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Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

electrek.co

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Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#281

Post by vel0city »

ggreer wrote: post #272
iknowstuff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense but does it make sense to manufacture LFPs as 4680 cylinders instead of rectangular blocks/blades, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Blade_battery ?

Which cell technology to use depends on the application. Tesla actually uses BYD blade batteries in some of their vehicles sold in Europe. The main issue with prismatic cells is that to be safe, they must be made with LFP chemistry, which hurts energy density. LFP is also worse at charging/discharging when cold, though battery management software mostly solves that. Cylindrical cells make sense for higher performance…

> The main issue with prismatic cells is that to be safe, they must be made with LFP chemistry, which hurts energy density

This is obviously untrue. Tons of other chemistries have used prismatic cells with good safety as well. You think Macbooks and iPhones use LFP or cylinder cells?

> Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair,

It can be just as easy to repair a prismatic battery as a cylinder battery. It all comes down to the layout of the battery. And as you mentioned, how the battery is constructed, if the battery is structural, etc.

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#282

Post by netsharc »

jfengel wrote: post #188
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible there is something wrong with a group of people completely unable to see when someone is lying to them. And no matter how many times they are lied to, as long as they are rich enough they believe them. I don't know what to think anymore about this. He has continuously conned his way along and does it just long enough to jump to the next con. Tesla is crashing and somehow people though giving him a hug…

Beyond a certain point it becomes self-reinforcing. You will distort everything else about your world view to support that lie. You will surround yourself with other people who believe it and live in a completely internally consistent reality, surrounded by a vast conspiracy trying to bring you down. The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but…

I feel the same re: killer part...

Maybe the smart people are the ones who can intuitively feel the stupidity of the masses and take advantage of that, whereas the dumb are the ones who are too cautious about houses of cards and unstable Ponzi schemes...

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#283

Post by dzhiurgis »

lossolo wrote: post #228
dzhiurgis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be joking.

And you've gotta have some outdated knowledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g

Ah I actually watched this when it came out.

Yes looks pretty capable but they don’t go into software itself much. Looking at video you can see it’s pretty laggy at times.

Friends atto3 is somewhat capable but software quality just isn’t it. Other just got brand new sealion 7, hope I can test it soon, but some capability isn’t there either.

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#284

Post by em-bee »

gota wrote: post #50
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$7,386 seems to be roughly one Cybertruck batteries worth (the only vehicle that uses that battery). As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already. I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.

Maybe they did this to keep the contract with a symbolic value; or to avoid the headlines that Tesla 'cancelled' the contract? A '99% write down' is such an uncommon term that many people might not register it.

posting it on HN had the opposite effect for me. if the headline was "tesla cancelled contract to buy batteries" i would not have cared. the things that still confuses me is that this is caused by tesla no longer needing these batteries, but the headline to me reads like it is caused by the partner and tesla is somehow negatively affected by that.

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#285

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bgarbiak wrote: post #241
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why didn’t the Europeans come out on top? Fewer new entrants? America has Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, et cetera in the EV native camp, and Waymo in the autonomous-native camp. If we limit ourselves to export variants, Europe has Polestar. (And by this metric, China has dozens of new entrants in both fields.)

Europe doesn’t need new entrants. They got legacy automakers that are no worse at making EVs than Chinese and American startups. The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).

> Europe doesn’t need new entrants. They got legacy automakers that are no worse at making EVs than Chinese and American startups

Innovator's dilemma. It's not a coincidence that the two largest EV makers in the world are battery natives [1], and that they outproduce Nos. 3 (Geely), 4 (GM) and 5 (VW) combined.

[1] https://www.fool.com/research/largest-ev-companies/

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#286

Post by iknowstuff »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #246
dzhiurgis wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD is going to wipe everything off. I’ve tried v13 few weeks ago, knowing it works so well. Still got shocked how good it is. They’ll have to drop the price of it tho, but even then 10M cars * $100 per month is $12b of revenue per year.

How is that a Tesla thing though? I'm fairly certain every auto manufacturer and many non-auto manufacturers are working on it. I doubt they'll be able to patent anything truly important to the process, since others beat them to the market with most of it. Or am I missing something essential?

Remember how everyone kept saying tesla is doomed because any minute now the old OEMs were going to storm in and kill their EV business? In actuality, those OEMs are getting killed by Tesla and Chinese startups. You are making the same argument for autonomy. Old OEMS cannot compete in this space at all. Waymo cannot compete on price with Tesla.

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#287

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #164
nxm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn’t the Europeans come out on top?

All the traditional car companies in the west failed. I think short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies. In fact that's pretty much the only oversight given to the CEOs. The next quarterly report is all that matters. Even if you wanted to do the right thing and focus on long term goals office politics will ensure that a single down quarter where you focused on long term investments will be punished by…

> short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies

Zero auto companies outside China, America and Europe have successfully pivoted to EVs. And even within China, it's basically Geely and Changan. All the others are new entrants.

> China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance

GM's unions own a significant fraction of its shares. This is a stakeholder system. What you may be referring to is state ownership, not stakeholder-based governance.

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#288

Post by Veedrac »

nemomarx wrote: post #2

Tesla stock dipped a little today it seems but it's still up 8 percent over the month. I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.

The stock market learns from experience, because it's made of people who learn from experience.

Imagine an investor's experience with TSLA. From the beginning, they're flooded with news reports about 'fundamentals' this, 'fundamentals' that, about how Tesla would imminently collapse, how it's a scam, yada yada. Said investors _constantly_ see themselves being right and those skeptics wrong. Tesla is in fact disrupting an industry. They really are just continuing to scale. Marginal profitability keeps going up. Their cars keep getting better. FSD keeps getting better. The competition that people kept pointing at kept failing to materialize. None of this seems to change the skeptics' byline.

Tesla is actually in a materially worse position than it was a few years ago, by many metrics, but the stock price isn't set by 'fundamentals', it's set by the people setting demand for the stock. With TSLA, this is disproportionately going to be people who have learned to and gotten rich from ignoring the people loudly telling them why investing in Tesla is a bad idea.

A market will correct eventually, but corrections either require people to change their minds or run out of capital. Neither has happened yet, so the market can't correct.

Re: Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

#290

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

spwa4 wrote: post #202
vrosas wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/Predictions/Ketamine-and-adderall-fueled ramblings

I think they mean grift or even fraud, since they were definitely meant to attract investment. Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.

I still don’t understand how they haven’t been sued for the hundreds of millions they took as a deposit for a new Roadster…8 years ago!
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