Tesla Gigafactory 1 as the Future of Construction
What is the future of construction, as seen by Elon Musk and Tesla? Should you be worried if you work in construction? Yes!
The construction industry has a dismal reputation. Productivity is low and falling, relative to other industries. New technology is absorbed slowly. Costs are going up instead of down. Projects are routinely delivered over budget and over time. And not just by a little.
It doesn’t have to be like that. Consider Tesla’s Gigafactory 1, also called Giga Nevada.
Gigafactory 1 will have the biggest footprint of a building in the world.
Gigafactory 1 is a $5 billion high-tech lithium-ion-battery factory under construction east of Reno. The goal of the megaproject is to make electric vehicles and home-power systems more affordable by producing batteries at an unprecedented scale. If completed as planned, Gigafactory 1 will have the biggest footprint of a building in the world, at more than half a million square meters, or 107 football fields.
The building is modular by design. At the outset, Tesla defined a minimum viable production facility, or “block,” that could be operational as soon as it was completed…
