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]
