Tesla's head of battery engineering exits
reuters.com
reuters.com
The one thing Tesla supporters have pointed to more than anything is that Tesla had a large head-start in battery tech over all of the competitors. So Chevy is shipping many more Bolts than Tesla is shipping all models combined, but Tesla's headstart in battery tech and manufacturing would keep them a contender.
Now their head of battery tech is gone and they've missed model 3 targets by a very wide margin due to problems with batteries.
I'm not sure how reliable their lead in batteries is right now.
There's still that supercharger network, though. I suspect we'll be hearing more about that now that other points in Tesla's favor are dwindling.
Chevy shipped a few hundred more Bolts than Teslas one month. Tesla is way ahead on the year, and October is always a slow month for Tesla for whatever reason. It’s netiher a trend (yet) not is it ‘many’.
Also, those are dealer shipments - anecdotally, I see tons of them on dealership lots being advertised way under list price. The exact opposite of the situation Tesla is in.
In terms of whats happening with the teams at Tesla, it certainly looks like a lot of churn, but it's hard to know the real severity of it because of the over reactions by the press.
4 years at a company is a good amount of time. I'd be worried if the Head of Battery at Tesla was a super star engineer who joined with a lot of fanfare and then left the company in less than a year or two (e.g. Chris Lattner joining Tesla and leaving after a very short stint).
Scaling up in Auto-industry is not an easy one, and they are having tough time, also not being highlighted is that the base price of $35,000 is not realistic and every thing is said and upgraded the Model 3 averages in high 40s or low 50s. These are important factors esp. when Model 3 is supposed to the Model T of 21st Century.
TSLA currently is in a bad situation and they have to turn around swiftly, because their stock-price assumes they will hit home runs in perpetuity, while they are struggling to get their Second home run.. That is the point of discussion.
Their CFO churn is one great example. I’m surprised they can find anybody to happily sign off on Musk’s borderline fraudulent activity.
After Facebook didn't sell to Yahoo, they lost their entire management team.
Do you have a link where I can read more about this?
In the US only (majority of Teslas sold oversees in October, as is always the case in the first month of each quarter).
And cost-wise LG Chem seems competitive enough to Panasonic anyway, keeping in mind leaked figures for Bolt.
Sibling post also has the link but I don't want you to miss it.
It's essentially the Apple move - by outmaneuvering competitors on key resources it allows higher margin or products that others can't even create.
Apple also uses some fairly specialized, extremely high-precision equipment that only a few companies in the world have the skill to manufacture. Apple has enough purchasing power to buy up all of the capacity that those manufacturers can produce for years at a time, and in doing so they lock out competitors from using that equipment.
It's possible, but seems really unlikely to me that Tesla has the capacity or purchasing power at this point to corner the supply chain like Apple does.
https://www.engadget.com/2011/08/04/apples-hold-on-metal-cha...
Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848283
> When Apple's iPhone4 was nearing production, Foxconn and Apple discovered that the metal frame was so specialized that it could be made only by an expensive, low-volume machine usually reserved for prototypes. Apple's designers wouldn't budge on their specs, so Gou ordered more than 1,000 of the $20,000 machines from Tokyo-based Fanuc. Most companies have just one.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_38/b41950584...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-...
If China were to produce many times more cells than Tesla, we could still have a major battery shortage for most of the world's auto manufacturers.
> But getting prices down this way has not just produced cheaper, better batteries. It has also resulted in significant overcapacity. Cairn ERA estimates that last year the manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries exceeded demand by about a third. Both it and BNEF say that the battery manufacturers are either losing money or making only wafer-thin profits on every electric-vehicle battery they produce. Despite the seeming glut, though, they all have plans to expand, in part to drive prices even lower. Mr Jaffe explains their thinking as that of the “traditional Asian conglomerate model”: sacrificing margins for market share. This may be a sound strategy given the ever-greater hopes for electric vehicles in the near future. But at the moment it is also one that looks rather unnerving. Although Mr Jaffe believes that increased demand for both electric vehicles and stationary storage will justify the rush to expand, he accepts that, for now, “It feels like a gold rush—but there’s no gold.”
https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21726069-no-need-sub...
2) Tesla also likely has a significant advantage in battery pack architecture, from safety (they offered to teach Boeing how to design battery packs so their EV planes don't catch fire a couple of years back), to withstand more extreme weather conditions (hot or cold), to having an industry-leading battery degradation performance. I think I've seen reports of Tesla batteries only losing 4-5% of charge capacity after 100,000 miles.
That one is easy to do with overprovisioning - similar to SSDs and I believe even HDDs do this to account for inevitable degradations during operation.
I thought Tesla was always marketing that their selling point is cheaper batteries, which cant be a USP, as Panasonic can always manufacture the same for GM/Ford etc.
Ludicrous mode being a software update could easily be that you already have the performance innately but they cap your output at 85%. Same as any game where you have to pay to get the extra features/items (DLC) but every other player in the game already has the item when you're around them. All the players get it, it's just a flip of a bit to enable the item for you. Just costs $10k in this case...
Of course, today all Tesla P100D get built with that fuse already in place - so it's "just a software upgrade" today.
There's quite a bit of electrical magic going on for a fuse to be able to handle insane current bursts while retaining a good response time in case of a catastrophic fault.
What's going on is that the current drawn while flooring a ludicrous vehicle is a largish fraction of the current that should cause an instantaneous fuse blow. A fuse that melts at a given temperature and heats up as I^2 R wasn't going to cut it. In the electrical distribution industry, you'd get a fancy circuit breaker with an electrical trip device and call it a day. This has two issues for Tesla. First, your average electrical trip device uses a current transformer, and those don't work for DC. Second, DC current is considerably harder to interrupt than AC, and the current the fuse needs to carry is in the kA range (I have no idea what the short circuit current is), so a circuit breaker would be rather large. Hence a fuse, with a little explosive inside, with an active circuit, presumably using a Hall effect sensor, the voltage drop across the fuse, or maybe just a reed switch.
(Hmm. It's nice when fuses and such don't need external power. I wonder if there's sufficient voltage drop across the fuse during a fault to power the circuit that blows the fuse? I bet there is. It could even be a very simple circuit like a Zener diode in series with a resistive heater that sets off the explosive.)
Initially when I heard that, I thought Tesla was bluffing. But the Ludicrous mode with P100D performance, and the fact that no other electric car maker is able to match that, leads me to believe that they are not bluffing.
The 100,000 dollar plus luxury electric saloon market isn't exactly overflowing with competition yet, so I'm not sure this really proves anything. Given time and a stronger focus on electric models, I have few doubts the usual German contenders will build electric cars every bit as quick.
The "legacy" car manufacturers have been slow to wake to Tesla's successes in some regards, but that looks set to change rapidly over the next decade.
- battery range (the tech and battery production capacity doesn't disappear with the manager)
- charging network (passing 1,000 stations)
- autonomous driving (miles recorded and in all kinds of traffic and weather)
- selling online and through own dealers in malls as opposed to through independent dealers in the outskirts of town
- integrating electric into every part of the car design
- over the air updates
- brand (you don't think f Nissan, Chevy, BMW etc. as EV makers)
They are also still the only manufacturer that makes EVs look attractive and perform better than ordinary cars. Everybody else on the market seem to deliberately make ugly cars with mediocre performance. The reason probably is the simple fact that Tesla wants you to buy electric cars whereas the other manufacturers already make money on selling combustion engine cars and would make less selling EVs. They are in the EV market reluctantly.
In theory, the above could change quickly. But how does a company that for 100 years has made combustion engine cars and has thousands of employees, suppliers, facilities, contracts, etc all geared up on selling combustion engine cars through dealerships and who are dependent on making money on spare parts and repairs of mechanical parts suddenly pivot into selling EVs that barely need repairs online or in malls? It's as likely as Google launching a Facebook challenger. Or Microsoft beating Amazon on selling consumer goods. Actually, it's less likely since all the incumbent car manufacturers run on razor thin margins. They don't have piles of cash to reinvent themselves. It's more like Nokia winning the smart phone game or a news paper beating Google on selling online ads.
My bet is still on Tesla, but it would be nice if I'm wrong and the incumbents rise to the challenge.
Perhaps a look at this from the other way around is more revealing. They were having issues with batteries --> now their head of battery tech is gone.
First, the problems (as stated in the article) that Tesla is claiming are the primary constraint with the Model 3 are related to battery manufacturing capacity. That could potentially be related to technology/design obviously, but manufacturing could also just be a production problem. Those batteries in NV are actually built primarily by Panasonic [0]. Interestingly, that article also discusses the fact that Tesla has pulled back on plans to power the factory using a solar roof. Critically, that has left them relying on grid power which has enough power bumps (2-3/week) that it is a major production headache and is combined with labor difficulties in the factory in regards to talented and trained technicians.
Second, according to other industry sources [1] The issue is not the batteries but the body manufacturing. The body (which is also the frame in modern unibody cars and even most trucks) line is almost certainly being done by hand based on rate of production. The line isn't just not installed in CA yet, its not even fully built by the Michigan supplier. Why? Someone has to take the blame and it can be either Musk [2] or Tesla [3] because it sure isn't my fault. Toyota gives away the secrets of its internal process for free (partially as internal motivation to continue to improve...because they now must get better to stay on top) but hey they also have a full time CEO. Toyota offered to help Tesla, until Musk kept making fun of fuel cells. On the otherside there is what is happening now, with Tesla sending (confused and in flux) plans to their body line supplier a year after major OEM's sent plans for NEXT years models. Not to mention that the same journalists reported this all a year ago...because Tesla hadn't even begun the permitting process necessary to hit its own ramp timeline with the state of California [4].
Compare to their same reports on Jaguar's upcoming EV [5], It looks like Tesla continues to either (1) not now how to do manufacturing or (2) are still working to define the disruptive innovation in manufacturing that allows them to not test their production line. That disruption has escaped places like Toyota (and every other car manufacturer), Intel (and every other semiconductor manufacturer), and every other manufacturer in general who run a LOT of prototype prior to committing to production and build that time into their schedules. The other option is (3) Musk knew all this a long time ago and has been misleading folks for quite a while.
TL;DR: Tesla thought it was immune from the god given rules of running a factory. Human and robot factory employees are not AWS instances. Meatspace =/= code
Side story: One area Toyota save immense time was reducing the time it took to change over metal stamping dies from 3 days to less than ten minutes [6]. GM took a lot longer to learn these lessons [7].
[0] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/tesla-gigafactory-solar-powe...
[1] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/model-3-body-line-still-in-d...
[2] https://dailykanban.com/2017/07/fremont-problem-starts-m/
[3] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/source-tesla-responsible-mod...
[4] https://dailykanban.com/2016/09/docs-reveal-teslas-productio...
[5] https://dailykanban.com/2017/11/no-production-hell-jaguars-p...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-minute_exchange_of_die
[7] https://history.gmheritagecenter.com/wiki/index.php/1986_Die...
What? That's not even remotely accurate. Tesla sold ~75,000 vehicles in q1-q3. Year to date sales for Bolt is approximately 17,000. And that includes all cars sitting at the car dealership not even sold. Tesla only counts a sale once it's delivered into the customers hands. Bolt sales are a very tiny fraction of Tesla's sales.
GM lose $9k on every Volt right now after subsidies and are also having trouble selling them.
http://fortune.com/2017/07/17/gm-shutdown-chevy-bolt-supply/
Margins get thinner (or in this case negative) closer to the bottom of the market.
Tesla doesn't have the EPA slowly tightening the CAFE noose so selling Bolts at a loss might still be a net profit for GM over all because it offsets more profitable products.
Why is this a political discussion all of a sudden?
The Bolt has great range and I’m sure it’s a joy to drive, but it’s an ugly, tiny subcompact.
No one outside of our tech early-adopter bubble is going to pay $35,000 for a car that looks like that. Every other car that looks like that sells for $18-20k. Most people don’t care what the propulsion is.
The reason the Model 3 has a higher ceiling than the Bolt (if Tesla can figure out their production hell) is because it has the looks and amenities expected of a $35,000 car.
We’re never going to solve emissions if only environmentalists and tech lovers like us stop driving gas cars. There have to be alternatives that are compelling to the masses - and not just that, but compelling at their price point.
People care about the TCO though. If you're gonna make that extra $15k back in fuel savings in the first two years (and I have no idea whether that's the real number or not, and it's probably very dependent on local fuel charges) then regular people will sign up for that.
Then I figured: it's because you can floor it in an EV and nobody notices, so you do it all the time. Whereas in a similar class petrol car, if you floor it from zero and keep it in the optimal rev band, you sound and look like a huge idiot.
Edit: Just to be clear, a constant torque would imply a linearly increasing power output when increasing the revs. Of course Tesla doesn't have that – what they have is high torque, and thus significant power output already at very low revolutions. A typical small DC electric engine has an almost linearly decreasing torque curve (unless capped), although I don't really know specifics about Tesla's engines.
Basically: for an internal combustion engine the force is the force of the explosion averaged over time, so the higher the RPM the shorter the time between explosions the higher the average force (until you get to a point where your cylinders are moving so fast the start fighting against each other).
For an electric car the force is the voltage, there's no impulse to average out, it's just continuous force.
Now of course in reality it's not that simple and you actually do have a torque curve, but compared to ICE it's basically a square wave.
It's a shame seeing people just downvote comments without doing even the most basic research to try to disprove someone.
For proof, here's the actual torque curve for a Model S. http://mihalache.free.fr/TSLA/ModelS.png And you can see very clearly the torque curve looks nothing like a square wave.
Also your assertion about internal combustion engines is wrong as well. At higher RPMs you get less duration with the valves open and you can't get as much fuel and air into the cylinder. It's not that mechanical losses are taking away that force, it's that those explosions are less powerful as you approach redline. Then once you're right up at max RPM you start having to deal with stuff like valve float where the springs pushing the valves back up can't keep up with the camshaft but that's over complicating it for a basic explanation.
The superchargers are arguably a big deal for model S and X users, who I believe often have free charging. As I understand it, Model 3 users wont have this, though? So what’s so special about the Tesla ones, especially outside the US?
Number of stations is meaningless. At any given time, a sizeable portion of them will be out of commission. Some will not be accessible outside business hours (the ones at dealerships being the biggest offenders) or will be ICE'd. Even worse, some will be listed as working, but then fail to connect and charge your car at all. This has happened to me, multiple times. In one case, leaving me stranded, as I did not have range to reach the next one, after being unable to charge at two different locations. And that was in San Jose, not in the middle of a desert.
I have not checked your numbers, but I seriously doubt 30k is the number of fast chargers. Instead, those will be the slow, L2 chargers, which take 4 hours for a full charge on a Nissan Leaf. Quick chargers are much fewer in number, break frequently and, in the US, can be on two, competing standards (CHADEMO and whatever is that Ford and other manufacturers use).
In contrast, Tesla's network is much better maintained, each location has many chargers, and they are all Tesla's proprietary fast chargers.
Not to mention, Tesla cars can use their chargers, L2, and have adapters for other quick chargers.
TL;DR- This is not an apples to apples comparison.
a) "fast charger" is a loose term and is often used for anything exceeding 20kW. Superchargers deliver up to 140 kW (split between two cars) or 120 kW (to one car). That's why Tesla/Elon sometimes refer to them as "level 4 charger", although the specification ends at level 3. Other manufacturers are now getting on that train with (according to specification) up to 400 kW
b) The notion of the "average electric car user" does not take into account that yes, people drive less than 80km per day on average, BUT they go on the occasional road trip. And they don't want to have a car sitting around just for road trips. They want one that can do both (commute & roadtrip). That's where the supercharger network helps
For instance, suppose Chevy needs to go through this retooling at some point in the future and set back production at that point.
A set back is not proof that they don't have a lead in battery tech.
However, it should be asked: what is the nature of the lead? What is superior about the batteries? How does this lead manifest?
If you use the correct numbers, their margins are significantly lower than the rest of the industry.
Maybe there is some causality between these two statements...
The class was mainly Boolean algebra with some flip flops thrown in at some point. If I recall correctly that was my sophomore year.
There was next to no digital in my courses. Heavy on math and analog circuits. I think that one class on digital logic was it.
Yeah that explains it. :-) So nothing about writing Verilog, feedback pipelining, adder design, clock skew, and stuff like that? Because those are the kinds of things I'd expect in a digital logic course (if one were available) and I would be shocked if you didn't need to know those concepts for a job in ASIC design.
Everything else I learned on the job. If I had gone into board design, I’m sure a lot more would have been relevant.
Many places the chip designer is also the board designer, but sadly that is not the case here.
How far down? I wouldn't expect it to be popular but I also wouldn't expect it to have a long prereq chain (a sophomore-level course on computer architecture seems enough?)... it doesn't seem like analog which is where you actually need a long prereq chain to get anywhere.
> so most students don't
Most students... in EE? Or most students planning to do digital design after graduation?
But until the stuff I was being taught became practical (because it paid for dinner), I wasn’t really able to retain much once I had finished a class. So I don’t think it would have mattered time much if I had learned about clock skew in college. I’d have forgotten about its importance the next semester anyway.
Information without relevance is hard to maintain.
Textbooks tend to be very general (also old) and don't focus on the tooling used which is the bulk of the work you have to do.
The question isn't what you spend your time on though. It's what is worth spending time teaching/learning in school. You also spend all your time using a mouse and keyboard but (hopefully) you don't take courses to learn how to use the mouse and the keyboard in school. If most people could pick it up in a short period of time on the job then it doesn't seem a worthwhile use of time to teach in a course.
The simulation I can do in Vivado is apparently nothing compared to the scale those tools take it to. I've talked to someone in the industry that they told me Vivado's simulation is only okay for beginner projects.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?keywords=battery&locat...
Once you know who does the work, target them as a goal.
Be careful what you wish for.
Right now you stand to make a lot of money. If schools start cranking out undergrads who know what you know you won't be very valuable.
edit: looks like I struck a nerve.
Either way, he gets to put in his expertise to found a new company in one of the hottest technologies there is in 2017, probably becoming rich by selling Tesla's own upgraded tech back to it, as well as to everyone else in the electric car race. All while not having Elon Musk looming over his shoulder. Not bad!
I think sunk cost fallacy can be quoted if someone messes up multiple times but they still don't want to let them go. Then the problem is nonchalance or incompetence.
Just like there people who can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory nearly every time.
...seriously, I'm sorta worried about our continued access to enough lithium for all this electric technology that's rapidly emerging. Counterarguments?
And the lithium doesn’t just go away. Lithium batteries can be recycled, though in practice it is currently often cheaper to just mine more lithium.
This makes me nervous as an investor..
Musk says half of the Model 3 battery assembly zones (2 out of 4) in the factory were badly designed, so they had to redo them from scratch.
I don't think it entails anything for their batteries in general, more "were new at the automated robotic assembly thing".
> [...] joined the company in January 2013,
> was involved in developing technology
> for all of Tesla's cars [according to
> his LinkedIn profile]
For Tesla I'd be surprised if the "Head of Battery Engineering" was only a "Director" level position in US style corporate ladders?
Here's a link to a summary of conference call: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/7ao4m0/conferenc...
That forum is quite anti-Tesla (as opposed to /r/teslamotors). The whole Tesla thing is quite controversial - lots of haters, lots of fanboys.
Best advice I can give you: Read what both sides have to say and weigh the arguments. Then just stick with the truth you've always believed in - it's what everyone does in 2017 ;-)
Thanks a lot for the report, I guess I misinterpreted what article said about which factory the problems were happening.
Source: http://www.thedrive.com/tech/15514/toyota-wont-share-solid-s...
Dyson's (sakti3) solid state battery certainly is.
But, in the real world, if he were interviewing for a new job, the prospective employer would surely have this conversation:
Q: So, why did you leave Tesla?
A: Oh, just felt like it was time to go. Wanted to start my own thing.
Q: Ok. But, didn’t your departure coincide with the announcement that the Model 3’s primary production bottleneck was with assembly of the battery pack?
A: Yes, but that was just a coincidence. I had been talking about leaving for a while.
Q: Ok. Would you mind if we talked with 3 references from Tesla? Perhaps your direct manager, a peer, and one of your subordinates?
A: Sure.....
It seems like he left to start his own company?
I'm betting Tesla couldn't pay him enough and he's starting his own shop to sell to the other major auto manufacturers.
But he could get yelled at by Elon Musk every day, or he could walk into any VC in Silicon Valley, drop his own name, and have a fat stack of VC cash to gamble on something of his own design.
That's the reason why nobody in the auto industry has taken them up on it. It's not a demonstration of good faith - it was a publicity stunt.
What is interesting about that implication though is that while to me and others it seems "clearly" implied, there isn't any one thing you would point to that says it is what it is. I have seen so many cases where the message the company sent about somebody leaving was really different that I no longer believe anything except what the person says.
They were able to manufacture batteries for 50k+ Model S/X.
But couldn't scale the same batteries for Model 3?
Here's one source on it, with a few more details:
https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/tesla-model-3-exclusive-batte...