Elon Musk just confirmed Tesla ‘giga-factory’ world’s largest battery plant to be built in US, announcement next month

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR1HEA_2erc&start=500]

You have to wait almost to the end of this video but Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirms earlier plans to build the world’s largest battery factory in the US  at 8:37 in the video above.

Musk discussed the needs to get to mass market electric vehicles in the November conference call where he stated that they would need to build the biggest battery factory ever built to meet demand.

Certainly people shouldn’t look at the X number of sales over four years and assume that that’s the number of cars that we will make. I think we will make towards the back end of that a lot more cars and so there needs to be other agreements with some combination of Panasonic, maybe with others. Panasonic is also our primary partner, but when it comes to the high volume third-generation vehicle it’s clear that there is going to need to be incremental production capacity created at this existing look today, so we are in the process of figuring that out and there is going to need to be some kind of giga factory built….

Well, like I said, this isn’t the right time to talk in detail about our plans for kind of a giga factory but except to say, obviously, we are acknowledging the fact that one needs to be built and we are looking at a variety of different locations. I don’t think permitting is going to be the driver here. This is going to be a very green factory. There going to be a lot of solar power. It’s going to have essentially zero emissions and there are no toxic elements that are going to come out of this factory and we will build in recycling capability right into the factory. So old packs would come in one side and get reprocessed as new packs. So a way to think of this is like a factory is the machine that works for machine and that itself has a version, just like you have a version of a product. It’s like a version of the factory. So we are trying to figure out what’s the right way to do version one at this giga factory and we want to be thoughtful about it and it is going to be a really giant facility, like say we are doing that something that’s comparable to all lithium-ion production in the world in one factory.

I’d also note that Musk referred to the Gen 3 car as the “Model E” for the first time even though both Tesla and Ford have registered trademarks for it.

Video from CNBC, below