Tesla is a Battery Company • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#151

Post by eru » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

lotsofmangos wrote: post #140

DenisM wrote: post #18

Musk 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…

Global industry decisions are a lot to do with ego as well as necessity. Once one person has a battery factory the same size as all the other battery factories in the world combined, pretty soon someone else will try and double it. I fully expect China to announce the construction of a new lithium battery plant larger than Elon's, shortly after it starts production. edit, just noticed mstachowiak's comment about BYD'…

There are some alternative materials that will become viable if Li becomes too expensive. But yes, interesting indeed.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#152

Post by eru » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #43

rail2rail wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Similarly Google is just a bunch of commodity off-the-shelf hard drives.

If some talking head wrote a blog called "Google is a hard drive company" that would be a worthy retort.

They are very good at building cheap servers, and running them cheaply.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#153

Post by e12e » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

jeremyrwelch wrote: post #25

happertiger wrote: post #11

If Tesla executes, they are going to be the leading company in a number of industries, of which battery technology and manufacturing is one of them. They are also leaders in direct sales, JIT manufacturing, motor design, any one of which is a disruptive innovation channel they could monetize, all in the service of building electric cars. Tesla is an energy company, a battery company, a car company, etc, just as GE or…

My point with this post is that their business hinges on Battery production and tech more than any other component, and thus the lead they've created in this space matters more than any of their other innovations. But you're right, their execution on multiple fronts is truly unreal.

Somewhat related: I remember that in the late 90s a Mitsubishi subsidiary, SUN-A, was tasked with developing transformers for Toyota's new hybrid cars. It'll be interesting to see if building a megacrop will be better than building a market place with various competing companies/contractors for this technology (Not that Tesla will prevent such a market place to develop -- indeed one already exists. I just mean it'll be interesting to see if Tesla will benefit from dominating by themselves, rather than delegating to existing market leaders).

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#154

Post by drzaiusapelord » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

reportingsjr wrote: post #145

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They were a battery company using luxury automobiles to fund battery R&D. This seems questionable to me. I just don't see lithium-ion powering electric cars in an affordable or usable fashion. The density isn't great and after 4-5 years the battery pack wears out, making your $30-50k battery investment disappear. There's no resale value on a battery that can't even hold 30% of its original charge. Musk's solar city…

Wow, you're pulling out some numbers that seem very unfounded here. You also seem to be VERY anti-tesla as seen in your other posts in this thread. Can you show me where you have seen hard evidence of battery packs "wearing out" after 4-5 years? Also, please define wearing out as there are different meanings to that. Contrary to what you have said in this thread the battery life has actually been significantly better…

In practice we're seeing ~25% loss of capacity at 40k miles in LEAF real world testing. 30% loss at 50k miles is the accepted norm. Capacity goes down annually after that. It seems that some cars are doing better, but play cars owned by the rich that get very few miles like the early Tesla sportscars. Real world daily-drivers like the LEAF experience the exact decay that was predicted. Lithium-ion isnt some new hot tech we don't understand. We understand it very well.

http://www.torquenews.com/2250/how-long-will-electric-vehicl...

Americans replace their car every 6 years now. You may have 30-50% capacity at year 6, depending on a lot of factors. This is unacceptable considering the anemic range of a new battery. EV means losing almost all your car's value after 3-5 years. High trade-in values we enjoy now will be lost as the majority of the cost of the vehicle will be its battery. These batteries will fill landfills and be an environmental disaster.

The current "fix" is just to build the battery replacement cost into the warranty. So now your car is more expensive. Warranty claims now become a legal struggle over what is faulty or not. Nissan claims 70% battery power is non-faulty. That means your 75m LEAF range is now ~50m. My gas car gets that in a gallon and a half.

>You also seem to be VERY anti-tesla as seen in your other posts in this thread.

Its a 12 year old company that has done nothing but burn money. They have no mature product on the horizon and their promises of making a middle-class cheap EV with great range and durability are just not in the realm of technology. The stock has been on a decline since mid last year and they have a celebrity CEO who is good at PR and gimmicks but not delivering affordable vehicles.

>Also, saying the only incentive of buying an electric car to save money

This is the only motivator for mass market acceptance. The idle rich love the acceleration of that $100k car, but that doesn't matter to someone who makes half or a third that in a year.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#155

Post by eru » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #95

Except we need an exponential leap in battery technology. These 1% per year improvements are going to take forever to get us better EVs

But 1% a year IS exponential.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#156

Post by mikeash » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #150

mikeash wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so named because its planned capacity is measured in gigawatt-hours of batteries per year. "A gigafactory" to refer to any factory of that size is a reasonable term to use.

Couldn't you just measure the capacity in directly in Watts instead of Watt hours / year?

Certainly, and you could measure battery capacity in joules, and... well, for some reason we've standardized on weird units for these things.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#157

Post by e12e » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

felixbraun wrote: post #146

Tesla's goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. They want (a) to see as many electric cars on the road as fast as possible and (b) make a lot of money. B is required to perfect the product -- which serves A better than anything else. I think the 'Apple way' is most efficient: selling the whole package and making it so good, that people happily pay a lot.

I'm not sure how cars will ever constitute "sustainable transport". Less unsustainable than carbon fuelled cars, maybe. And that's a big maybe, given batteries, power generation etc.

But I suppose there's not that much money in trying to sell bicycles...

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#158

Post by peterfirefly » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

the_rosentotter wrote: post #105

jeremyrwelch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't know about this. Source?

Musk has been known to embellish his academic record, it was detailed during the court case against Tesla's original founder Martin Eberhard: http://evworld.com/pdf/eberhardvmusk.pdf According to court documents he has never had any association with Stanford university, and, contrary to public statements, among them SEC filings, has no degrees beyond a Bachelor of Science in Economics from PennU.

Do we know if we can trust Eberhard on this?

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#159

Post by DenisM » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #97

DenisM wrote: post #18

Musk 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…

You use "Gigafactory" as if it was an established word. It isn't. It it the name of Tesla's battery factory being built in Nevada.

If we couldn't use words until they are established, no word would ever become established.

Think about this - how do words become words? There isn't a government agency that makes decisions on that, it's the people who do, through common use.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#160

Post by DenisM » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

mstachowiak wrote: post #72

DenisM wrote: post #18

Musk 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...

Exciting times!

One thing that Musk has and BYD doesn't is the eager attention of the world's best engineers. Musk has an interview where he described SpaceX having designed things in house instead of buying them, and coming up with much better solutions. I imagine that battery and rockets are similar to software in that regard - a top engineer is 10x more productive than an average engineer. Combination of scale and engineering talent might be Tesla's bet to stay ahead.