Tesla's top battery supplier says Elon doesn't know how to make battery cells | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's top battery supplier says Elon doesn't know how to make battery cells

electrek.co

14 pointspeutetre9 comments

>Zeng said he had told Musk directly that his bet on a cylindrical battery, known as the 4680, “is going to fail and never be successful.”

The CATL founder, who has a PhD in physics, was also unimpressed with Musk’s electrochemistry knowledge when debating Tesla’s 4680 batteyr cell effort:

“We had a very big debate, and I showed him,” Zeng said. “He was silent. He doesn’t know how to make a battery. It’s about electrochemistry. He’s good for the chips, the software, the hardware, the mechanical things.”

I wish the headlines would not be so literal because he praised Elon on other things.

Actual materials chemist here. A PhD in physics is not that relevant to understanding the real electrochemical nuts and bolts if a battery.

Just look up what a solid electrolyte interface (SEI) layer is to see how bush league current battery technology is. Compared to CMOS tech, which has benefited from trillions of dollars of R&D, batteries are in the stone age.

That's myopically complacent; 20 years ago some car makers probably said the same thing: bah, Musk doesn't know how to make cars. Now something like every other new car on North American roads is a Tesla.

That battery marker is probably toast.

> Now something like every other new car on North American roads is a Tesla.

Source? I could see that being true for EVs, but I can't see it being true for all cars in general.

Ford sold almost as many trucks as Tesla did units total for 2023, so there's no source, unless things changed very recently.

>Now something like every other new car on North American roads is a Tesla.

That’s not even close to being true. Toyota, alone, sold more vehicles in the US than Tesla did globally.

https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...

https://pressroom.toyota.com/?generate_pdf=91364

Perhaps you meant electric vehicles? Which your statement about count sold more accurate, but overall sentiment, still off.

california sales are pretty high:

https://electrek.co/2024/01/30/one-out-of-every-8-cars-sold-...

(toyota 15% tesla 13%)

But toyotas numbers transfer to rest of the US.

I think what people read is that model 3 and model y are the best selling cars in california:

https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/01/Scree...

but if you look closer tesla only sells one car in the segment, while toyota "competes with itself" with camry+corolla > model 3, and same with honda's accord+civic > model 3

Sure, they sell well, but those stats are still a far cry from parent’s assertion.

Cybertruck. That is all.

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