Tesla battery production

Tesla's gigafactory has begun production of its first battery cells which will power future Tesla vehicles. More than 2,900 people are already working at the 4.9 million-square-foot facility - with over 4,000 extra jobs added this year thanks to the partnership between Tesla and Japan's Panasonic Corp. The gigafactory, which cost five billion dollars to build, will assist Tesla with its goals of selling 500,000 Model 3 cars by 2018. Approximately 95 percent of Tesla’s components are made in the U.S. and 25,000 of the company's 30,000 employees are based there. According to the Tesla website, the Gigafactory began construction in June 2015, outside Sparks, Nevada and the company plans to reach full production capacity by 2018. "The name Gigafactory comes from the factory’s planned annual battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). “Giga” is a unit of measurement that represents “billions”. One GWh is the equivalent of generating (or consuming) one billion watts for one hour—one million times that of one kWh".