Tesla’s former CTO is building a giant lithium-ion battery recycling operation
wsj.com
wsj.com
I know we would receive laptop batteries, phone batteries, and other rechargeables but they never made it into the bin. I hear now, anything with a screen costs money to recycle at Bestbuy. They really seem to be taking a step in the wrong direction. Better labelled bins, and easier access to recycling areas will make it easier for the average person to recycle, which in my opinion, is a net gain for us all.
There's a straightforward solution to this and the recycling problem:
1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery
2. Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents)
3. Pay the same amount back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant
There you go. This system has only one knob (the amount paid per battery) and by tweaking it you can adjust the incentive to recycle. You sit back and let the market sort out the details.
Not to mention that this would extend the lifetime of phones by making it easy to replace the battery.
This is certainly needed for lithium and other rechargeable battery tech going forward.
What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket?
If you throw other recyclables in regular bin, you would also get a warning the first time, and the workers would not pickup you trash after that if you continue. Not sure how they are incentivized to check the bins, but they do.
Garbage collection in the US is increasingly mechanized, with trucks grabbing cans and dumping the bagged trash into a hopper vs. a person handling the trash can and its contents. People living in higher density areas would just put their bagged trash in a dumpster, with multiple homes or apartments sharing a cluster of dumpsters. So, I think it would require staffing or technology changes to inspect trash for proper recycling. I also think there would be a lot of resistance to this for cost and privacy reasons.
Some states in the US do use a deposit system for other things besides batteries. Glass and plastic bottles in particular have some sort of scheme where I think you pay extra up front and get it back when you recycle the bottle, but I've never lived in a state that had this so I am not sure exactly how that works. Generally speaking though, I think people would respond well to "cash for trash" and overall a positive incentive like this would be more popular and effective than having trash inspected.
Whatever the manager wants to happen of course. Unless you actually check some places out, see how they handle recycling and hit them with a hefty fine if they don't do it properly.
Apple has argued that they can fit a bigger, harder to remove battery into devices, and the added capacity because it's bigger makes up for it being hard to remove. I've changed batteries on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and it's very straightforward; I'm not sure how much truth there isn't to that argument on laptops. Phones are so small that I find that explanation more plausible.
Samsung used to allow you to remove your battery easily but they also stopped at least in their flagship phone, last time I looked at one anyway. I know they also offer phones that do allow for this but the flagship phones really set the tone I feel for the downstream expectations over time.
Rather unfortunately I don’t think Apple sees value in removable batteries, which while I understand the trade offs I think is a net negative in this case
No, that would be the various libre phones that have in-tree kernel drivers and correspondingly support updates to the latest system indefinitely.
The default in the industry prior to Apple was for software to be independent from hardware. You can install the latest Windows on hardware going back to the earliest x64 processors and Linux or BSD on hardware going back more than 20 years.
If random community-supported Linux distributions can support hardware from the previous millennium, Apple could support all the iPhone hardware ever made, but they don't. So that's just another instance of them doing something user-hostile so you have to buy a newer iPhone and Samsung et al following them.
Offering battery replacements in that context is just another way for them to stick it to you -- you have a four year old iPhone with a flat battery, they take your money to put in a new one and then stop issuing it software updates a year later so you have to buy a new one regardless.
The same is true for smartphones. The original iPhone didn't have a very long support life but the iPhone 6S from 2015 is supported in iOS 14 giving it at least a 6 year lifespan.
If an android manufacturer guaranteed 5 years support and stock android available on the same day as google releases it then it be willing to give android another try.
Not even google themselves guarantee that. Some manufacturers are charging the same price as an iPhone with sometime less than 2 years with of OS upgrades.
On phones there's a better case for fixed batteries, but at least I don't mind another millimeter thickness if that means I can replace the battery.
The core charge would be returned if the user sells the phone to any legit business (funded by the core charge originally paid to Apple). If the user sells the phone on eBay, the buyer can recover the core charge later, so it’s part of the market value of any phone that has a battery in it.
The charge also could be recovered if the phone is given to a recycling center. It’s on Apple to figure out how to get the batteries out and pay whoever does that work. Apple can decide whether to do the engineering to make the battery replaceable up front, or fund the delicate labor of taking apart the phone later.
They will already recycle your battery for free. I think they will actually also recycle other manufacturers' batteries for free as well, and also any random loose batteries you hand them.
Seems pretty reasonable to me?
I wonder how much empty space is in current gen iPhones, the 7 had so much that a YouTuber was able to squeeze the adapter Apple shipped with it convert analog audio to Lightning externally entirely into the phone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LORsgF-fhgQ).
This is hardware engineering, and high quality engineering at that. When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.
It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.
So yeah, it is an "All Apple would have to do", but evidence is Apple is much better at deciding what it should and shouldn't do than back-seat designers. Sorry if that sounds a bit brusque, a nerve might have been hit here. But hardware isn't easy.
This fallacy seems to be common in discussions of Apple. Apple is very profitable, therefore everything they do is infallible and impossible to improve.
Look at a picture of an Openmoko device. Just look at it. Here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
Compare this to various modern phones with a replaceable battery:
https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones-removab...
There are obvious reasons to expect the former to fail in the market but not the latter, even though they all have a replaceable battery.
Meanwhile the Apple devices further run iOS and are compatible with iMessage and the complete set of third party iOS apps, which are a large component of their success, but none of which would be any less true if they had a replaceable battery.
Doing a lot of things right can't prove that they're not doing a specific thing wrong.
Rather, they are iterating upon the same few products with a zillion engineers in eensy weensy form factors where space is at a premium, so they probably think about why they do things a certain way.
There is a good reason, and the reason is that Apple doesn't want people to easily repair their phones.
There is an esthetic consideration in that they won't be able to use a glass back, but that's seriously minor. They can put paint and gloss on top of ceramic or tons of other solutions for just a bit more cost.
I'd bet a lot that the primary reason they did this was to make the device a fraction of a millimetre thinner; Apple seems to obsessed with thinness at the cost of everything else.
Personally, I'd much prefer an ever-so-slightly thicker phone with a removable battery, and I rather doubt I'm alone in that.
I don't expect most people to refurbish their own iPhones, the way I do mine. That seems like it would be a weird thing to expect most people to do. And what's wrong with the million small shops that do battery replacements, or with Apple stores' own such service, that requires the "not difficult" total redesign you're so anxious to see happen?
This really isn't a total redesign, by the way, and it doesn't just apply to the battery, but helps repairing everything else. In any case, it absolutely isn't a total redesign, and FWIW the iPhones don't even have that much battery compared to more repairable phones of the same size.
This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.
I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.
Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50.
You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great.
Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.
It's much easier to find the replacement part for the phone - as long as it's not more than maybe 5 years old - then it is to find the replacement part for the washing machine.
That's been my experience, anyway. Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.. but I don't have much problem finding anything else I ever want to buy on the internet.
Usually the manufacturer has them, though they may optimize for selling to service professionals, and these days there tend to be third-party sellers more focussed on consumers, as well (and you can often get parts on Amazon.)
IME, getting the right part number is often the hardest thing, though usually docs available from the manufacturer (even for units no longer sold) can be downloaded that provide this, and lots of time searching by description and appliance model can find the part, too.
My experience with this has been terrible for e.g. circular saws & power drills, to name one example.
I had a part I needed for a Makita circular saw & Black & decker power drill. In both cases buying every replacement part would easily cost 10-20x of the retail price of a new saw or power drill, compared to maybe 1.5-2x in the case of a modern phone. The aftermarket for OEM car parts is similarly brutal for most manufacturers, but for some happy reason phones are the exception.
Can I ask what phone(s) you are talking about? I replaced the battery of an iPhone 7 recently, and maybe it was just early in the evolution of these designs, but putting the screen back on with the sealant ring was the easiest part. Personally found it much harder to break the adhesive - definitely the longest step, but this was my first modern phone battery replacement.
Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone.
My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver.
Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.
Meanwhile I've repaired my old washing machine quite easily.
Do you also think that Fairphone is “a lot more bulky” and “missing the mark”?
I think that Apple simply designs their devices with planned obsolescence for more profit.
My mother inherited my late-2014 iPhone 6. It still gets security updates, although it won't run the current iOS.
The battery started to swell, so she took it in for a new one. They replaced it with a refurb, since they aren't authorized to do replacements of swollen batteries on-site. It cost her as much as a replacement battery would. Presumably, the original has been refurbished and someone else is using it.
If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.
I don’t think that’s true at all. The Fairphone 2 came out the year after your mothers’s iPhone and got an OS update this year, and if she had it then she would be authorized and likely capable of replacing the battery herself.
Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size.
The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down.
Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum.
There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.
It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.
Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.
Or do you want to avoid a 4 year old Android phone because of performance?
With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case.
But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.
Before June 2007 every mobile phone had an easily replaceable battery, except some extremely niche “design phones” like the Nokia 7280 [1].
I'll gladly take the daily convenience of sturdier, more durable devices over the once-every-two-years convenience of a battery replacement with less labor. It's an excellent design trade off, IMHO.
Calling them non-replaceable makes people think these devices are far less repairable than they actually are. And with the prevalence of phone repair shops, we really need to stop calling them "non-replaceable."
Certainly they can't be swapped out on a daily basis. But that's a very very different use case.
On one of those drops, the tiny plastic hinge holding the door on broke, and that was the end of that flip phone. It wasn't a popular enough model that I could find a replacement door online.
Compactness is definitely a major tradeoff though.
By the very nature of the design constraint, a removable battery will take up more space inside a device than the same chemistry packaged without the protective case, springs to hold the contacts in place, and so on.
That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this.
That's making a lot of unstated assumptions. To start with, that the battery needed to consume all available space. The width and length of the phone are determined by the size of the screen, and a certain minimum depth is required to prevent this:
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a...
So then you have the dimensions of the phone already dictated by concerns other than the battery. At that point you could still use all of the available space for a battery, but if that's more battery capacity than you actually need, it makes the phone heavier. So you could very well already have some unused space inside the phone and not have any trade off with thickness at all, and in practice this is true for several phones that nonetheless have epoxied batteries.
Moreover, even if the trade off you're describing exists for a given phone, that doesn't prove it's significant. Do we have to destroy the environment over a fraction of a millimeter?
You know what carries less risk of fire than quick charging? Swapping a battery.
This doesn't prevent battery recycling, but it does junk the entire phone, which as you saynis harder to recycle.
Mandate standardized batteries. (Perhaps antitrusting battery manufacture would achieve this automatically, since they'd make more money.) California has led this kind of change before, with citizen bills. C'mon California!
If it isn't profitable to recycle, you can make it profitable by making the fee reclaimable when it's recycled.
It's quite possible that throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved and raw resources become more scarce might be the best way to go. This cycle has already occurred with old electronics (companies are successfully mining garbage dumps for the gold connectors and traces).
The fact that there have been instances where this has occurred doesn't mean its a good plan. I agree that not all plans work out in retrospect, but neither does doing nothing. If we look at the balance of cases, we have done a lot more harm with a lack of environmental policies than we have with poor policies.
Overall the mechanism is solid enough. If a product has EOL issues, a recycling deposit builds the solution into the initial price. It doesn't even need to be recycling. Could be safe disposal.
A perfect example is ethanol. It's pretty clear especially by now that we would be better off investing in solar/wind and electric cars, but good luck getting rid of those ethanol subsidies and related legislation.
The recycling industry itself is another example. Now that China is no longer buying our recycling (due to the extreme air pollution generated when processing it), waste management companies don't know what to do with it and most are just dumping it in landfills. Of course we're still paying them to collect it and requiring everyone to continue sorting.
My Samsung Galaxy S6 has a thickness of 6.8mm and a 2550mAh battery that requires unglueing to replace [1].
I'd much rather carry around the extra 1.8mm for the extra repairability.
[0] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php
> You sit back and let the market sort out the details.
You say this but you are suggesting the imposition of a very substantial regulation.
That has definitely cut down on a lot of waste.
1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery
How do you propose to mandate this?
That would shift the market pretty quickly towards user replaceable batteries.
They are fewer these days, but they still exist:
Better recycling may not be equal to ease of replacement.
Not if you choose a company that cares about the environment: https://fairphone.com
We do this with the likes of glass bottles and beverage cans and lot of them just end up in the trash. It only makes sense economically because consumers can bring them back in large batches, but even then the money you get back often doesn't justify the extra hassle economically.
If you're going to raise the price until it does you've just recreated the cobra effect[1].
Indeed, the comparison with bottle deposit programmes is apt— there are people in my city who rifle through blueboxes on the curb pulling out refundable items. Maybe this bothers some people, but it seems like a reasonable thing; you couldn't directly pay someone to do that work, but you can incentivize it to happen anyway, same as shopping carts get gathered up and returned by homeless people for a dollar a pop. If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return, that would be terrific!
Yes they are. You can buy Li-ion batteries of the mAh size commonly used in phones for $1-2 in bulk on AliExpress. Any price incentive to return them is going to either be too low for most people to bother, or so high that you'd have an incentive to produce batteries just to throw them away.
> If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return [..., it works for bottle deposit programmes!]
This works for bottles because e.g. on a Friday night in a major city trashcans downtown are going to be full of drink bottles. This works because there's a lot of them, they're big and obvious, and people consume them in large quantities.
A battery in a phone that you keep for months or years isn't worth digging through general trash for.
I recycle my own batteries because it's easy to do while I'm at it for some feel-good about reducing pollution. I'm not against recycling. I'm just saying that I don't see how a price incentive for this makes sense.
the point of a deposit is that it's charged on the production, and only refunded on the return. you're not just paying people to return batteries. If there was a $5 deposit on a phone-sized lithium-ion battery, it would no longer be possible to buy those batteries for $1-2 because the deposit would have to be charged on import.
This sort of deposit scheme makes sense and works for e.g. glass beer bottles because in practice they're high-volume items (a consumer might return a 24 bottle crate/week), and the bottles/crates are actually still useful items in themselves and can be immediately returned to consumer circulation after some washing and gluing a new label on them.
The price/volume/weight of glass bottles & beer crates also makes any sort of return fraud impractical.
As opposed to Li-ion batteries which are going to be broken when they're returned. How is a vending machine that gives me money for a deposited phone battery going to know the difference between a battery and a piece of wood I covered in some duct-tape and wires?
And all for what? Reducing Li-ion pollution? It isn't some massive problem in developed countries, and people mostly do sort their batteries in recycling if given the chance.
So again, I'm not arguing that the recycling is a bad idea, but that this idea of giving it a price incentive in this case is a terrible idea.
Whereas the suggestions in this thread that I've been replying to are going to involve some combination of a massive ramp-up in customs inspections, as well as local recycling facilities where returned Li-ion batteries would need to be manually inspected. It just doesn't seem worth it.
I worked briefly at the Molson plant in Etobicoke and they literally have machines which cut apart skids of 12-pack boxes, wash off the old labels, all of it.
I ask because with the current system those individuals have basically zero protections -- they aren't guaranteed at least minimum wage, they have no compensation if they aren't working (e.g. if they were stabbed by something in the blue bin), they generally have no other benefits (more of an issue in the US with healthcare, but this isn't a peachy situation elsewhere either), and so on.
The fact that the current incentive structure makes rifling through refuse attractive points to some sort of deeper issue. While I'm spitballing a bit with ideas, do you agree that something seems off with the status quo?
Depending on how implemented, you can combat this. In CA, it's a deposit you pay on purchase. You get that deposit back on turning in the recyclable item. There are problems (it's illegal to bring items in from out of state for obvious reasons, and the bulk rate paid to the collection centers for the material needs to be closely kept track of (or just let them deal with it and require they accept all items in the program to be official, I dunno).
A Federal law would be easier, as then you wouldn't have to worry about transfer between states, and we already track goods at the border with customs. Better ability to control fraud would allow higher deposit rates, and I imagine you could charge based on mAh or something (maybe with a logarithmic scale so car batteries are enormously expensive, but still something you have to pay for and want to recycle). If every phone had a $10-$15 deposit for the battery, I think that's enough that people would definitely recycle, or other people would do it for them.
There's info on how well the program is working here.[1]
1: http://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/current-and-proposed-law...
I'm sure the rates would be a bit lower if poverty was eliminated. Plenty of people collection bottles from trash cans and parks. The high rates imply that most people recycle bottles consumed in their own house though.
Of course not all recycling is BS as this article shows. But we should change the automatic narrative of "recycling=good, landfill=bad" because it encourages practices that are wasteful both for the economy and environment.
As an alternative, charge corporations exactly what it costs to recycle anything found in the waste stream. Which puts the responsibility on someone who can actually change things to reduce this cost. The only way to avoid this charge entirely is to add a "This is not recyclable" logo that is big enough that no-one will miss it.
Only then can we can blame consumers that continue to buy those items, but not before.
I do agree though that recycling does help feed the *vicious cycle of consumption by hiding or misrepresenting the negative externalities.
(Edited to fix virtuous typo. Meant vicious)
People skip the reduce&reuse and go straight to recycle because it allows them to signal that virtue without actually doing all that much after all. It is still better than nothing but it's more signal than virtue. It's quite possibly the least anyone can do in terms of effort, throw the copious amounts of trash in 2-3 bins instead of one.
It's the same with EVs. Where the focus should be to reduce the use of cars (with many, many benefits that come as side effects), we actually encourage people to drive more by moving the costs upfront in the purchase price and making driving even cheaper. This means people will have to get their money's worth by driving more. It also allows people to have a massive carbon footprint while still virtue signaling via the fact that they drive an EV, or recycle the battery.
I don't have to look any further than my closest neighbor who buys a new SUV every 2 years, the latest being a Model X. Just a couple of months ago in casual conversation he pointed out the fact that I own a (admittedly old, decade+) gasoline car, even if with a tiny engine. It would be much cleaner to buy an EV he says. No consideration to the fact that recently I drive my car under 2000Km per year and ride a bicycle or public transport as much as I reasonably can.
I used to get into an argument about how recycling really only makes much sense when it's energetically cheaper (e.g. aluminum), but I was usually just wasting my breath so now my normal response is that baby seal is just the appetizer.
Is there a term for virtue signaling to one's self?
Or maybe not; it just demonstrates 'virtue signalling' has about as much semantic payload as 'fake news' at this point. One consequence of internet-driven constant political engagement is that neologisms devolve into shibboleths really quickly.
When I take batteries to the recycling center, that's not something that my friends typically hear about.
Doing it myself would require $34 in parts plus tools and skill I don’t have.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+SE+Battery+Replacement/6...
Because these are extremely lightweight, compact, water-resistant devices. There isn't room for old-style battery compartments. Every micrometer is squeezed here.
The other benefit is that Apple will make sure they all get recycled. I don't know this as a fact, but it seems that most of the folks who want to jump on this as evidence that Apple is evil are the same people who are willing to spend a bit more for greener solutions in general. Having Apple replace and recycle is greener than having millions of users tossing old batteries into trash cans. (Don't kid yourself, this will happen if iPhone batteries are easily replaceable.) Yes, there is some marginal cost for this ecological advantage. But it seems like a good tradeoff to me at least.
My 6s is 5 years old. Had the battery replaced once so far. Going strong running the latest OS. $49 for 5 years of use. Not too bad.
All in all, I just have a hard time understanding all the emotional anger over this issue. It is just not a big deal in practice (in my experience). I guess it has been a problem for others, although I wonder if the angry folks actually have iPhones. To each their own.
Battery replacement costs and recycling info: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/battery-powe... https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
Until recently, I think quite a bit of recycling is a sham. I've spent a bit of time as a hobby tracking down recycling (in my high school growing up, etc) and effectively none of it made it to actually being recycled.
In other places they just mandate this stuff.
Gentle reminder "recycle" is the last thing to do in the "reduce, reuse, recycle".
Live in a small home/apartment, don’t eat meat or dairy products, don’t drive or fly in planes, and don’t have kids. That’s how someone who lives in a modern developed nation can “do their part” for the planet. I live that way but almost nobody else is willing.
Wringing your hands that batteries get thrown out instead of recycled is like complaining the toilet is running when the house is on fire.
Based on the "furnace" picture and language about melting down the batteries, it seems like their approach is to just treat the incoming batteries as "enriched ore" and proceed with an energy-intensive, standard, metal extraction process.
So what they save is the huge amount of energy and dirtiness required to dig in the earth (in the few suitable places on the earth) for rocks with <.5% metal content and crush those rocks into dust, which is substantial, but not revolutionary?
E.g. everybody is talking about exotic battery chemistries while Tesla is able to wring out significantly more performance from their existing chemistry by doing tabless electrodes.
You could argue that the focus on revolutionary progress versus incremental improvements is sometimes holding us back.
I agree. Despite all the ecological issues with internal combustion engines (ICE), consider the massive improvements in efficiency in the last half and quarter centuries. Some of those were small "revolutionary" changes (variable valve timing, turbocharging, electronic fuel injection, direct injection) but constant iteration and competition drove up efficiency also.
We shouldn't dismiss significant improvement in better fuel sources because the step forward isn't a big enough step. Embrace any improvements we can get. Time is running out.
Did you know you can see exactly how much companies are spending on R&D and reinvesting in the company in a company's financial statements? Did you know that Tesla invests a relatively small amount in R&D, and that the number has been stagnant for years? They barely spend enough to cover maintenance on their current facilities. Have you compares this to other auto companies?
Where do people get this idea that Tesla generates massive cash that it reinvests back into the company (a la Amazon)?
Discounted cash flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow) is being used to value companies for this reason.
That's an expected dividend.
What is the DCF available to shareholders of a company that never pays a dividend? Nothing.
Government bonds are safer still, but on the right time horizon index funds have had better rates of return.
Point is, you have to park your savings somewhere, because if you leave them in the bank, the paltry returns of a savings account won't maintain purchasing power relatively to inflationary devaluation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38
Apparently they use remaining electricity to power the crunching step.
That's an interesting/unfortunate choice of words given the well-documented issues with lithium-ion batteries :-)
>To JB Straubel, one of the brains behind Tesla Inc., TSLA -1.13%▲ that refuse holds the key to driving the electric car revolution forward—and making the vehicles affordable enough for everyone to own one.
Could someone help?
>Mr. Straubel said in his first in-depth interview about his new venture since it was formed in 2017 while still at Tesla.
Was that with Tesla's blessing?
(Prounuced 'ref-use', rhymes with 'refuge'.)
Ref-use: ref as in referee, use as in noose, or loose.
But then in en-gb we'd say "waste" or maybe "rubbish".
In the US we say ref as in referee, use as in news or lose, fwiw.
I’ve been interested in setting up some free local e-waste collection for recycling, but it seems like the cost of collection and sorting is more than the price I can get for it.
I work with a company that recycles older hybrid batteries from Toyota, Honda, Ford. Most of these are NiMH and pay $0.40-$0.80 per pound for the Nickel value alone.
So a NiMH hybrid battery is worth $50 for the core from a Prius, but a lithium battery from a Nissan Leaf would cost you ~$700 to recycle.
Very few companies are doing more than lip service on the very difficult (sometimes impossible) task of dirty work to get recycled materials into the supply chain as a viable (and someday better) alternative than new raw materials from the earth.
This has so many implications if successful – you can compete with mining 1:1. It allows a company to handle disruptions in the traditional supply chain, etc. But, today this is hard to do and you often only see post-consumer recycled materials used behind-the-scenes (e.g. a plastic frame holding a non-essential chamber) or in packaging (e.g. bamboo ink, cardboard boxes without white paint), but it's rarely used in what the consumer sees (notable exception: The Google Nest Mini "fabric" is made from plastic bottles).
As more devices rely on batteries, we need to think about how we can start harvesting those materials for re-use ourselves and not just shipping overseas and closing our eyes. It's much more expensive to intentionally source recycled materials today and that is, unfortunately, a losing proposition for most manufacturers.
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https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/google-newest-nest...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/18/apples-2019-envir...
What's new is Tim Higgins giving JB Straubel space in the pages of WSJ to run a PR campaign for his company.
will need to dig around but recall seeing a screenshot of either an analyst call or archived page that suggested someone let it slip this was a Tesla subsidiary and not a completely unrelated entity.
Scrap inventory has a severely depreciated value - the emails that have surfaced suggest they may have tried to hide it under “Work in Progress” where they could value it fully.
If they actually wrote down $100M+ in battery inventory that would be a massive shock - no investor is considering that level of scrap in valuing the company right now.
If they have a secret subsidiary they could sell it to this entity at some bloated price without anyone knowing.
This company then becomes some highly indebted entity that will probably eventually go bankrupt but save Tesla’s valuation.
Ultimately, it's up to them how to value it, within reason and the law, just like it's up to them when to sell emissions credits.
In order to qualify for the S&P 500, Tesla needed a cumulative four quarter profit. Q1 and Q2 2019 were "take out the trash" quarters, with $702 million and $408 million in losses respectively, for a cumulative loss of $1.11 billion.
In the four quarters since that time, Tesla has posted profits of $143, $105, $16 and $104 million, for a combined profit of $368 million. The previous two quarters were heavily juiced with credit sales to shore them up to be a slight profit.
This fits the criteria for S&P 500 inclusion, and also solidifies the notion that Tesla can be profitable - it's just taking losses like Amazon, investing in the future.
A company that purely focuses on engineering and ignores the short term would have instead sold credits as they came in, and not structured expenses and income to achieve the result that they did. If Tesla had instead posted 6 losses in a row of ~$125 million they'd be materially worse off, both from an investor perception perspective and by not qualifying for the S&P 500.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with playing these games. The "shorts" point them out to denigrate the company, but I don't think that makes sense. The fact that Musk has such tight control over the company is a major competitive advantage. The CEO of VW could not have done the same thing.
And that is perhaps the greatest advantage of all that Tesla has over many other companies, especially in the car industry, but generally (excluding only Amazon and parts of Apple/Google): Tesla is not run by beancounters with a next-quarterly only mindset, but by someone with a long-term vision and a general engineering focus with deep pockets.
Not many companies these days go for extensive, ground-breaking, costly R&D that Tesla does, and those that do rarely go to the length of Tesla/SpaceX. For most companies that level of investment would flatten their stock value, shareholders would be angry... but Elon Musk (and similarly Jeff Bezos) are impressive personalities that manage to keep the beancounter hawks at bay.
huh? you realize that Tesla spends less than $300M a quarter in R&D when companies they now dwarf like Ford and GM consistently spend more than $1B each?
in fact Tesla’s R&D spend has noticeably shrunk since last year, which is another head scratcher considering how many projects they claim to be working on, including a “full rewrite of FSD”
I don't think the two of you have points in contention. That is to say, I think it is accurate to say that Ford and GM _spend_ more on R&D but Tesla _executes_ more on R&D. In fact, I would say that very discontinuity forms much of the basis for Tesla's very (some would say irrationally) high P/E ratio!
Only one of these has long term impacts but they are both "R&D"
Either they are publicly exaggerating the scope of the projects they are working on (eg the “million mile” battery and “full rewrite of FSD”), severely underpaying engineers and understaffed, or something else.
Other companies might consider exoskeleton a R&D thing, Tesla just handles that as part of their Cybertruck development cost.
The same goes for a lot of their developments.
What matters is how fast and how often new technology goes into your next product. If you look at the Cybertruck, how many innovative stuff there is, I really don't care how much R&D they have, I'm just impressed with how many innovations they bring to market with each iteration of their cars.
John DeLorean achieved his original initial career arc by resurrecting the Pontiac brand. Technically speaking, there wasn't a terrible amount of innovation there -- the idea was using existing products in a new way by putting a bigger engine into a smaller frame and marketing it in a sexy manner. But it took off like wildfire. He invented the idea of a muscle car.
So, as sibling comments say, you may not buy the efficiency argument, but will you buy the focus argument? Tesla made a name out of doubling down on the future instead of the past. They were first to market with a vehicle so iconic it become eponymous with the sector itself. They built a global supercharger network to challenge the whole idea of a gasoline vehicle being the norm. Personal feelings regarding the antics of their founder (and horrible mismanagement/mistreatment of ICs inside the company) aside, I have a lot of respect for the innovations that their product culture has achieved.
Starting from 0, valuing employee opinion, and removing red tape saves countless employee hours and makes good people stay.
The only ones doing real new work that is available to buy instead of investing ludicrous amounts of money shaving half grams of fleet CO2 from doomed ICEs and ungodly amounts of lobbying are Toyota with their Prius, BMW with the i3, i8 and whatever is slated for 2021 and VW with their modular platform (and all three are still not even close to catching up to Tesla). The rest are dealing, at best, with toy projects, greenwashing, that will not have any major impact. After all, SUVs have fat margins while most electric projects are cash burners.
It is fine if you don't like Elon or how he runs his company, but it is absurd to suggest that this is a shell company and not an actual effort to improve recycling technology.
Did Tesla fund this company? Or Elon? What transactions have taken place between Tesla and this co?
Tesla had $100M+ of scrap inventory they pretended was still good and then somehow created a subsidiary out of thin air and "sold" the scrap to it?
I don't understand where the $100M the subsidiary paid materialised from. How is any of this possible.
What's preventing others from having secret fake subsidiaries and printing money out of nowhere?
The question is who funded this company and what transactions have they made with Tesla?
but obviously no one will tell you those two things.
M isn't out any money. B has a lot of waste to process, batteries maybe. C has $100M extra on their balance sheet. There'd be some wastage: capital gains taxes, ancillary costs.
Does that kind of thing work?
Spend $100 million to prop up billions.
Note that I'm commenting in the abstract, not commenting in support of fraud as an explanation. I have no information or opinion about this battery recycling company.
also it’s the clearest sign of accounting fraud...but apparently the SEC doesn’t care to investigate that anymore.
Get the word out. Batteries are bad hydrogen is good. Current hydrogen gas will have more energy than batteries at peak technology growth. This matters because hydrogen cars are cheaper, more scalable, and more inclusive than battery cars. Rich people get battery cars, you get a battery bike.
Compare two vehicles of the same overall type. A Toyota Mirai, one of the only hydrogen cars available, with a Long-Range Model 3.
Msrp: $58,550 for the Mirai, $46,990 for the LR Model 3.
Range: 312 miles for the Mirai, 322 for Model 3 LR.
Curb weight (!): 4075lbs for the Mirai, 4072lbs for the Model 3 LR.
Top speed, 0-60mph: 111mph and 9s for the Mirai; 145mph and 4.4s Model 3 LR
Cost per mile: $0.33 per mile for Toyota Mirai in LA https://www.toyotasantamonica.com/toyota-mirai-faqs/#:~:text....
About $0.05 per mile for the Tesla Model 3 LR (19 cents per kWh in LA for households average, ~4 miles per kWh) for home charging and $0.07 per mile for Model 3 LR with Supercharging (about 28 cents per kWh).
Battery-electric cars are basically cheaper and more convenient and more efficient and better in virtually every single way. (Even lighter for more range, which I was surprised at.)
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(The parent comment has since been edited.)
BEVs are only lighter in certain cases, like passenger cars. They become heavier/provide less range than the FCEV equivalent for larger sizes, like with large SUVs, pickup/semi-trailer trucks, etc. Additionally, electrified boats, ships, trains, and airplanes will likely make use of fuel cells.
FCEVs have the advantage of faster (5-minute) refueling, a low self-discharge rate, and have better resistance to temperature extremes.
Current FCEV production numbers are very low. As FCEV production increases, the cost will come down: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge....
An FCEV would make a good option for someone who wants to drive a completely electric car but who doesn't have convenient access to charging stations. Perhaps they live in an apartment and/or work at a place with a limited number of/no charging stations.
It ignores both the cost and environmental damage of each energy source.
If we discover a way to extract energy from little kittens more efficiently than from oil, according to you we should start building kitten farms for fuel. This is absurd :)
Alternatively think of the low energy output of solar and wind power. In order to get more energy, you have to use more land and real estate. Are we supposed to chop down the entire rainforest and destroy poor people neighborhoods to get more energy.
No, people are not chopping down the rainforest for solar panels and integrating wind turbines into a forest is absolutely trivial with minimal loss of land. [0]
The primary reason why rain forests are being destroyed is by what I personally call "disposable agriculture". Poor farmers set a part of the rainforest on fire. The resulting ashes drop down on the land and the farmer starts tilling the soil. The ashes act as a natural fertilizer. The farmer then plants his monoculture field and exports the harvest. The top soil in the rainforest is not very deep. Without trees it is prone to being blown or washed away. Additionally exporting the harvest means that organic matter is being taken away from the location which further depletes the topsoil. After 3 years the land is worthless and the farmer has to move onto the next location. Rinse and repeat. A single farmer can easily destroy hundreds of acres of rainforest.
Depletion of nutrients is not exclusive to the rainforest though. Regular farmland also suffers from this which is why farmers have to use artificial fertilizer. You can farm in the rainforest even if you can't afford fertilizer. This is why it is being destroyed.
[0] https://static2.bigstockphoto.com/5/1/3/large1500/315311371....
There is basically no infrastructure either. Additionally hydrogen infrastructure is incredibly expensive to deploy and to keep running. Using the already existing power infrastructure is just so much smarter its not even close.
Add to all that that nobody has ever produced fuel cells at that scale at anywhere the price you would need. It also contains lots of expensive metals that would make scaling to millions of cars very challenging. Compared to batteries that consists of lithium, nikel, graphite and silicon, with maybe some cobalt but that will be gone soon. All easily available materials that can scale.
Any automaker that is still perusing fuel cells will be dealt harsh kicks by the market over and over again. At least they can keep sucking in government money to continue development, instead the government funding sulfer-lithium batteries that have way more potential.
Also, hydrogen has how much - 60% energy loss?
Whenever I see people use this phrase in a debate context, I give the argument less credit because it's meant to evoke an emotional response, but adds little to the discussion.
There are all sorts of companies , some big, some small, some more profit-driven, some less, some with more flexible ethics, etc. A company being big or small doesn't inherently make it bad, and small companies aren't inherently good.
It might also disrupt the status quo. Electrolysis (I assume this is where you're getting your hydrogen) just takes water and electric. People might even have home systems that can do it. That said, I still think hydrogen is, for the most part, silly, because of the electric requirement. Might as well use the electric as electric.
I don't think time favors hydrogen cars. The underlying technology was available over 50 years ago (used on Gemini spacecraft as hydrogen fuel cells in the mid 1960s, and in stationary form in the early 1930s, first developed in the lab in the 1830s). Lithium chemistry has advanced dramatically in the time since it was first invented. There were no rechargeable lithium chemistry batteries 50 years ago, even in the lab. And they didn't enter practical use until the 1990s and significant yearly progress continues today.
Time favors lithium chemistry rechargeable batteries.
With lithium annodes we are at a point where you can replace most air-travel with battery planes.
There is way more upside for improvement in batteries compared to fuel cells.
Fuel cells have no future in transportation unless there is some fundamental breakthrew that nobody can anticipate, nothing I have seen even in research improves fuel cell technology enough to make it viable.
I also don't see how fuel cells beat ICE even a renewable produced carbon fuel like methanol or Dimethyl ether. I would prefer small nuclear reactors but I seem to be the only one.