They're lucky China is answering. They're incredibly late to the EV game; considering that they're doing remarkably well.
When you're not the trailblazer, it's easy to make catch-up progress to those that went before you in much much less time. Why this is constantly a source of amazement is funny to me. By the time Ford got involved, the path was no longer a beaten down path, it was fully paved 8-lane highway. Instead trying to figure out how to make an electrified car, they just took all of the learning before them and then turned it into something fancy. While Tesla is "working" on self-driving and not doing well with it, Ford said, nah, we'll just turn our batteries into a generator for the home. They built an actual truck that looks like the same truck everyone is used to and say here it is as an electric. That's easy to do when you are riding coat tails
This all pre-dated the COVID related supply chain issues, BTW. Lack of battery supply is behind the lackluster inventory (and therefore sales) of all non-Tesla vehicles for over half a decade.
I say all this not as a Tesla fan, but as a GM electric vehicle owner. GM was unable to produce more then a few tens of thousands of Bolts a year -- not because consumers didn't want them, but because there was simply no way for them to get them from LG Chem. VW/Audi group has had the same issue. They're both not late to the game on EV tech or production, but very late to the game on battery production.
Being late to the game in this case has a huge cost. And various governments wasted time and money providing consumer subsidies for EV purchases thinking this would lead the market to magically "solve" the EV supply issue by increasing consumer demand when the issue that really needed solving was volume and cost of battery production.
If we were going to involve public dollars in getting EVs to market we should have invested massively in encouraging battery production. Some governments are waking up to this now at least.
Bloomberg projects VW selling more EVs than Tesla by 2024 and they are planning to have 240GWh/yr of in-house battery production by 2030.
BYD in China is fully vertically integrated on EV production, moreso than Tesla who relies on 3rd party mining and on Panasonic for chemistries/cell production. BYD is now the largest PHEV+BEV manufacturer in the world.
Tesla might have had a head start but There has been a lot of catching up going on, and as we get closer and closer to resource constraints instead of production constraints they aren't in much better of a position than any other manufacturer.
Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021, 600k means a growth rate of %1900 in the span of 2 1/2 years (They need to be at the run rate in 2026)?
Battery packs were a problem to Tesla in 2018 and now they've moved onto the bigger problem that no one is talking about.... There isn't enough lithium and nickel production to even make this possible.
That's why Tesla launched its own mining operations in Nevada.
Also, its not like Elon hasn't been screaming about lack of nickel and lithium production since like 2018, just no one seems to be paying attention.
source? all i could find was this https://insideevs.com/news/596347/us-ford-ev-sales-june-2022
> H1 production of nearly 34,000 units is below the level from 2021 in the same period.
which is just talking about mach-e production, not other EVs.
But mainly, they don't need to actually make 600k EVs in 2024 for it to be true that they have contracts in place to purchase that many batteries if needed.
As for Tesla's mining chops, they bought mining rights in 2020 and as of April 2022 they haven't even broken ground, with Elon saying "price of lithium has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into the mining and refining directly at scale, unless costs improve."
I guess while Elon has been screaming about it other companies like BYD and CATL have been the ones actually scaling global production.
If you actually look at their guidance, it's "50% growth on average," and they've consistently hit it.
> In October 2016 Tesla said its production timeline was on schedule.[115][116][117] Again in February 2017, Tesla said that vehicle development, supply chain and manufacturing are on track to support volume deliveries of the Model 3 in the second half of 2017.
> As of February 2017, Tesla planned to ramp up production to exceed 5,000 vehicles per week in Q4 2017 and reach 10,000 vehicles per week in 2018.[111]
> By early November 2017, Musk had postponed the target date for manufacturing 5,000 of the vehicles per week from December 2017 to March 2018.
- 100,000/yr in 2017: fail, occurred in 2018
- 400,000/yr in 2018: fail, occurred in 2020/2021
- Volume delivery in in 2H 2017: fail unless you consider 1764 to be volume
- 5000/wk in Q4 2017/March 2018: fail, produced 187/wk, probably first broke 5000/wk Q1 2019 (total quarterly rate was almost 5k/wk)
- 10,000/wk in 2018: fail 4,722/wk Q4 of 2018, probably first broke 10,000/wk at the tail end of Q3 2020 (total quarterly rate was almost 10k/wk) as long as we include model Y production as well
Now I wouldn't call this lying, but its definitely not consistently hitting production goals either
No, that really isn't easy to do when you're running something as large as the Ford Motor Company. In fact it is much easier for a new entrant to make such big changes.
German, Japanese, and American manufacturers were the biggest national security components of WWII. Tesla is a second tier interest of a CEO who prefers to be an online troll than keeping up with the auto industry.
Sorry, this is just absurd. Tesla is the only company designing for massive scale and ruthless simplification from the start. Their entire DNA is based on YAGNI.
Every other legacy automaker is pinned between their dealerships, their dependence on consumer debt, their own massive debt, and the fact that they'll need to cannibalize existing business to pivot to EVs.
No other company owns their own destiny by being more in control of their supply chain than Tesla.
In 2020 GM sold 6.8 million vehicles. The other manufacturers are already operating at massive scale. Or are you arguing the automotive market will suddenly dramatically increase in a way existing manufacturers can't deal with? That consumers will suddenly be flush with cash to buy more brand new cars than they are already buying and Tesla will be the most popular option? This is very hard for me to imagine.
> their dependence on consumer debt
??? Teslas are not cheap. I will not be able to afford a Tesla for the forseeable future. Unless Teslas comes down below 25k, no Teslas are in my future, another ICE car or hybrid will be. How is Tesla not dependent on consumer debt? Or do you mean something else by this?
Maybe you missed the footage of FSD perfectly navigating San Francisco during rush hour [1]. I'd say they're doing pretty damn well.
That sounds logical but it doesn't often actually happen that way, which is why I think there is amazement the few times it does.
For example, Nokia could have just caught up with Apple after they released the iPhone? Motorola etc. could have just caught up with Nokia in the 90s when Nokia made phones people actually wanted? Apple of the 90s could have just caught up with Microsoft and Windows right?
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/electric-cars-fend-off-supp...
They are missing out on the easy part of the S-curve of adoption, and will have a far far harder time securing key competitive tech and supply chains by entering too late
There are currently ~8 major battery manufacturers, and right now a large bevy of battery startups. But right now is probably the last time in history to enter the market, because you can't just innovate on electrolyte or anode or cathode and enter the market, you have to do it all. And the lead times for development of new products, even in wel established companies with solid pipelines, is around five years.
The US did innovate quite a bit in this space, but political interference and strange political beliefs about batteries, like the physics prevents them from being used in all the ways we are currently using them, has significantly held back the US from leading as much as it could have in this space.
This is I n large part because industry leaders like Ford were so anti-scientifically anti-EV.
We kneecapped our future to let current rentiers, masquerading as gigantic industrialists, collect rent.
Batteries at the core are commodities, where you have laser thin margins and supplier model that is pulling R&D costs from many companies is basically only long term way to go.
Electric part of an EV is easy. It’s a car that’s hard part.
I would argue that might have been true 5 years ago, but now it's proving to be the competitive advantage. Batteries and the materials that produce them are no longer selling at 'Razor thin margins' because the 'Commodity' is extremely constrained. No EV manufacturer can get enough batterys to produce the cars they sell.
But please tell me who has that competitive advantage? Tesla? They’re Panasonic/CATL shop, with negligible amount of in house production.
The rest of an EV is pretty simple. Drivetrain is no longer a really hard component, as electric motors are far more straight forward.
> > It’s a car that’s hard part.
Countries that try to kickstart a new car industry often outsource the drivetrain, as it's the most difficult part to build.
With EVs, batteries are by far the touchiest and most difficult part to build. Companies that outsource battery design, or at a bare minimum are not intimated involved with the batteries for their own packs, will be left behind.