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Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

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Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#111

Post by shawn-furyan »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #80
mikeash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worldwide production of lithium-ion batteries in 2013 was around 35GWh. The current rate is somewhat higher, I can't quite find how much. Tesla is currently producing around 100,000 cars/year. Each car has about 80kWh of battery on average (the options right now are 75 or 90), so that's about 8GWh. If they meet their goal of 400,000 Model 3s produced in 2018, assuming 55kWh of battery for those cars, that's 22GWh, no…

That analysis is sort of ridiculous. On the numerator you're using a number much higher than the number of cars Tesla has ever produced in a year. On the denominator you're using a years-old size of a rapidly growing market for batteries.

How do you think that decisions are made under uncertainty? You can't always wait until you have very solid numbers to come up with an analysis. It's not "ridiculous" to come up with an order of magnitude estimate when better information is unavailable, it's a critical step in solving new problems.

A more productive criticism would have been to offer an improvement, rather than to just point to the imperfections in an attempt to estimate the future impact of a new technology.

edit: added second paragraph

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#112

Post by honkhonkpants »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #111
honkhonkpants wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analysis is sort of ridiculous. On the numerator you're using a number much higher than the number of cars Tesla has ever produced in a year. On the denominator you're using a years-old size of a rapidly growing market for batteries.

How do you think that decisions are made under uncertainty? You can't always wait until you have very solid numbers to come up with an analysis. It's not "ridiculous" to come up with an order of magnitude estimate when better information is unavailable, it's a critical step in solving new problems. A more productive criticism would have been to offer an improvement, rather than to just point to the imperfections in a…

OK, but in 2016 we don't have to guess how many cars Tesla built in 2015. It's historical fact.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#113

Post by mstachowiak »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #53
mikeash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worldwide production of lithium-ion batteries in 2013 was around 35GWh. The current rate is somewhat higher, I can't quite find how much. Tesla is currently producing around 100,000 cars/year. Each car has about 80kWh of battery on average (the options right now are 75 or 90), so that's about 8GWh. If they meet their goal of 400,000 Model 3s produced in 2018, assuming 55kWh of battery for those cars, that's 22GWh, no…

JB Straubel just mentioned at the annual Tesla shareholder meeting they're now expecting to produce 150GW of storage capacity a year at the Gigafactory, split between vehicles and energy storage based on demand for both.

Just for clarification, Tesla's initial estimates for Gigafactory production was 35GW/year at the cell level and 50GW/year at the pack level (with some cells produced by other suppliers). At the shareholder meeting they speculated they could 3x those numbers with the current Gigafactory. This is at full production, which is years away.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#114

Post by draw_down »

Animats wrote: post #45

From the article: "Since 2008, estimates of battery costs were cut by a factor four and battery energy density had a fivefold increase. " We're not seeing that kind of improvement in mobile devices.

Are you sure?

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#115

Post by scarlac »

agumonkey wrote: post #62

What about recycling btw ?

The batteries are highly recyclable. The internal structure changes over time/use but the chemicals are intact.

Tesla have mentioned on several occasions that they will eventually take old batteries and recycle them at the Gigafactory.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#116

Post by venomsnake »

mtgx wrote: post #97
olivermarks wrote: post #54

Look to China for mass production of cost effective batteries, not Tesla... firms like EV West help me demystify the true state of maturity of this market http://evwest.com/catalog/

That's what I'm afraid of. That China will push a "race to the bottom" not on just prices per se, but on lower prices with poorer quality batteries that hold much fewer charges and degrade faster, making you want to dump your EV battery after 3 years. But everyone will be too focused on their promotion of "cheap long range EVs" to notice.

Revolutionary idea ... make batteries replaceable. We had it back in the days. You could just remove the old batteries and put the new ones.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#117

Post by nawariata »

mtgx wrote: post #97
olivermarks wrote: post #54

Look to China for mass production of cost effective batteries, not Tesla... firms like EV West help me demystify the true state of maturity of this market http://evwest.com/catalog/

That's what I'm afraid of. That China will push a "race to the bottom" not on just prices per se, but on lower prices with poorer quality batteries that hold much fewer charges and degrade faster, making you want to dump your EV battery after 3 years. But everyone will be too focused on their promotion of "cheap long range EVs" to notice.

I would be more concerned about exploding batteries, lithium is no joke. http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?262234-TK...

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#118

Post by qaq »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #55
narrator wrote: post #17

I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is ge…

Well Musk has often claimed that the cost of batteries doesn't magically go down due to big new innovations like we've seen in some other industries. Rather it's due to constant iterations, making small improvements, and economies of scale. Particularly that latter part is hugely important and hasn't been much of a factor yet in the specialised market that is car batteries. And that's why they're building a gigantic…

It's a function of both $ & time. You can't spend a trillion and build a Gigafactory in 1 day even though you are spending 200X the amount of money.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#119

Post by shawn-furyan »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #112
shawn-furyan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think that decisions are made under uncertainty? You can't always wait until you have very solid numbers to come up with an analysis. It's not "ridiculous" to come up with an order of magnitude estimate when better information is unavailable, it's a critical step in solving new problems. A more productive criticism would have been to offer an improvement, rather than to just point to the imperfections in a…

OK, but in 2016 we don't have to guess how many cars Tesla built in 2015. It's historical fact.

What is it? You could actually improve the estimate rather than /just/ pointing out that it has flaws. And your original criticism was vague. At least this one moves things forward.

After a quick Google search, the number of vehicles Tesla sold in 2015 does in fact seem to be a bit uncertain. It seems they sold over 50,000 vehicles, but I've not found a more precise number, in a few minutes of looking.

Sales from previous years seem to be:

2012 - 2,650

2013 - 22,477

2014 - 31,655

2015- ~50,000

though I got these numbers from a quora post, so take them with an adequately large dose of salt.

edit: added google findings, tweaked wording to be more specific

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#120

Post by notJim »

disposeofnick9 wrote: post #66

Can't wait to buy the plastic battery holder grids for Tesla-sized cells. My first 18650 pack is made from 4 laptop batteries and is capable of about 63 A at 0.2C.

Just out of curiosity… whaaat does this comment mean? Are you building some kind of railgun or something?
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