Tesla's Gigafactory [LIVE]

I will be LIVE streaming as much of the Gigafactory event as possible!

I never understood why Tesla insisted on calling its new battery factory a “Gigafactory.” It’s just a factory, after all, and we already have a word in English for that—“factory.” But then I saw it up close, and the enormity of it all is mind-boggling. When finished, it will be the largest factory in the entire world and the the biggest building in the world by footprint. Here’s why Tesla needs it.

(Full Disclosure: Tesla wanted us to see the Gigafactory so badly that they invited us and a whole bunch of other outlets, and that was it. We paid our own way. Mostly. Flights from New York to Reno are a pain, so we flew to San Francisco, picked up a Tesla Model X at Tesla’s Fremont factory, and then went on a road trip to the Gigafactory outside Reno. It is not a short drive.)

Tesla is betting its entire future, in large part, on Gigafactory 1. It will churn out the batteries necessary for the Tesla Model 3, which is the car that’s supposed to make or break the company, and for which Tesla already has hundreds of thousands of orders despite first deliveries still being more than a year away.