With more than 400,000 Tesla Model 3 reservations already on the books, it’s no secret that Tesla will have to kick things into high gear to ensure that reservation holders won’t need to wait until 2020 to receive their car.
To address such concerns, Tesla during its earnings conference call this past Wednesday announced a more aggressive production timeline that will see the company aim to manufacture 500,000 vehicles in 2018, two years ahead of its initial 2020 projection. In fact, Tesla CEO Elon Musk went so far as to boldly predict that Tesla by 2017 will see Model 3 production fall in the 100,000 to 200,000 range.
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Of course, Tesla’s Gigafactory lies at the core of the company’s mass production plans. Still under construction, the Gigafactory is poised to be the world’s largest building in terms of square footage — 5.8 million square feet to be exact — and will primarily focus on churning out boatloads of battery packs for use across Tesla’s fleet of vehicles.
As it stands today, Tesla is hoping that its gargantuan Gigafactory will begin producing its first battery cells by the end of 2016, presumably giving it enough time to ramp up production ahead of the planned late-2017 launch of the Model 3.
Recently, Bloomberg took a trip to the Gigafactory — located outside of Reno, Nevada — whereupon they posted a number of new photos highlighting the construction progress on the factory.
In the photo below, we see that Tesla has made quite a bit of headway, but that more work remains.
And speaking to the size of the building, the structure’s roof is so massive that it doesn’t even look like a roof when photographed, as you can tell from the shot below.
If you’re curious to see more of what Bloomberg captured, make sure to hit the source link for even more photos of the Gigafactory.
