If this were any other company making such unsubstantiated claims that didn't have any basis in the reality of the underlying technology, they'd be getting roasted here.
>“I don't think they're lying,” Jaffe said. “I just think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work.”
There are no laws here, just advances in battery tech, and people believe Tesla is at the forefront of that AFAIK. Sure, they might be making claims that are hard to believe, but isn't the point of Tesla doing exactly that?
We would also wonder about making it to production, but Tesla actually has a halfway decent track record at that.
That's the thing. They didn't. The roadster concept didn't have 200kWh in it at all.
For a nice reference: see this comment sceptical of Tesla's capability to deliver this 100MW battery in Australia in 100 days. Which was just recently completed on time. The tone reads surprisingly similar to the Bloomberg article ("To say nothing of the near 50 degree weather beating down on old infrastructre that spans thousands of very sparse kilometers.") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838355
People, and companies, have reputations. Those have to be taken into account when judging their claims.
Note also that all of the claims of the article are in the "this is hard" territory, not any actual "this is perpetual motion" sort of impossibility as the title alludes to.
The example that seems easiest to judge is doubling the capacity of the roadster battery: The current Model S battery is a rather thin sheet underneath the car. I have absolutely no doubt that you can fit twice the volume into the same frame. It gets only easier if there are any advances in battery density, or if car grows only slightly in every dimension.
That said I’m still skeptical aboutthe figures given but not because of the batteries - it takes lot of engineering to keep a car togheter at those speeds: most of the components will be quite close to the limit of material science and tesla is not exactly known for its quality control pipeline.