now.

The factory is critical to Tesla's future.

It needs to make batteries cheap enough to realize

Elon Musk's dreams of making affordable electric

cars for us all.

Inside, there are areas where production is already

up and running, taking battery cells made in Tesla's

Fremont factory and assembling them into battery packs.

These assembly lines in section A are going to get

a lot busier.

By 2018, when it's running at full capacity,

the Gigafactory will double the world's lithium ion

battery production from 2013, when the plan for this

megastructure started.

But it is still very much a work in progress, something

that's hard to ignore.

And this is a great example: just steps from the active

factory, there's an active building site.

This is sections D and E that are being built

right behind us here.

Section D is well underway, though.

These are the reinforcing bars going in.

The concrete floor will be poured within days.

The factory's being made as dense as possible,

so there are two or three internal floors where

the height of machinery will allow it.

It's all this car's fault, the hotly anticipated

Tesla Model 3.

Elon Musk thinks he can make 500,000 of these a year

by 2018, and they all need batteries.

Eventually, he says we could see Gigafactories on other

continents, pumping out batteries as fast as

we could use them.

This one in Nevada, according to him, is just the beginning.