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"For a moment, pretend you&amp;#039;re Elon Musk: mercilessly clever, exorbitantly wealthy, and CEO of Tesla, the world&amp;#039;s most successful electric-car company. But you&amp;#039;ve got big problems on the horizon. Powering those upcoming Model X crossover SUVs and entry-level Model Es will take batteries. Lots of batteries\u2014more than a supplier can produce reliably. What do you do? Spend $2 billion to build the world&amp;#039;s largest battery plant in the southwestern United States (and call it the &amp;#039;Gigafactory&amp;#039; for good measure). READ THIS: Return to Power: the 2013 Tesla Model S  Yes, Tesla has announced it&amp;#039;s moving forward with a comically big lithium-ion battery production station, slated to employ 6500 people (minions?) and span over a 500- to 1000-acre plot. See, each Model S requires several thousand lithium-ion packs to stomp on a BMW M5, and Tesla plans on building some 500,000 cars by 2020. It has agreed to buy 1.8 billion batteries from Panasonic over the next four years, but it&amp;#039;s now more logical for Musk to make his own supply than to depend on a third-party purveyor.  According to Tesla, the Gigafactory should produce 30 gigawatt-hours&amp;#039; worth of batteries annually, which it says is comparable to all the lithium-ion battery production in the world. The facility will cost around $4.5 billion in total investments, but Tesla claims it&amp;#039;ll cut battery-pack price per kWh by over 30 percent by 2017. This, along with assuming a supplier role to other industries (think solar storage), is how the company plans to bring premium electric car prices into middle-class accessibility. The Gigafactory&amp;#039;s location is yet to be announced, but it&amp;#039;ll be strategically located near the main assembly plant in Fremont, California\u2014possibly Texas, Nevada, or Arizona. If Musk has his way, construction will begin this year, and the plant will be ready for production launch by 2017. READ THIS: Tesla expanding Supercharger network nationwide "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a7187/elon-musk-tesla-cost-savings-gigafactory/>