Self-Driving Car Producers Are Scooping Up Real Estate
Apple, Alphabet (that's Google's parent company) and others are looking for swaths of real estate in the S.F. Bay Area for their self-driving car facilities, underscoring SV’s growing role in the auto industry, according to Hudson Pacific Properties CEO Victor Coleman.
Victor told analysts the self-driving car market is shifting from R&D to facilities, which “seem to be a hot demand item,” as Alphabet looks for 400k SF and Apple seeks 800k SF for self-driving car production, the Wall Street Journal reports.
While those are big spaces, car factories tend to be much larger. Tesla’s CA auto-plant is 5.3M SF.
Of course, one of the biggest recent real estate endeavors devoted to auto-making is Tesla’s up-and-coming “Gigafactory” in Sparks, NV, set to be 5.5M SF and cost about $5B. [WSJ]
