Panasonic and Tesla Sign Agreement for the Gigafactory
teslamotors.com
teslamotors.com
Tesla is thinking big. They want everyone in the world to eventually have a electric car. I think they will own a significant share of premium market after they release the Gen III.
However, they will be cars that people will desire at a cheaper price point than the Gen III, from different manufacturers. Also some people love certain car brands regardless of anything else, and mostly will stick to those brands. It will be great that those other car brands will be able to more easily make electric vehicles.
Those electric cars from other manufacturers will most likely have a Tesla battery and charge on Tesla charging station. I think this is true disruption.
There is still no truly legally enforceable promise, that explains in detail, exactly what Elon is giving away and what he isn't, and what the terms are.
It's now 1.5 months later, and despite many people asking such a thing, nothing has been forthcoming at all.
So before you give them amazing amounts of credit for this, could we please wait till they actually do something more than PR?
In North America, yes. The rest of the automotive industry has been advancing a lot.
I love that BMW get the same power/torque from a 3.0 liter engine as Ford/GM do out of a 6+ liter engine.
And, the 2.7 liter V6 which is going into the new F-150 supposedly makes 325hp.
http://truckyeah.jalopnik.com/2015-ford-f-150-weighs-less-th...
You're comparing a 2015 engine to engines Europe have had for 20+ years.
Yes, in recent years the North American manufacturers have caught up a little.. see the newer Ford V8, Jeep with VVT, etc. etc.
I am hoping for a 200 mile range mid size, but I doubt Tesla will be first. I am also expecting range extender vehicles to have much more popularity initially because to be honest, I don't have time for 30 minute charge cycles when I am on trip and most people I know just want to get to their destination.
Tesla has already broken ground in several states for the Gigafactory (with plans to discard the sites they choose not to move forward with). I think 18-24 months is a reasonable timeline for them to be online.
Traditional auto manufacturers have decades of experience driving the continual refinement of their designs. These efforts have resulted a general expectation among consumers of unfailing reliability and service life measured in decades. The issues they're experiencing with drive units are troubling but acceptable for most owners who know they bought a bleeding-edge testbed for future technology. My concern is one of time, things move relatively slow in the world of automotive engineering and these issues show Tesla has a lot to learn and a lot to change once they've discovered the points of failure. That kind of time doesn't fit with their expected release schedule and owners won't accept the kinds of failure rates experienced in the Model S in a mass market car.
If you are single without family (so only one car) and travel with car a lot (skiing in state or whatever) then the current electrics aren't for you. But you are in a minority part of society (although probably over-represented on H N :-)
Plus they are mass produced, cheap, and have a relatively high energy density.
The new factory might work on creating some new battery technologies though, not sure. Ideally yes, you want the battery as compact as possible and lots of round batteries aren't the most efficient for that, but when you factor in cost and the natural heat insulation, it might have been the best option at the time. If it works, roll with it and work on one of the numerous other problems they have to solve.
Lithium Polymer batteries (or LiPo for short) are a special case of Lithium-Ion batteries. They are sold in a 'pouch' format (and they are not the first to use a format like that, for instance, in the polaroid cartridges there used to be a battery in a similar form factor (polapulse)).
The reason why LiPo batteries are not so constrained in shape as their siblings is that the electrolyte is a liquid. Solid electrolyte batteries are typically much more constrained in terms of shapes.
This is also why regular car batteries (lead-acid) can be block shaped, the acid is also a liquid.
The polapulse was an interesting battery, it only had to fire the camera 10 times but was quite high current. The packaging constraints of the cartridge dictated the battery geometry and so a flat pouch like battery was born.
LiPo batteries exist in all kinds of interesting shapes and sizes too.
EDIT: looks like I was firsted somewhere below, doh!
Li-ion, due to the liquid, needs a hard metal case, whereas li-poly can often get away with a foil pouch. The surface area per volume of a cylinder is less, as well as easier to make structurally sturdy, which means less weight is spent in the casing. Tesla cares more about weight than volume, so this is an acceptable tradeoff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_polymer_battery
Enjoy the read, I certainly did and it turns out the situation is a lot more complex (also historically) than I remembered it, but my memory wasn't quite as faulty as you made me feel initially (fortunately!).
Battery geometry is mostly dictated by physics and economics, even though a flat plate battery would be denser the gains in density would be off-set by the increase in cost and in the end the wasted space doubles as a cooling channel so you might end up having to separate your flat plates by periodic air channels anyway.
The reason why flat plates are better in some applications (for instance, for starter batteries in cars) is because those batteries are optimized for very high current during very short bursts of time. 300 Amps @ 12V is 3.6KW out of a very compact little box. The power generated from that little package is extremely impressive (if you pull the distributor cap on your car (if you have an old car) you can actually move the car for a bit on the starter engine in first gear or reverse!) but because of the short duration the power absorbed by the battery is relatively small (current is absorbed by the internal resistance of the battery during charge and discharge leading to a warming up of the battery).
But it does not last for very long so heat removal is not usually a problem, and the charge currents are reasonably low, so again no big problem in removing the heat (low current, longer time).
With electric vehicles the situation is reversed, the discharge time is relatively long (hours) but the charge times are getting ever shorter which means packs have to be actively cooled to avoid overheating, and the easiest way to do that is to flow air through gaps in the cells.
I saw some of this up close recently and it was quite interesting how Japan was still 'fighting the last war' in this sense.
They were trying to avoid a repetition of Japanese companies doing an end-run around American and European companies by doing their manufacturing and then turning around to innovate on the processes and principles in the end resulting in a wholly new industrial base.
But the world has long moved on from that time and even though there is plenty of innovation in this sphere the threat of a manufacturer turning into a competitor is still present (for instance, in China) but between the US, the EU and Japan that threat is all but non-existent.
Japanese companies are slowly coming around on this and are becoming more free with respect to sharing technology and IP with other partners. This Panasonic move is another step in that direction.
I'm worried the current electric grid is woefully insufficient for a world full of electric cars. I know their are plenty of electric lines out there running at greater than 100% of their rated capacity already.
Grand parent mentioned the grid, not the plants.
You'll need a little bit less grid, definitely not a lot. Those buildings are typically multi-layer and don't have a roof over the top layer (though not always) so it's not a trivial modification either. You could design that in from day 1 of course and it will help a little bit but that's borderline making money rather than a significant reduction in infrastructure.
Say your carpark is 100 meters long and 30 meters wide, that will house 50x4x4 = 800 cars to charge but you're collecting (on a good day) no more than 100x30x200 = 600 KW. It's not nothing, but if you take into account that a single normal car charger is already 3 KW to charge a full park of such cars would require 2.4 MW. And that's the slowest rate of charge for those cars, go faster and the requirements shoot up. Best case with only 4 decks of cars you're looking at a 25% reduction. Worst case not more than 10%. Good but not great.
The grid is definitely going to see some structural modifications before we can push the equivalent of our current gasoline consumption through it.
- The US used 134.51 billion gallons of gas in 2013.[1] - There are ~33 kWh/gal in gasoline [2]
134.51e9 gal x 33 kWh / gal = 4.44e12 kWh (4.44 trillion kWh / year)
- The US used a total of 3.856 trillion kWh of electricity in 2011 [3]
Ignoring improved efficiency and excluding other factors, converting all gasoline usage to electric would more than double US electricity consumption.
Under reasonable assumptions, PV solar generates about 0.75 kWh/m^2 per day. [4]
4.44 trillion kWh/year / 0.75 kWh/m^2 per day x 365 days/year / 1e6 m^2 per km^2 = 16,219 km^2
Which means you could generate all of the required electricity with about 16,200 km^2 of solar panels - which is just about exactly the total land area of Hawaii [5], or 405 million average home PV systems.
It's doable, but it will be non-trivial.
[1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=23&t=10 [2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent [3] http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricit... [4] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv-eff... [5] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terri...
A more reasonable assumption for charging is that it will take place wherever electric vehicles are parked, regardless of time of day; in that case, large parking lot installations for PV may be more sensible than individual home systems. In either case, it seems likely that increased adoption of electric vehicles will change what we consider "peak" electricity use hours, since it could consume half or more of total electricity in the US.
My Volt drives around 22 -> 28 miles on that power.
Eliminating gasoline refining would reduce the needed electricity by ~850 billion kWh / year, and the improved efficiency (ignoring charge/discharge cycle efficiency) would reduce the net energy to ~594 billion kWh / year - or 54 million average home PV installations. Quick googling shows that it will be about 10% higher for charging losses.
I think we agree ... that if there's less gas being refined, then there's less energy being used to do that ... if and only if gas refining is independent of refining into all the other products. If, on the other hand, refining into the other products efficiently ends up making gas anyway, then that's different.
Not a bad analysis, but there's a lot we're glossing over here.
For one thing, that 33kWh can get you about 100 miles in an average electric vehicle. That's compared to the average new US car which gets 25MPG, and existing cars out there average worse than that. So right away, there's a factor of four that we're leaving out here.
Further (as others have mentioned) it takes a huge amount of electricity to refine oil into gasoline. The electricity savings from not refining a gallon of gas are enough to drive an electric vehicle pretty far on its own.
Also, our grid and generating capacity are built to handle peak load, which (in most parts of the US) will occur on hot days when lots of people are using AC. On the flip side, the majority of electric car charging happens at night, so there's a lot of spare capacity already there.
If everyone switched to EVs, we'd probably need to build out more generating capacity, but probably not as much as your analysis suggests.
This isn't as much as you would think. The manufacturing electrical usage of the US (which includes this) is separated out on the EIA site, and you can simply subtract it :)
But these factors are absolutely enormous, particularly for the comparison you set up, as electric vehicles are about 3x as efficient. EVs on the mass market get about 3m/kWh, whereas most gas vehicles get about 1m/kWh, if you use your 33kWh/gal.
So instead of doubling US electricity consumption, 100% EV vehicle fleet just raises consumption by 33%, an amount that could nearly be made up for with simple efficiency gains in electricity use.
I subtracted out the electricity spent producing gas in the US, which isn't as much as one would think.
You can entirely ignore it if you want to compare the residential electric grid.
Note that if you stick to residential, it's 6x all current residential usage if everyone drives teslas and charges once a day.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/236uzj/toyota_co...
-----
First, they'll be producing 50GwH of packs, but only 35GwH of cells; so they'll still be dependent on external cell manufacturing for a sizable portion of the packs.
Second, that it sounds like Panasonic will basically own and run the cell part of the factory; as opposed to Tesla or a joint venture purchasing the equipment and making the cells themselves.
I don't see Panasonic wanting to give up any of the control it has over this sector. The agreement is probably positioned to obligate Tesla to purchase X amount of cells a year to make the new gigafactory economically feasible for Panasonic.
Unless Telsa and Panasonic has jointly developed an revolutionary battery that is going to need some funding and mass produced. But any new battery will need years in time for safety testing. And the news would properly have leaked by now.
Electric cars are already affordable, that's not the main sticking point (a fast way to charge them and a widely rolled out network of charging stations is).
If they manage to shave a few percentage points off the cost of production and create jobs in the process I don't see the problem.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/gigafactory
"In cooperation with strategic battery manufacturing partners, we’re planning to build a large scale factory that will allow us to achieve economies of scale and minimize costs through innovative manufacturing, reduction of logistics waste, optimization of co-located processes and reduced overhead."
I guess that and also securing the supply chain for themselves as the rest of the car industry starts/continues to compete with them for the battery supply.
The last time I did some research on the Tesla batteries it was just a ton of high-quality 18650s, is this still true?
Obviously, there is a good reason for Tesla and Panasonic not to have chosen LFP, does anyone know why? I know the energy density is lower, but are there other reasons?
https://suite.io/mike-dehaan/4bfn2v4 http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/conferences/phev2007/PHEV20...
LFP's advantage is in power density, which is not an issue with the size of pack that Tesla is using.
Definitely.
> In other words, how overvalued is Tesla stock?
For those following Discounted-Cash-Flow models, a lot.[1]
> Would it be worth making it a significant fraction of my portfolio?
That's up to you. I'll leave you two parting thoughts:
a) It could follow the path of Amazon, lots of people screaming "overpriced" forever as it rises.
b) Building a lasting car manufacturer isn't exactly easy.[2]
---
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/aswath-damodaran-tesla-valuat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...
It would probably depend on how much extra capacity they have. The Tesla vehicles are in high demand and only going to be in more demand when they start rolling out the Tesla 3 (which is really the 4th Tesla isn't it, I guess they're referring to it being the 3rd generation with the Model S and X being the same generation).
[0]http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachme...
A huge growing market will be batteries in homes. Germany is trying to push it to go from 30% of photovoltaic self-consumption up to 70% (when the sun shines, people usually are away at work). The excessive electricity is sold to the network.
This requires between 5 and 10kWh storage capacity (compared to the 50+kWh of a Tesla) for a single family home. The current price is about 20€cts/kWh for the storage over the whole lifetime. So it is not economic yet, but it should be within a few years and I hope that Tesla will contribute to it. Solar costs about 15€cts/kWh and electricity from the network is around 25€cts/kWh. When solar will reach 10€cts and storage 10€cts/kWh, the market will be very important.
Really hope this makes that happen.
They sure are quiet though, I worry about pets and wildlife.
Gigafactory will employ about 6,500 people by 2020
Delivery truck drivers? I mean the factory is should be mostly automated by 2020.
and why do you want to own one so badly?
Lets assume by some miracle I manage to save up a £7000 deposit, this leaves me with some £60000 to find. At a quick google around its pretty hard to get car finance over £25000, but lets have a crack at it and try autotrader. They'll only let me borrow £50k over 60 months which gives me monthly payments of £958.
My monthly take home is £1800, so that leaves me with £852 to play with, my rent is £450 and my council tax is £101, so now we're down to £301 and I haven't paid for my utilities yet.
So an electric car in my lifetime (or at least one with a useful range like the Teslas) is a distant dream. At least until the Model 3.
Anyway, even if nothing changes, in 20 years your £67K Model S will be on autotrader for £6K or less. You can pick up a 20 year Ferrari 456 GT for the price of a new Ford Focus and I'm sure they hold their value better than a Tesla will.
The Vauxhall Ampera is £29k, you can get a used 2012 Chevy Volt from around £17k.
I'm not sure how the limited lifetime of batteries will affect the used car economy, but the kind of people who buys a brand new Model S generally aren't keen on driving 10 year old cars.
Like I said, this might all change with the Model 3, and I genuinely hope it does. I'm tired of driving petrol dependent cars, and I want my next new-car purchase to be fully electric.
Edit: You could always get a G-Wiz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REVAi
The Zoe is a problem. I love Renault cars, my Clio was my favourite thing in the world, but the Zoe has DRM in the battery which you have to rent from Renault for a fee based on your mileage, which as far as I could tell, worked out to more than I would pay in petrol.
I believe, although it may have been FUD, that if you go over the mileage you have pre-arranged with Renault, they will disable your battery remotely.