Tesla Holding “Investor Event” At Gigafactory On January 4, Ahead Of CES 2017

Tesla will be hosting an invitation-only “investor event” at its Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, on January 4, according to recent reports. The idea is seemingly that, rather than taking part in CES 2017 in Las Vegas, the company will just host its own event a bit earlier — at its own very impressive battery manufacturing facility a bit to the northwest.

Not a bad idea, I’d say. What seems more effective:

1. Share an event with every other company out there in a very crowded location? … or …
2. Bring people to your own enormous, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and monopolize all coverage and attention?

Bloomberg provides more: “While visitors have to pay their own air fare and hotel costs, they’ll get some time with CEO Elon Musk and Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, according to guests who have received invitations. Tesla may need the good graces of Wall Street and investors this year as it spends heavily to expand production to 500,000 vehicles annually by 2018, some 10 times the number of vehicles delivered in 2015.”

Bloomberg got a quote on the matter from someone attending the event, Joe Dennison, an associate portfolio manager of Zevenbergen Capital Investments in Seattle: “We are excited to see the scope and scale, not just of the facility itself, but in the levels of automation and potential advancements in manufacturing.”

The associate portfolio manager also noted that he was hoping to find out new information regarding battery production costs and release timing for the Model 3.

As an interesting side note here, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will actually be giving an opening keynote speech at CES 2017. Nvidia is, of course, a key supplier for Tesla, particularly with regard to self-driving sensor data processing hardware. So, in a sense, there will be partial Tesla presence at CES.

Those interested in taking a look at the state of progress on the Gigafactory “themselves” can do so generically (from a bird’s eye view) by watching this recent well-shot drone video of the site.