On Saturday, YouTuber and drone connoisseur Duncan Sinfield posted a video that shows the Tesla Gigafactory in all its current splendor. The Gigafactory, when complete (at the end of 2018), will have the largest footprint of any building on Earth. True to the electric vehicle company’s form, though, the Gigafactory’s carbon footprint will remain negligible.
Sinfield is known for his Apple Campus 2 drone videos, but he’s run into some competition: Another YouTuber stole his idea, and now the nemeses compete for views. So he traveled east, to Storey County, Nevada: The site of Elon Musk’s grand machine — the machine that builds the machine, equivalent in scale to about 50 billion hamsters.
Musk decided to build the Gigafactory so that Tesla could manufacture enough autonomous, electric vehicles to save the planet. At the end of July this year, Musk and Tesla hosted the Gigafactory’s grand opening, even though it was just 14 percent complete. (It’s a five-billion-dollar project, so it makes sense that Tesla is looking for new sources of income.)
Now, as the 4K video shows, it’s expanding even more, branching out beyond its humble, rectangular beginnings. Soon enough, its batteries and internal components will find their way inside Model 3s — perhaps like the murdered-out version we saw earlier in April, and undoubtedly equipped with Tesla’s own special glass. Unless, that is, Musk succeeds in “anti-selling” that car.
Here’s what it will look like when complete:
A rendering of the finished Gigafactory: Mind-bogglingly immense, and adorned with solar panels.
If you want a look inside the Gigafactory, look to Leonardo DiCaprio’s recently released climate change documentary, Before the Flood, which also features an interview with Musk from the factory floor.
