Tesla to achieve leading $100/kWh battery cell cost this year, says investor
electrek.co
electrek.co
I follow Tesla closely as a current owner, and most news I hear about software changes, future Tesla stuff, etc comes out first from electrek.
So thanks to the guy who runs it and stays on top of it!
It's worse than that. The "analyst" is from Worm Capital. Every heard of them? Probably not. But their fund is 60% Tesla.
Why is it that "shorts" are criticized for talking their book and spreading FUD, but the "longs" are not criticized for all the stock pumping? Why are Worm Capital and the YouTube guy getting factory tours?
Because they're helping the bottom line? That's Tesla's job. To help itself.
Are you proposing they give tours to short sellers?
If I am long on a stock I applaud the shorts. After all, if they are wrong, they have to buy back and drive up my price more. Also when a company is over-hyped or worse and outright fraud, short sellers can bring attention to this and slow the impending bust that is going to happen. I personally had shorted a lot of stocks in the past and they are almost all bankrupt now taking with them the sheer speculators that over extended themselves.
You're right but I think a lot of hobby investors don't really get 'long on stock' - once they buy stock in a company they feel personally invested and want the price to go up, and damn the naysayers.
The only time this might not apply is when a company is taking a huge risk (like Tesla with the push for the Model 3) and there's a real chance that grassroots FUD could break a company.
However, I would think all the news coverage short sellers are drumming up is illegal stock market manipulation. But, either that's not the case in practice, or the SEC just ignores them.
"The pump-and-dump scheme, allegedly orchestrated by a Frost associate named Barry Honig, took place between 2013 and 2018. According to the SEC, Honig coordinated an effort to buy up shares at a discount, pay a third party to write laudatory articles on Wall Street forums, and then sell those shares for a profit."
I'm no stock market expert but surely that's only true if the short sellers are right and the stock does lose a lot of value? Whereas if the stock keeps going up the short seller has motive to try and crash the stock price?
>I would take this with a grain of salt since those tours are controlled by Tesla’s investor relations department and there are obviously made to impress, but it’s nonetheless some interesting color on Tesla’s battery operations.
I stopped trusting their PR team, they must prove themselves instead of talking now. They did this to themselves.
They may have been delayed from overly ambitious targets, but Tesla is shipping three different models of all electric cars, residential and large-scale energy storage, solar roofs (barely), and is building out the single biggest factory in the world.
Now we’re hearing that Tesla is hitting $100/kWh for their battery cells. That’s a milestone that as recently as 2017 the DOE expected to be hit in 2020, and back when Tesla launched in 2003 was a compete and utter fairy tale.
$100/kWh has for years been predicted to be the tipping point where long-range electric goes mainstream. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is literally Tesla delivering on its core mission statement.
SpaceX literally owns the orbital launch market and is a private enterprise trying to get humans to another fucking planet.
How irrational can Elon-haters possibly get?
However stuff like this is kind of factual ("an investor reported X ... we thinks it means Y") and it comes with some fair caveats. I come across their articles regularly and I haven't really seen them misrepresenting facts.
In this case, they add the following to the stuff they cite from the investor: "Electrek’s Take: I would take this with a grain of salt since those tours are controlled by Tesla’s investor relations department and there are obviously made to impress, but it’s nonetheless some interesting color on Tesla’s battery operations.". So credible source but they take their opinion with a grain of salt.
So yes, it's definitely a pro Tesla article and the 100$/KwH metric is an interesting one regardless. Definitely looks like they are doing better than their competition (which is not really news) and they seem to be out producing everybody else at this point at lower cost with more cost reductions likely due to economies of scale and improvements such as discussed in the article.
Also interesting is Elektrek's take on the infamous 35K variant being more likely to ship towards the end of the announced window. We'll see. Cost reductions definitely make this more feasible. But I can't blame Tesla for wanting to cash in on the apparently greater demand than supply for the more profitable high end models. I imagine they are not in a hurry to drop prices given the lack of competition and given the pressure on them to show positive results on their balance.
Makes you see news like this differently. Musk probably gave them a factory tour and asked them to spew some BS to the ether to help the stock.
I see this (and to an extent, my interest in Tesla) as a “rising tide lifts all boats” sort of situation. Anyone differentiating their automobiles by making batteries at a noteworthy price point pushes everybody else to at least try to match. The gauntlet is thrown down.
I really care if SpaceX succeeds. I only care that Tesla succeeds enough to be a model worth improving upon. If they go down as a cautionary tale against making electric cars that would be bad for everybody.
I guess you're right, because the competitors are just starting to roll out now...
I don't see any non-Chinese automaker besides Tesla and possibly GM taking EVs seriously.
Every car manufacturer either has electric cars today or has hybrids with plans to move into electric cars.
Not sure why you think suddenly the entire automotive market is going to capitulate and give up everything to Tesla.
That just seems bizarre to me.
There are certainly a lot of hybrids being sold around the world. There are still very few strictly electric cars being made or sold anywhere on earth, that aren't Teslas. It turns out it is very difficult to do what Tesla has.
The industry is running at least five years behind Tesla presently. It'll continue to catch up, without question. Tesla will be doing $40 billion in sales by the time it does and will legitimately be in the league of BMW size wise at that point.
'Catching Up' might be more reserved for Tesla. They cant make cars, but automakers can.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/07/huge-gap-tesla-model-3-...
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manufacturers_by_motor...
Not really accurate- they’re still making the mustang, crossovers, and SUVs too.
The big problem for Tesla now is to compete with the incumbents on their turf, mass producing cars. That EV drive trains makes cars actually less compley isn't helping neither. And the incumbents are really good at that. Tesla had an incredible window of opportunity to turn the automotive industry upside down. Now the window narrowed down to a race between Tesla getting production straight and the traditional car makers developing an electrical car. Ip to very recently I would still have been with Tesla. Now, not so much. Musk apparently having some issues, production being a constant headache. And Tesla even tried to built their own seats. Not everything other manufacturers did was wrong.
That this development, compounded by the digitalization of everything, posses a complete new set of challenges for traditional car makers is an other story.
There is a reason for the specialized nature of the car industry. Regardless, had Teslas aim been to revolutionize the way cars are built I agree with a newly concieved vertical integration being a good idea. But that was not the initial goal, was it? Mission creep was never a good thing.
That being said I personally hope that Tesla manages the turn around, it's just that I'm not so optimistic anymore.
They are going to take it on the chin for a while for the lies they perpetrated, but the interesting thing is how much they genuinely seem to be turning things around, as a surprising pace for a traditional automaker.
As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, don't sleep on Renault-Nissan Alliance. Carlos Ghosn was saying the future of the companies was all electric as far back as the original Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt launch window (when Tesla was still trying to fulfill early orders for the original Roadster). Between Renault and Nissan they are the largest EV manufacturer right now, with the Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe both having top spots on EV sales. Nissan has announced that their Infiniti sub-brand will be moving to hybrid/EV only soon, and there is a very interesting shell game Nissan has been playing with their Nissan USA subordinate to eventually move all the current ICE-heavy/truck-heavy divisions that are currently still very profitable in the US into a subsidiary that they can spin-off/drop/bankrupt at a moment's notice. Nissan leadership seems to be truly predicting that the market will fall out under ICE and heavy vehicles sooner than anyone else in auto manufacturing is expecting, and putting their money where their mouth is in their corporate structuring and bet hedging. It's fascinating to watch, and as an EV fan, I'm hoping the Renault-Nissan Alliance is right.
No, they are a partner and have put up a significant fraction of the capital for the plant though.
Even for the cells produced in Japan if they are using IP owned by Tesla in their construction or chemistry they could still have a say in who Panasonic sells them to.
How profitable is Twitter?
(1) Navigant ranked them dead last compared to their competitors earlier this year.
(2) They don't believe in LIDAR which almost everyone else is using to supplement the camera/radar based sensors. I trust the combination of Apple, Waymo, Baidu, GM etc to pick the best self driving architecture.
They have the best in class self driving technology that's actually in production. Until I can actually sit in one of Waymo's cars, it doesn't mean much.
It is talking about what Tesla is creating not what they have today.
> We believe Tesla is creating a best-in-class self-driving technology.
What are they basing that belief on?
> According to Tesla, the company believes it can gather 1 billion miles of data per year from current drivers.
Good training data is necessary but having a lot of training data alone is not a guarantee for success.
I believe a lot in Elon Musk and Tesla but I would like to hear a good argument from Worm Capital about why they think Tesla will have the best-in-class self-driving technology.
I always upvote things that yield an interesting didcussion.
In other words, few things can be said if only independent people can talk about them.
I objected to an article premised on a self-interested statement from someone who's inherently optimistic about Tesla. Neutral, grounded reporting about any profit-making company is always welcome.
For that you’ll need a professional. It’s really dangerous (and illegal?) if your system backfeeds the grid.
Working with lithium batteries is not to be performed without lots and lots of caution. The amount of energy in such cells that can be delivered, in a very surprising manner that is guaranteed to catch attention, is dangerous to say the least. And that's just from a single cell, a failing bank of cells is guaranteed to be a great conversation starter!
I'm sure there are those that can safely work with the stuff, but I'd not bet the house and family on it. Play safe!
(okok, enough with the puns now)
Keep in mind something that small is not capable of running a whole house. You'd drain them very quickly, especially with HVAC running.
Sifting through the impressive sounding numbers, it looks like you can buy an online UPS with about a tenth of the KWh capacity of a powerwall for about the same price.
Now I want Tesla to build online UPSes...
What are these things made from and where does that stuff come from? Was any of that part of the big tariffs that were recently announced?
Nickel is a worry. Cobalt is unlikely to be a concern for tariffs since it would probably help China to tax it. Graphite might be under threat too since it's made in both the US and China.
Other materials like lithium or organics are unlikely to be taxed or are manufactured at large scale.
Still, it's economical to recycle batteries for the heavy metals alone. Recycling lithium would require an additional step (similar to the final steps of processing lithium brine, but simpler) that currently isn't done. Its cheaper to recycle than to extract even lithium, but the value of lithium in a battery is a couple dozen times less than the heavy metals.
The process involves shredding or incinerating the cells first, then dumping the results in an electrolysis tank. Because the cells are essentially just chunks of plastic, aluminum, copper (and steel for teslas) and various powders, the large chunks can be easily sorted from the anode and cathode material by washing. The powder goes into an electrolysis bath, which extracts the high-value metals (cobalt and nickel) to a pretty good purity. The carbon leftovers (anode, electrolyte, and plastics) collect at the bottom with the lithium and leftover cathode material (aluminum, silicon, other things depending on the chemistry). The leftovers are mostly sold as clinker.
You could extract the lithium from that, but at present it's not done. For one thing, batteries actually have a lower concentration of lithium than lithium brine and even some lithium-bearing ores. Recycling is also just so low-volume that if you did extract the lithium you wouldn't really have enough to be worth selling.
Regardless, the clinker material is ecologically inert. Nickel and cobalt are the only hazardous materials in the battery. Everything else is extremely common in nature- lithium is present in every water supply since it's a natural component of salt. Carbon is obviously everywhere, even in elemental forms. Any rock you pick up almost anywhere in the world is overwhelmingly likely to be primarily made of silicon. Aluminum is similar. NB that all the clinker materials will be in oxide or hydroxide forms.
What is low draw depends very heavily on the chemistry, but at <1 C most batteries are only a couple percent less efficient. Every other energy storage method including hydraulic is far less efficient.
In fact, battery degradation has in some cases been slower than battery innovation! Batteries have gotten better so quickly that the newer ones may have 50% more capacity even if the old ones didnt degrade much at all.
Edit: its also complicated by the multitude of batteries and chemistries. Li ion is incredibly diverse compared to other battery families, and the various types can't be used together. Practically speaking you can only reuse batteries of a single chemistry and form factor, and the chemistry changes every few years or less. Its just not a stable enough industry for that yet.
Interestingly, Nissan has a PowerWall-like project of their own, but only for secondary use batteries (as they want to prioritize car production, being you know a car company). You don't hear it advertised because Nissan has seen a far slower trickle of secondary use batteries than they originally expected to see, and thus have had very few of their PowerWall-like systems to sell to any market.
I guess you mean salts in general, otherwise NaCl has no Li(thium) in sight :)
Lithium salts in particular are more common in freshwater than other kinds of salt, due to various geological properties that I dont really know much about.
The problem with carbon is not the element, but the molecules. Plastic is largely made of carbon, but doesn't belong in nature.
It seems to me like it'd be easier to burn them off rather than skimming them after electrolysis, but I don't want to assume.
But that's a huge part of the car, and the majority of the drivetrain cost. The motor costs probably a few hundred. When you consider all the things it actually replaces -fuel and exhaust, starter and alternator, a number of ancillaries- it's really starting to close in on an internal combustion engine. Not to mention that that level of drivetrain is high end in terms of power output.
The battery has represented ~80% of an electric powertrain's cost, so it's a reasonable proxy for replacing most of the powertrain. Even parts that aren't fully replaced, like the heater core, A/C and radiator are made significantly cheaper. It's very much an estimate, but it isn't inaccurate.
Recently it's becoming less representative. Drive stages (electronics) are getting more exotic and expensive as manufacturers recognize the value in them, and motors are probably going to continue using limited amounts of neodymium magnets. And of course, batteries have become far cheaper. Personally I can't wait- I want more focus to be on the motors and drivers, which are way more accessible from an aftermarket perspective. It takes tens or hundreds of millions to get into battery manufacturing, but only a few hundred thousand to get into making world-class motors or electronics. Crate engines for EVs are just waiting on the demand (and a friendly nod from manufacturers).
Here is a better article:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/musk-says-tesla-can-get-li-...
It appears it's old news, from June (and the above is from the horse's mouth, not an investor).