>In the NY Metro area, it’s Con Edison
That is a rather unfortunate (or rather appropriate) name for a company named after Edison.
Tesla is a Battery Company
71–80 of 173 posts
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#72Musk has previously said in an interview that Li-Ion batteries were at $600 / kwh, but when he looked at the component and manufacturing costs they were at $100 / kwh. Somehow the entire supply chain has piked up a lot of overhead, and he realized it would be possible to reduce that. At those prices, Model-S battery pack costs are between $36k and $51k! When I realized that, I came to conclusion that Tesla Motors cou…
BYD is building a similar Gigafactory.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/23/byd-gigafactory-to-be-wo...
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#73I don't think this is a revelation to anyone who has been paying attention? This seems to have been the dominant hypothesis for a long, long time, and is always what justified Tesla's early (very) red activities. They were a battery company using luxury automobiles to fund battery R&D.
Agreed. CTO JB has referred to Tesla as an energy storage company for a while now.
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The battery in a Tesla Model S is literally a huge array of Panasonic flashlight batteries. It is an off-the-shelf catalog item you can order from Panasonic. Um, no. Viewing the battery of a Tesla Model S as just a big flashlight battery misses the whole point of what Tesla is doing. A flashlight battery does one thing: it discharges energy until it's empty. Even an ordinary rechargeable household battery only does…
The cells themselves are COTS Panasonic NCR18650A without built-in protection circuits.. The management circuits are probably developed by Tesla but are external to the batteries, most likely a circuit per array of parallel cells. Having a protection circuit per cell would be wasteful and also result in quite a bit of power loss and complexity in wiring them up.
I toured the Tesla factory in Fremont, CA last Monday. During the completely awesome 1 hour tour, our guide answered many detailed questions about their cars and manufacturing processes, including how Tesla instruments battery cells.
We were told that they instrument every single one of the 7,000+ cells for temperature and voltage.
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#75Don't ignore the other battery companies. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2900452/foxconn-partners-with... Foxconn hopes to build cars priced under US$15,000, according to Gou. The contract manufacturer already develops electric car batteries, which he said were in demand. Look out, Tesla. Being that the batteries are the expensive part of an electric car, Foxconn could get to the mass market before Tesla, and possibl…
Does Foxconn have much expertise in manufacturing batteries?
Maybe not as much, but Apple has been "poaching" Tesla's engineers.
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#76Wrong. Tesla is a distribution company. Cars and batteries are commodities, more or less. Corporations are now extremely efficient at copying and commoditizing their competitors' innovations - just look at how fast the android ecosystem popped up alongside iPhone - so technological advancements are not the real source of long term value but merely the temporary advantage needed to be first to a market and set up netw…
I generally agree with your categorization, but I would be more specific that Tesla is both a Battery distribution AND marketing company. EVs existed prior to Tesla, but they were the first company to identify and correctly serve the high end market with the Roadster.
My company Chrg specializes in charging infrastructure. Note that the Superchargers you mentioned actually use specially designed Tesla batteries, which are precursors to the Home battery product Tesla will likely be launching soon.
Solar advancements are a great thing for Tesla. Once power is captured via solar panels, it will need to be stored – preferably in Tesla batteries.
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#77Interesting to consider --- is there enough lithium in the world to support this stuff? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
USGS says there's this much available lithium:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs...
These guys
http://www.erb.umich.edu/Research/InstituteReports/09-10/Glo...
and these guys
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032114...
think there's plenty of lithium, not a problem.
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#78Interesting to consider --- is there enough lithium in the world to support this stuff? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
The amount of lithium available in known reserves that are profitable to extract at today's prices is very large. We won't be running into constraints anytime soon. And while lithium makes for a good battery anode now, it would be foolish to assume it's the preferred choice for energy storage 15 years down the road.
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#79Interesting to consider --- is there enough lithium in the world to support this stuff? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
Can't lithium batteries be recycled?
Re: Tesla is a Battery Company
#80Tesla is not a battery company until they actually start manufacturing batteries.