The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Batteries | Hacker News Reader

The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Batteries

bloomberg.com

60 pointsneya19 comments

This article uses outdated numbers which make CATL look better (compared to Tesla) than it does.

They list Tesla Gigafactory as making ~30 GWh and that (well, 35 GWh) was the initial plan.

Current projections are that Gigafactory, when completed in 2020, will make 150 GWh of batteries (https://insideevs.com/elon-musk-says-gigafactory-output-coul...).

CATL is estimated to be 50 GWh by 2020 so only 1/3 of estimated Gigafactory.

In fact, the current projections is that by 2020 Tesla will make 150 GWh, all of China ~100 GWh and the rest of the world ~50 GWh so Tesla will be making half of all world's batteries.

It's also not surprising. Article said that CATL is raising $2 billion. Gigafactory 1 will cost $5 billion (at least $1.6 billion financed by Panasonic).

That assumes no further investment from Tesla and it's almost certain that they'll start building one or two more gigafactories before 2020 (although it does take 6 years to fully build one). Musk was already talking publicly about european factory and this december there were rumors about china factory.

I collect those tidbits of data: https://www.notion.so/Tesla-watch-4bed70edb73b46c380e2762a0b...

Do you have info on the battery range increase? For example a tesla 2017 model X 100D has a claimed range of 330 miles. How many years would it take the battery range to double, to say 600 or 1,800 per charge?

There are 2 aspects to this.

First is: battery density per unit of weight of battery.

According to chart in https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread.php?166243-Energy-De..., battery density between 2008 and 2013/14 (i.e. in 5/6 years) more than doubled.

Price per kWH dropped 5x in the same period.

What that means is that for the same weight, we could put 2x more battery in the car and it would cost 2.5x less (5 / 2). That would double the range, all else being equal.

But mileage doesn't depend only on how big the battery is.

The smaller / lighter the car, the more mileage it gets from the same energy. That means Tesla 3 would get a better mileage than Tesla S or X if it used the same battery because Tesla 3 is a smaller car.

There's also aerodynamic efficiency of the car and how you drive it (e.g. accelerating quickly uses up more energy than accelerating slowly).

> accelerating quickly uses up more energy than accelerating slowly

Can you explain this to me? I know gas engines have this attribute but I assumed electric motors didn't.

Resistive power losses in the battery pack, drive inverter, motor, and associated wiring are proportional to the square of the current. Doubling the motor current doubles the torque but quadruples the losses.

Where will Musk get money to build another 2 Gigafactories? If one costs $5 billion, he would need a big round of new funding. Also Tesla as business is burning through cash at a quick pace so that will need more cash to sustain itself as well. Do you think Tesla will need to raise / borrow another 10-15 billion?

TSLA's market cap is a lot bigger than $5 billion, and they have a history of being able to raise money.

If you want to bet against that, by all means, short the stock.

Now that interest rates are rising it might be more difficult to raise billions of dollars, especially after history of consistently underdelivering and over promising that Tesla has. That their losses have been growing and no signs of being profitable is also a problem.

I've spent the weekend watching videos of and reading about converting classic cars (VW Beetles, Porsche 911s and others) into electric powered vehicles (some of them gloriously restored!). It was exciting to learn this:

1. Electric conversion is about three things: batteries, chargers and motors. Of these three, batteries have been the least technologically convenient aspect of converting to electric - until recently. For years batteries have remained heavy and expensive, rendering them inefficient for use to power modern vehicles (it's all about size for the kW). Electric motor tech and battery charging tech have been past their "S" curves and are considered mature, buyers being spoilt for choice.

2. Over the last 5 years, battery tech has improved both in size-to-power ratios as well as in dramatic reduction in costs - and there's more to come. (Soon with graphene and Samsung we will have 5x speed in recharging). The tide is definitely changing on the battery tech front. All three factors for electric conversion now make electric powered vehicles (that can do more than 200km daily) a viable possibility - eve for home DIY conversion.

3. It is not surprising therefore to see a growing cottage industry of DIY electric conversion kits in the US already. (Google "DIY electric car kit")

ICE (internal combustion engine) motor companies have always kept their R&D and production process of powerful and efficient motors as their competitive advantage. That's their mojo. The gas motor and drive train technology is essentially the car that customers have been buying. This is the very heart of the industry at threat. 3 components and goodbye to a century of battle-test crankshafts, pistons, intake manifolds and injection designs! Gone.

It is my humble opinion that we ought to be more excited about the DIY home kits for electric vehicles instead of the Teslas and big automakers.

As a mid point between DIY and new cars, Jaguar have created a drop in replacement for the xk drivetrain which allows them to (reversibly) convert classic cars to EVs:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/jaguars-restored-this-o...

> [...] we ought to be more excited about the DIY home kits for electric vehicles instead of the Teslas and big automakers.

Can you explain why? Who is “we”? Are you anticipating that a sizable fraction of the 1+ billion gas cars in the world are going to be converted by DIY home kits? I personally can’t imagine hundreds of millions of DIY conversions (or even professional conversions).

Practically what I care about is (a) getting fossil fuel burning out of my neighborhood (and out of places where people live, in general), and (b) dramatically reducing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere, on a global scale. As far as I can tell the way we will get there is by sales of new electric cars largely supplanting gas cars over the next 2 decades or so (also pickup trucks, buses, delivery trucks, freight shipping trucks, etc.).

Policymakers can speed this up by tightening emissions standards for all vehicles, banning ICE cars from some roads or areas, increasing fuel taxes, subsidizing electric cars, funding basic research in battery technology, etc.

Any information on what current western car manufacturers are planning for battery production capacity? The story of Nissan and Tesla is known by now. But I don't read a lot about most other producers.

One I know of is Williams Advanced Engineering who are building a battery factory for Aston Martin. That's fairly low volume, however.

Another is the quite significant investments Dyson are making in EV technology; they plan to build an EV car by 2020 but details are sparse.

Probably the most significant, however, is Swiss engineering group ABB, who plan to build Europe’s largest lithium-ion battery factory in Sweden targeting annual cell production equivalent to 32 gigawatt-hours by 2023, over 90 percent of Tesla’s Gigafactory target. [0]

[0] http://new.abb.com/news/detail/2121/abb-and-northvolt-partne...

The number for Tesla is outdated. 35 GWh was initial plan.

The current estimate 150 GWh by 2020 (https://insideevs.com/elon-musk-says-gigafactory-output-coul...).

Which is kind of needed to build as many cars as they want.

Only half of batteries will go to cars (the other half to residential powerpacks and commercial deployments like the one in Australia) which is 75 GWh.

At average 75 kWh batter per car, it's just enough to build 1 million Tesla 3 cars a year, which is not that much and well within Tesla's projections by 2020.

That doesn't include even more battery hungry Tesla trucks and roadsters and S and X, which is why it's safe to say that before 2020 Tesla will have to start building another Gigafactory to deliver the cars they've already promised.

The next Tesla giga factory might even be in China or India instead of the US they already plan to build a car factory in China. Depends on the capacity utilization if all the batteries produced in the US can be used in NA and Europe it would make better sense to build another giga factory in China or India for the Asian market. Toyota so far has been pro hydrogen instead of pure electric but that has changed in the last few months to me once Toyota goes all in on electric the world will move to electric cars a lot quicker than most are expecting.

> "once Toyota goes all in on electric the world will move to electric cars a lot quicker than most are expecting."

I don't know what the car market is like where you live, but where I live the majority of people only buy used cars (because of the lower cost). This is possible because of a surplus in supply of once-new cars. If we're going to get past the tipping point for electric cars, I'd suggest we'd need to see one of three things happen:

1. New electric cars sold at a price point that can compete with the used car market.

2. An increase in popularity in electric car conversions (whether DIY or done by a professional).

3. Wait until the early electric car models trickle down to the used car market.

4. Air pollution regulations in cities make owning ICE car more expensive or banning them outright.

electric cars depreciate ridiculously fast right now. I can buy a couple year old leaf with really low miles for $5000 right now in seattle, and i have tons of choices. Even the up-range models from the past years are under 10k. This also applies to up-market stuff like the I3, etc.

We haven't seen how this will hit say, stuff like the bolt, but basically everyone but tesla got hit was outrageous depreciation.

If that keeps up, electric cars could become a similar price choice for a lot of people who don't need to drive all that far, even if they're the earlier low-range models. This could be further incentivized by stuff like free HOV access and free charging some places a lot of locations enjoy.

I don't think the big US automakers have any in-house EV battery capacity. Conventional car batteries are not a differentiating component and so have always been supplied by outside contract providers.

Chevy Volt batteries are made by LG, originally in Korea but I think they now have a plant in Michigan.

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