Tesla Gigafactory: stunning new 360 image of ‘Gigafactory 1’ shows progress ahead of production ramp up

Tesla’s Gigafactory is about to get busy. Well, it’s already quite busy with construction, but we are now talking about production. Some Tesla energy products have been trickling out of the factory for a year now, but with the new generation (Powerwall 2 and Powerpack 2) – things are about to get serious.

Now we get our latest look at the progress at the plant through a stunning new 360-degree image.

It’s the first update since our last flyover over a month ago.

A friend of the site, Lance Neveu, stopped by the battery factory during his cross-country road trip from Montreal to San Francisco. On Friday, he arrived in Nevada and told Electrek:

“It was raining all day as I crossed Nevada from the east. I didn’t expect to see so much rain in the desert and it seemed pretty sure that the weather wouldn’t break by the time I reached Electric Avenue but, low and behold, the clouds separated for a short while.”

Here’s the stunning 360-degree image he managed to capture during that short period of time:

As you can see, the 4 new sections have progressed nicely over the past month and now the structures are almost complete. The pilot plan section (the one with a solid white roof) is about 1.9 million square feet of operational space.

The 3 new sections at the South end of the factory add up to 2.5 million square feet and the new structure extending at the North end will add an additional 930,000 square feet.

Aside from the new structures, the roads and parking lots around the plant have also progressed nicely over the last month. From the last week of September to the last week of October:

Tesla is already producing the Powerpack 2 at the Gigafactory 1 and the new Powerwall 2 should start coming off the assembly line in the next few weeks for the first deliveries and installations in December-January. Tesla is being more vague about the start of production for the new 2170 cells by Panasonic, but the production is expected to be necessary for any volume delivery of both new generation stationary storage products and therefore, it should also be starting around the same time.

As we recently reported, Tesla is also building new more advanced and automated drive system production lines at the Gigafactory. The automaker is expected to produce both the battery pack and the drive unit of the Model 3 at the plant.

Those battery packs will also be equipped with Tesla’s new 2170 battery cells, but in the meantime, the focus will be for Tesla Energy products, like the new Powerwall 2 and large Powerpack utility projects like Tesla’s recent 80 MWh project with Southern California Edison.