Tesla says its battery innovations will deliver its goal of a $25,000 car

I think that one of the big advantages of tabless batteries is supposed to be that they have a much larger contact area which makes them easier to cool, particularly spirally wound Li-Ion which is going to be hottest near the core.

But this is an area of active research and a fairly complex modeling problem, and I’m no expert.

700 should be 70 shouldn't it?

Depends on where you get the numbers for the current inflation rate.

Currently all the inflation is being concentrated in real estate prices.

If that starts spilling over into auto (with low interest loans, etc.) or consumer goods, we could see it increase.

The Fed just alluded to being okay with inflation above 2% for a few years if the weighted average was below 2% due to years like these.

I guess? It's more of a battery manufacturing breakthrough than a battery tech breakthrough. I'm not trying to rag on Tesla. It is quite a breakthrough that will help achieve better manufacturing throughput, it just did not live up to the hype that Elon generated. I was hoping that Tesla had a breakthrough in regard to some new exotic battery type.

Model 3 was hyped as $35k car, with an additional $7.5k tax credit on top of that for early adopters. In reality it's $45-50k car. What they do offer for $35k is purely to tick the box (and also when it finally arrived tax breaks were long gone for Tesla).

If history repeats itself this new model will be first true $35k Tesla.

If you look at the Chinese market, basically the likes of Tesla and VW are an extremely lucrative but relatively small part of a market that is simply huge with an average sales price well below the cheapest cars in the EU or US. The US and much of the EU is simply not covering the low end of the market at all that exists in China and other developing markets.

There are Chinese and Indian car manufacturers in the process of ramping up production of EVs that cost in the order of as little as 5000$. These replace similarly priced petrol cars that were never even on the market in the EU and the US. They're not going to be breaking any records in terms of range, premium features, etc. But they'll be affordable for the masses in developing economies. Basically it's cheap manufacturing and mass production of outdated but proven technology.

Selling a 5000$ car in the EU or US is not a thing. It's not a technical problem but a problem of that market not making sense when you can also sell a 25K, 50K or 75K model to the same person and when you are essentially supply limited. Creating that market would erode the high end of the market. And this is where manufacturers earn their profits. This problem does not exist in developing markets where that high end is comparatively small because of the income distribution being different.

Simply put there's a huge amount of people for whom 5K is about the maximum they are going to be able to spend on a car. Most of those people are not in the EU or the US. Hence the volume production of cheap EVs for that segment is happening in markets where these people do exist in large numbers.

Even the differences between the EU and the US are kind of striking here. The US does not like small cars. The EU does not like big cars. There are a lot of cars on the market in the EU that are not even for sale in the US. And vice versa. There are dominant car brands in the EU that have 0 sales in the US.

So, Tesla saying that they will go as low as 25K is basically a function of their growth plans in the US. They've nailed the high end of the market and are profitable there. They are now about to enter the middle segment of the market. They are literally ramping up production and new factories as fast as they can. Every kwh of battery they produce they can sell. So, dropping the price point of products only happens when the market for higher priced cars gets to the saturation point. There's no need for them to go any lower than that before that.

Who's paying you to downplay what was actually announced?

1)56% reduction in cost (which blows way past the $100/kwh holy grail for EV to sub $40). This by itself is insane and most people in the industry thought it wont happen for at least another decade. This puts the last nail in the coffin for the future of ICE cars.

2) 54% increase in range. The new Model S will have minimum 520mi of range and much more actually when they start production. Range anxiety gone out the window.

3) New manufacturing tech along with vertical integration will allow Tesla to scale 55x their current rate of production and become the world's largest auto manufacturer by many multiples. Tesla will not only produce their own battery cells but they're even getting into mining!!

Along with many other things announced in 3+ hour technical video. But yea 16% density improvement is the only takeaway from this...

Edit: I like how you're editing your original comment after I've already replied without any mention of it. Please practice honest forum etiquette.

That's just from the improvement of the cells themselves, they also talked about an additional 10% decrease in mass and a 14% increase in range due to the integration of the battery pack into the body of the car, which the new, larger cells will allow them to do. An overall improvement of 30% range with these changes ain't too shabby, and that's from incremental improvements to what they are already doing. Honestly everything they covered today seemed so straight forward and feasible that it just seemed kind of boring, but the changes combined are quite impressive. The important part of the presentation really, is the total overall cost reduction of the battery pack of 56%, that's what leads them to believe they can produce a $25,000 car.

> It announced it is confident that in the near future it will be able to deliver the same thing it's said it would deliver in the nearish future a decade ago

They also said that this one will be fully self-driving.

I'm not gonna hold my breath...

They're absolutely pushing the state of the art forward, kudos for that, but they're constantly overpromising and underdelivering.

With gas prices so low and likely to remain as such until the economy recovers, ICE cars are a better short term investment(on a personal level. I'm not counting externalities or AGW here).

There's something about Musk that rubs me the wrong way, but I do hope he succeeds in making electric vehicles the norm. That said, ICE cars won't die until we force them to die with carbon taxes and other disincentives.

Copy pasting previous comment since the number of people misrepresenting the ground breaking tech that was announced is to high to spend energy on:

1)56% reduction in cost (which blows way past the $100/kwh holy grail for EV to sub $40). This by itself is insane and most people in the industry thought it wont happen for at least another decade. This puts the last nail in the coffin for the future of ICE cars.

2) 54% increase in range. The new Model S will have minimum 520mi of range and much more actually when they start production. Range anxiety gone out the window.

3) New manufacturing tech along with vertical integration will allow Tesla to scale 55x their current rate of production and become the world's largest auto manufacturer by many multiples. Tesla will not only produce their own battery cells but they're even getting into mining!!

Along with many other things announced in a 3+ hour technical video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6T9xIeZTds

Currently EVs are < 1% of cars. What Tesla showed today was a path to increase that significantly with the cost per kWh reduced by 56% and 7x improvement in factory production footprint.

16% is just including the cell production process. Not the anode or cathode chemistry changes.

When demand exceeds supply, it makes sense to prioritize higher margin cars first. They did release $35k model 3 but people were willing to pay more for a few extras.

Technology wise it is not something entirely new. Just in their particular case, it worked very well for the cost, ... if we are to believe them.

Even if the entire battery will got to 50% of its current cost, Teslas will still be quite expensive cars, which have many expensive things other than the battery: Aluminum body for example.

>Their tabless batteries allow them to fix all these problem and give them a quite sensible reduction in $/KW and a good increase in range.

Ah, yes. Tesla always has something "around the corner" that will fix all their problems.

>Please explain me how this is not a big revelation

Just because Musk says something in a presentation doesn't mean it exists. Full-self-driving is also a "big revelation".

Remember the solar shingles at the SolarCity acquisition presentation? Non-functional aspirational mock-ups to squeeze through a deal to bail out family.

Tesla sold less than 400k cars last year.

For comparison, Toyota sold more than 10.4 million cars in 2019.

Ford sold more F150s in 2019 than Tesla has sold cars in the past 3 years.

>If you can't see the difference

And Theranos was testing people's blood. Just not with the technology they claimed to have.