Why Apple could win big with Tesla’s massive new battery ‘Gigafactory’

12 years ago

“The first Tesla I ever saw was stripped down to the chassis, a bare-metal incarnation of the company’s flagship electric Roadster on display at an event in Silicon Valley. Without the need for an internal combustion engine, the two-seater’s petite frame was dominated by a huge battery. My first thought: ‘This looks like a giant cell phone on wheels,'” Marcus Wohlsen reports for Wired. “As it turns out, I was more right than I realized.”

“This week, years after that first sighting, Tesla announced plans for what it calls the ‘Gigafactory,’ a 10-million-square-foot plant for making car batteries,” Wohlsen reports. “The company hopes that the sheer scale of the operation, combined with the inventiveness of its engineers, will bring battery prices down far enough to finally bring its electric cars into the mainstream.”

“But it’s not just the prospect of a gasoline-free future that has sparked such excitement about the Gigafactory. The same basic lithium-ion tech that fuels Tesla’s cars also runs most of today’s other mobile gadgets, large and small,” Wohlsen reports. “Earlier this month, as rumors swirled that Apple might want to buy Tesla, San Francisco Chronicle reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had indeed met with the iPhone maker. Musk later confirmed that Tesla and Apple had talked, but he wouldn’t say what about. Now that Tesla has announced the Gigafactory, Gartner auto industry analyst Thilo Koslowski thinks it would make more sense for Tesla to talk with Apple about something other than an acquisition. ‘Depending on the capacity of the factory and who the other investors will be, Tesla could start selling its batteries for other products besides cars,’ Koslowski tells WIRED. ‘This could actually mean Tesla might build batteries for Apple.'”

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