A driver killed in the May 7 crash of a Tesla vehicle while using Autopilot driving-assist software was speeding, USA highway safety investigators said on Wednesday (NZ time) in a preliminary report that did not state a probable cause. But he recently questioned Tesla’s approach. “There was nothing unexpected from our standpoint”.
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It’s Tesla Motors’ biggest bet yet: A massive, $5 billion factory in the Nevada desert that could almost double the world’s production of lithium-ion batteries.
Meeting consumer demand would require that Tesla also rapidly produce lithium-ion battery cells, which it now buys from Panasonic in Japan. That vehicle is due to launch later this year, almost a year ahead of Tesla’s similarly priced Model 3. The company has 373,000 pre-orders for the $35,000 electric vehicle.
Under the agreement, Panasonic and Tesla employees will work side-by-side at the Gigafactory, with Panasonic using its own equipment to produce and essentially sell the battery packs to Tesla, in-house.
Out in the desert, just off Electric Avenue east of Sparks, Nevada, over 1,000 workers are building what will be the largest building in the world in terms of its footprint over the ground. Chinese automaker BYD Co., which is backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corp., also makes batteries and energy storage systems and is already building battery-powered buses in the U.S. The company hopes to bring low-priced electric cars to the U.S.in a few years. This could help pay for the new Tesla master plan, which incorporates solar-plus-storage for all households, auto sharing and electric trucks among other proposals.
Tesla believes that the adoption of electric vehicles has been hampered by the high cost of lithium batteries, so it plans to use this factory to drastically boost production.
Getting the facility up and running will also be integral to the success of the latest production vehicle, the Model 3, which debuted to much fanfare earlier this year and led to a crush of pre-sales orders, which some analysts doubt the company will be able to fill. Galves went on to say that future generation EyeQ chips would process and act upon lateral movement data.
“I think it’s quite romantic, actually”, he said.
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When completed, the factory is projected to employ more than 6,000 workers and Musk said as many as 10,000.
