The American company Tesla Motors recently showed off a huge factory that will produce battery packs for its electric cars. The $5 billion factory is close to Reno in the Nevada desert. The facility is currently about 14 percent completed, but its robots are already getting ready to manufacture batteries. When finished, the facility will be one of the largest in the world, covering more than one square kilometer. Tesla officials expect the factory to manufacture tens of thousands of lithium-ion batteries a year. The company is calling the new facility a “Gigafactory.” The term giga is a unit of measurement representing one billion. Officials say the Gigafactory will produce 35 gigawatt hours of lithium-ion batteries by 2018. That capacity would be more than the whole world’s production in 2014. Tesla Motors is trying to lower the cost of electric car batteries by mass producing them in Nevada. Up until now, the company has turned to foreign companies for lithium-ion batteries.