Why do you believe SS Batteries are so close to mass production?
There are working prototypes in labs now and as
@30seconds posted, Toyota thought it had a production ready solid state tech. The 2022 is still the "early" 2020s and that's 4-5 years away. Look at where the EV world was 5 years ago, the Model S had just been introduced and it had around 240 miles of range on an 85 KWh battery. Now the range of the top model is close to 100 miles longer.
Mid-2020s would be 8 years or so, which would be a longer time span than just about every EV model on the road today.
JB said (pretty much) that they are currently working with the Goodenaugh battery technology .
Goodenough is just one of the solid state batteries in labs now. I don't know the specifics of the different chemistries, but Goodenough's chemistry much be the most promising for cars if everyone is looking at them.
I think that the main reasons for their slowness is that they can’t figure out how to build cars profitablely with the current batteries. They are waiting for something that is affordable. Elon has figured out how to make affordable batteries with current cell technology. What the people who think that the competition is a threat to Tesla don’t seem to understand is that Tesla will also be able to produce packs using more affordable cells for less than their competition.
The various articles predicting Tesla's demise when the mainstream car makers start making EVs en masse don't get that anything the mainstream car makers will do, Tesla will do at the same time if not before they do it.
I’m trying to find out how much their production equipment would need to charge to handle the Goodenaugh cells.
Current li-ion cells are very complex to manufacture and require some sophisticated equipment to do right. A lot of the li-ion cells from China are assembled by hand and they usually don't last very long because the tolerances are way off. Parts of the cells also need to be cured which takes time.
From what little I've seen about the solid state chemistries in the labs today, the cells should be much easier to make. That will probably mean the GF can crank out a tremendously larger volume of SS cells than the current cells because they can produce more cells per sq ft of factory floor per day and the cells will take less time per cell to make.
I'm sure Tesla was thinking ahead when they designed the GF and while they may not know exactly what needs to be done to manufacture the next chemistry, they probably are thinking about the details.
They are prepared to do that. 2019 would be an extremely aggressive schedule for introducing new cells.
They need to be quiet. Remember when there were a lot of incorrect opinions about the 2170’s being a huge breakthrough snd people were talking about waiting for the new batteries to order their cars?
They don't want to Osborne current production on the hopes something is coming soon that in reality will take years to reach production cars. I strongly doubt solid state cells will be ready for full production by 2019. They might be doing limited production for test vehicles by 2020 or 2021, but that would be really pushing the time table to the maximum.
