My thoughts on Battery Day:
I continue to be thoroughly impressed by the Tesla team. Drew and the other engineers are freaking rock stars. Super smart and motivated. I much prefer this type of presentation over the stupid PR stuff we saw from Cadillac and Lucid recently. And even if I ended up in a coma for the next 5 years, I'd sleep peacefully knowing the company is being pushed forward by the likes of Elon, Drew, and engineers like this. It almost makes me lose motivation to follow Tesla so closely, because these people are going to crush it over the next 5, 10, 15 years. I don't even feel like I need to pay attention to what's going on anymore.
As of today, even putting aside autonomy, Tesla already has a large lead in batteries, powertrain, software, engineering, manufacturing, etc. Battery Day made it clear that Tesla has some of the smartest people in the world thinking about and working hard on continuously improving every single piece of the entire battery supply chain, and probably the rest of the business as well. The pace of innovation and the numbers quoted seem absolutely absurd. I get the feeling that these advancements in Tesla's battery supply chain will, over the next 3-10 years, have a similar effect on Tesla in the battery space as the Starship architecture will have on SpaceX in the space industry. Basically it will make everybody else secondary, if not obsolete.
Everybody keeps saying Tesla can't do it alone, and Tesla keeps saying it hopes others will join it, but seriously, who can? No automotive company has been able to even come close to keeping pace with Tesla over the last decade, and now that Tesla is increasing its pace how will the gap anything but widen? I'm less familiar with the Panasonic's, LG Chem's, and CATL's of the world, but I'm skeptical that any of them have the resources, talent, leadership, and drive to keep up with Tesla's increasing pace of innovation.
And maybe that's the biggest take-away for me from Battery Day. Tesla's not just getting further ahead, it's increasing the rate at which it's getting ahead of the competition. Many will likely not understand this, but in order to survive Tesla's competitors don't just have to keep up with Tesla's innovations, they have to keep up with Tesla's pace of innovation. They don't just have to attract the right talent and spend money on the right R&D, they have to fundamentally change how their companies operate in order to drastically change their pace of innovation, or else they will get left behind.
I don't think many, if any, will be able to accomplish this on a scale similar to Tesla, so I expect we'll see a lot of casualties, and I think we should hope that Tesla can scale beyond 3 TWh after 2030, and perhaps achieve 10 or 20TWh by 2035, because I doubt anybody else is going to come anywhere close to those numbers. I'd love to be proven wrong by a Panasonic, LG Chem, or CATL Battery Day, but I'll see it when I believe it.
