Tesla has a lab trying to build its own battery cells | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has a lab trying to build its own battery cells

cnbc.com

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Quite a few of my chemical engineering friends at Berkeley have interned at Tesla in their battery cell division. Their laboratory also regularly partners with our Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for various research projects. It's a pretty robust operation actually, though I doubt most people would know about it unless they were in academia or affiliated with the research universities involved.

Happy overall that my friends don't have to choose between their morals or making money working in the oil industry now that battery chemistry is the more lucrative alternative.

One thing I learned while reading on HN is that there is never ever any kind of job posting from battery companies. There is much much secrecy about what the battery companies are doing (for obvious reasons). Due to this, they contact Masters/Phd student directly for possible job offers based on research papers and/or word of mouth.

They supposedly do not post any job postings.

Makes sense. Most people I know usually work during the school year / summer as research assistants under a professor in their lab before going on to intern somewhere. Unlike with computer science, with more hands on type of sciences like chemistry, I'm sure having some lab experience is pretty important if you want to be a meaningful contributor during your internship.

I don't know much about how job postings online work, but quite a few companies come recruit during the school year, and all of the events are open to everyone as long as you're a student. So I'm not sure it's necessarily as closed off as you're making it out to be with having to be contacted on an individual basis.

In addition to using Panasonic’s IP, Tesla has been using Panasonic as a source of cheap capital for years. Now that Pana has shown reluctance to keep investing in the Gigafactory, Tesla is going to try it themselves: like insurance, shipping, auto body repair, seats, glass, software (where is CarPlay?), inference chips, AI, motors, packs, tequila, sales, service, and manufacturing in general. May this effort fare better than the poor flufferbot.

You don't really need Carplay or Android Auto in a Tesla. Those two systems plug in holes in crappy OEM infotainment systems.

You need CarPlay for Waze which is a great. Once Tesla can build its own Waze into the car, I'll wait for the ability to run Waze.

There is a free waze you can run in the car's web browser. It's https://teslawaze.azurewebsites.net. Go there in your car, give it permission to see your location and it shows busy roads, police, tolls, rain, etc. You can open this in a computer webbrowser to get a sense of it.

This is someone's private project. They use open street maps, plus multiple open data sets. It's awesome, favorite thing to use in my car.

I drive a Model S and I disagree. I'd prefer to have my own music and podcast apps. Car Play and Android Auto are a lot better UX-wise.

Indeed. The Tesla system has a mediocre navigation app, a really pretty awful audio app, and not much else of use. And Tesla’s voice commands are not very useful.

Please don't post duplicate comments.

Of course they do.

Their 3 advantages are:

1) motors

2) batteries

3) continuing vertical integration (Elon points this out)

So this is 2+3.

Ya my first thought was duh... single the biggest impact on their business it seems like. Kinda like Apple peeling off component after component.

Apple is quite different though, since it didn't start peeling off components until it was stable. Tesla is trying to solve every single difficult problem involved in producing a fully autonomous electric vehicle at production volume. Each individual part of that sentence is a very difficult problem to solve, so why are they wasting time on batteries when they haven't got volume or AD fixed yet?

Those are certainly the things they've been claiming as their advantages, but the battery tech is mostly bought in and their original in-house motor tech has basically nothing in common with the motors used in the Model 3.

Those are certainly the things they've been claiming as their advantages, but the battery tech is mostly bought in

The battery pack, control systems, and cooling systems are something you can get really right, or quite wrong. The cells themselves are important, of course. Given that they're a cost driver, a vertical integration move would be to bring them in house. Even if Tesla ultimately fails at cars, it might still have a future as a battery pack manufacturer.

Cells manufacturing is a totally different animal, and I wonder if Tesla is willing to burn money long enough to get as good as Panasonic and the other big players. Being colocated with Panasonic at the gigafactory is a huge leg up, but its still a very long term play that I'm not sure matches up with Elon's patience or Tesla's cash reserves.

>their original in-house motor tech has basically nothing in common with the motors used in the Model 3.

What point are you trying to make here? The model 3 uses a different motor because the target price band and performance requirements are different.

If you buy a Cruze from GM it comes with a cheaper, less performant motor than a CTS-V.

They are saying that if you don't put your different motor in your mass market product, then your mass market product isn't using your motor as a differentiator.

The Tesla motor(s) that Tesla puts in the Model 3 are considered the best in the field and significantly better in terms of performance and efficiency than the competitors. This has been shown through tear-downs as well as in the end result.

I’m really not sure what the OP is trying to say. The TM3 motor is absolutely a differentiator.

I guess define "different motor" - both the Model 3 and Model S/X motors were designed in-house by Tesla. It's not like they're ordering Model 3 motors from some Chinese ODM that makes the same motor for Tesla and Toyota and GM and Nissan and insert company.

The Ford Mustang and Chevy Camaro both have a V8. They both consider their motors differentiators due to the specifics of THEIR V8 implementation. Just because other companies might be using the same basic design principles doesn't mean that their specific implementation of that design isn't a differentiator.

The Model 3 motor works on a fundamentally different principle to the ones in all Tesla's previous cars, but it's very similar to the motor technology used by all the other modern electric cars. The best analogy I can come up with is that it's like a company which has only produced diesel cars claiming their engine experience gives them an advantage over all the other car manufacturers who've been producing petrol cars for a while when announcing their first petrol car. (It's not a perfect analogy - a car manufacturer which did that could probably reuse a lot more of their existing engine tech and experience than Tesla could.)

More specifically, Tesla's big advantage was that they had very sophisticated drive technology for using AC induction motors in electric vehicles. That's even where their name came from - this kind of motor was invented by Nikola Tesla originally. No-one else had this tech. With the Model 3, they abandoned this in favour of permanent magnet brushless motors very much like the ones all the other manufacturers were already using. Because of the very different way in which those motors work, they require completely different drive algorithms, pose entirely new engineering and materials challenges to manufacture, and give very different perforrmance characteristics. Tesla basically took all of the motor work that was supposed to give them a headstart, abandoned it, and started almost from scratch where the other manufacturers were years ago.

Tesla is buying the batteries but make the battery pack themselves. For the China factory they are planning to use Chinese batteries for the packs.

In this context it is important to note that Tesla just bought Maxwell, which have a very interesting dry electrode process which could make cell manufacturing quicker and cheaper. Also, the cells themselves are improved by the process.

Tesla bears think the Maxwell acquisition is key to beginning their own battery production. The idea being, the right time for Tesla to jump into the cell market is during a price/performance discontinuity, and Maxwell’s dry electrode production process represents one of those discontinuities.

Essentially: dry electrode will force the whole industry to re-tool, so Tesla is at less of a disadvantage as a newcomer in that moment of the development curve.

I'd say Tesla bears tend to think that the focus to go into battery production is mainly motivated by the ongoing deterioration of their relationship with Panasonic.

That relationship deterioration has been seen since the start of this year, which happens to coincide with talks of Tesla acquiring Maxwell.

Also Maxwell's ultracapacitors are spectacular, and could enable a lot of high end features and/or improve regenerative braking across the board. On the high performance models, the motors already tend to move more power than warm summer tires in the dry can even transmit; I'm not sure what the ratio of regen to mechanical/heat braking currently is, but it seems like they could do most non-emergency braking through the motors. Not sure if the batteries are the limiting factor on that right now though.

Once the battery is warm most braking is already regenerative unless you are driving quite aggressively and need to reduce speed very rapidly. At least that's how it seems to be in my 2015 S 70D.

So ultra capacitors would have the most impact where people have short commutes in cold climates. Would be handy for me and might make a significant difference in the winter as the nearest thing I do to commuting is a 22 km journey into town and the same coming back after the car has been sitting idle for hours. It takes between 5 and 10 km for the battery to be warm enough for regen to be effective.

But after that I can get 50 kW of regen which is plenty enough to slow the car in normal circumstances.

I wonder if this is because of Panasonic scaling back its investment in the gigafactory, or the cause of it.

Panasonic never "scaled back its investment". They already made the investment to produce 35 GWh but haven't been able to reach this production level yet. They'll invest more later, to reach the new 54 GWh target -- only when they start hitting the 35 GWh mark. Investing too early is unnecessary.

>companies had already together invested $4.5 billion in the facility and had been planning to expand the plant’s capacity to the equivalent of 54 gigawatt hours (GWh) a year in 2020 from 35 GWh at present.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-gigafactory-panason...

Note that today's 35 GWh capacity was a 2020 goal, so they really are ahead of their objectives: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...

Right as GigaFactory was being planned/announced, there was much speculation/rumors on internet that Tesla was having talks with Samsung about possibly working together to build the gigafactory. I wonder what happened to it...

I suspect you'd do something like this if you just had big results from the lab research. Throwing Panasonic out of the process increases the chance that the new battery chemistry doesn't leak.

Is going to be like The Boring Company, where they just buy Chinese parts and pass them off as their own?

I didn’t realise you could buy tunnels from China and import them so cheap!

In addition to using Panasonic’s IP, Tesla has been using Panasonic as a source of cheap capital for years. Now that Pana has shown reluctance to keep investing in the Gigafactory, Tesla is going to try it themselves: like insurance, shipping, auto body repair, seats, glass, software (where is CarPlay?), inference chips, AI, motors, packs, and manufacturing in general. May this effort fare better than the poor flufferbot.

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