Panasonic, Tesla agree to partnership for US car battery plant- Nikkei Asian Review Panasonic likely will invest 20 billion to 30 billion yen ($194-291 million) initially, taking responsibility for equipping the factory with the machinery to make the battery cells. An official announcement on the partnership will come by the end of this month.
Yes, I was surprised to see this on Facebook before TMC. Here's the BI version: Nikkei: Tesla Signs Gigafactory Deal With Panasonic - Business Insider
2 billion battery cells between 2014-2017. That's enough for about 285714 model s battery packs right?
On InsideEVs 19 hours ago (which was written based on Nikkei I now see). Tesla And Panasonic Get Deal Done On Upcoming Battery Gigafactory
Tesla And Panasonic Reach Agreement On Gigafactory Project: Report Tesla And Panasonic Reach Agreement On Gigafactory Project: Report
It's official now: Panasonic and Tesla Sign Agreement for the Gigafactory | Press Releases | Tesla Motors
An important aspect of all of this is that Tesla seems to have convinced Panasonic that demand is indeed going through a step-change. An earlier quote from Panasonic's management cast doubt on this. Finally Panasonic seems to be accepting that they have lucked into a tiger-by-the-tail scenario with Tesla. Tesla would not have predicted a 2000 cars/week production rate for EOY 2015 unless they were sure Panasonic was coming through with their own massive increase in production, even prior to the gigafactory coming online. Speaking of 2000 cars/week, it occurred to me that, by then, Tesla will be producing in a single week as many cars as they took the first six months of production to produce! Our car is #2001, and delivered Dec. 20, 2012.
Unfortunately the exact number of deliveries in the first six months can't be figured out from our VIN numbers. The Canadian Signature VINs were started at 2000, so I think there may be something of a gap between the US Sig VINs and the Canadian Sig VINs. That said, many US production cars were delivered before the Candian Sigs were shipped. So your overall point is probably correct, or close to it anyway. Quite an acceleration in the delivery rate!
Marketplace (the American Public Media radio show) had a segment on Tesla and the gigafactory today. Nothing particularly new, but always nice to hear a segment on Tesla on mainstream media. The article makes clear that Tesla is expecting the host state to carry 10% of the investment cost through various incentives, etc.
Isn't 10% too much for the number of jobs it creates? I don't know the usual numbers but for 6k jobs(around 4k local jobs with avg salary at 100k again another guess), 500m incentives seems high to me!!