Against the backdrop of the Nevada desert a gigantic factory is taking shape. Look at the artist's impressions of the finished building and you could mistake it for a Martian colony, its ranks of solar panels stark against the reddish dirt. But this is the Gigafactory, a sprawling edifice covering around 600,000 square metres. Here, electric car company Tesla Motors plans to make a single component of its vehicles: the battery. A good rechargeable car battery will set you back around $10,000, for a product that is toxic, degrades substantially after a few years and must be carefully designed to avoid catastrophic overheating. The Gigafactory represents Tesla CEO Elon Musk's drive to make better batteries and so realise his dream of affordable electric cars.
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