Its after hours and I am in the mood to recount an interesting realization. This is probably not the right thread, but whatever.
From time to time, I like to read up on the short BS on seeking alpha to keep myself entertained more than anything else. so I was reading
this article by one Mr. Santos and believe it or not, I found an unlikely bullish argument. He was saying
As a positive comment: The only chance I see of the Gigafactory ending up being useful for Tesla, and even then cost-wise it's likely to be a doubtful bet, would be for Randy Carlson to be entirely right regarding his
in-module cell processing thesis.
Randy Carlson is an engineer at heart and a huge TSLA bull. And he made some bold predictions in the article that Mr. Santos refers above. If you have an engineering bent of mind, I'd highly recommend pouring a glass of red wine and reading through that
article. It is a very interesting thesis he puts together, based just on the fact that the battery pack of model 3 is much larger than expected, given the energy needs. Specifically, he makes a few bold predictions.
- The battery is air cooled instead of liquid cooled, which is a great way to drop battery costs
- The battery pack is probably the same thickness as a Model S despite longer cells (70 MM vs 65 MM in S/X)
- Most importantly, Li-ion cells once manufactured need to be 'aged' by very slowly charging & discharging them over a few days, using expensive equipment, which requires these cells to be stored at a production location. This is why cell manufacturing needs a large foot print and expensive. Randy's contention was this was short circuited by TSLA by building the packs first from cells and then 'aging' them in the battery packs
Now I am not a battery expert by any stretch and this all sounded somewhat far fetched to me and I didn't give it much credence. Also this article was more than a month old (6/20).
This morning I was skimming through electrek.co and i was startled when i was reading this
article. Specifically the article calls out a few things
- The half centimeter height increase for the car packs would be offset with more efficient battery packaging which will make the packs actually the same thickness or less than current packs and obviously with a higher energy density.
This is only possible if the connectors are between cells rather than on top of cells, strongly hinting that the battery is air-cooled and not liquid cooled and validates Carlson's first hypothesis
There was also a room for storing and aging battery packs which was again out of comprehension huge.
This was again a Carlson prediction, that it was infact the packs being 'aged' as opposed to the cells. This closed the loop for me on why the pack costs could approach $100 / Kwh with the industry at more than twice the cost with prismatic cells.
Now here is the best part. In a different
article Carlson runs the math and arrives at a 44 KWH capacity for the base Model S. This seems reasonable given that an S60, a larger, heavier, and a higher Cd car can achieve 210 miles. So long run, the battery costs for the 3 would be 5-6K for the average 40K model 3 car. This leaves a lot of room for TSLA to very comfortably make 25% GM on the car in the not too far future. If anything, I'd guess that in 2020, unless TSLA drops the prices, the GM could even approach 30%.
Really unbelieveable what Elon and JB accomplished with the gigafactory. Godspeed Tesla and TSLA!!
PS: if you know of any other thread where this would be more relevant, please drop a note. I will crosspost / link there.
PPS: Thought I was posting in the short term thread, but am going to leave it here anyways.
