Tesla isn’t fooling around about getting its Gigafactory up and running quickly. It plans to select sites in more than one state, and move forward with the building process at both simultaneously, just to be double sure that one is ready to supply battery packs in time to bring the mass-market Tesla into production without delay.

“What we’re going to do is move forward with more than one state, at least two, all the way to breaking ground, just in case there’s last-minute issues. The No. 1 thing is we want to minimize the risk timing for the Gigafactory to get up and running. We will end up spending more money to minimize the timing risk,” said the Iron Man in an interview with Bloomberg, adding that someday Tesla may need more than a single Gigafactory.

Musk is well aware that timing will be critical – development of the third-generation EV will need to closely parallel construction of the Gigafactory. “There are a lot of moving parts, a crazy amount of moving parts. If there’s a laggard there, we’ll have this massive facility and a ton of people trained and no ability to recoup revenue. It will be quite a bad situation.”

Elon also shed a little light on why California didn’t make the short list of Gigafactory sites – too much green tape. “California has a lot of regulatory agencies, and although this will be a very green factory, we can’t have a situation where an enormous amount of data has to be processed by a regulatory agency to find no significant impact and then give us approval to proceed,” he said.

Source: Bloomberg
Image: Arnold de Leon/Flickr