Tesla News: Gigafactory Berlin Site Cleared In Preparation For Ground Breaking
Today brings new drone footage of Gigafactory Berlin’s massive construction site. In a couple of recent Youtube uploads, we see what will be Tesla’s fourth Gigafactory, and the main supplier of their cars to Europe.
Currently, it is a massive 300-hectare plot of land, but that is still an impressive leap from the forest it was only a few months ago. As they look closer and closer to breaking ground, we can see gravel, work roads, and even a large tractor on the site, preparing to break ground.
Tesla picked up the land, outside of Berlin’s Freienbrink industrial-park, for €40 million, and ran into some snags over the last year while trying to get the ball rolling on their new factory.
First, they saw environmentalist opposition (ironic) as they moved to tear down a forest which had been planted there. Fortunately, better senses prevailed, as the forest had been planted for timber in the first place, and was going to house another auto-plant years prior. Next, they ran into some soil issues, which set back their ground-breaking from its original expected timeframe of March.
Youtuber, jetfox, uploaded a cinematic tour of the airspace around the site this morning, which is embedded below.
In this new video, you can see a brigade of large equipment preparing to get on with some work.
If you also compare to a video from a couple of days ago, uploaded by Tesla Kid Grünheide, another Youtuber, you can see the rate of change at the site.
While both admittedly show a similar state of the giant field, it really does give a comprehensive look at just how large these factories will get.
Work trailers and massive dump-trucks for scale, can barely even be seen from the sky as the drones gain altitude to show the whole footprint.
Tesla intends to build all parts of their vehicles at GigaBerlin, from batteries and powertrains, to whole vehicles. They plan to start with the Model Y, in July of next year.
That’s right around the corner, and as things heat up, it will be interesting to see if they can come near the pace of construction we saw at the Shanghai factory.
