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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
'Europe's biggest' battery energy system opens in East Yorkshire
‘Europe’s biggest’ battery energy storage system (by MWh) has been officially opened. Located at Pillswood near Cottingham, East Yorkshire, the £75m… | Industrials | Energy | Yorkshire & The Humber | Industrial | Sustainability |
bdaily.co.uk
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
Even before games, they saved 3/4 of the copper mass. Trying to save more will run into ampacity limits
Xepa777
Banned
Yah I’m saying at this rate when combined with an upcoming recession the prices will keep lowering throughout the year. Do I really have to spell that out?
Yeah, continued lowering of costs and price. Tesla will keep a healthy margin.
The EU pricing now is roughly the same as US pricing. Margins are fantastic. This is nothing to be worried about.
Just yesterday Troy was not raising his quarterly unit estimates despite China producing more than he expected in Feb - because he said Tesla didn’t have enough demand to buy the increased supply.
Today Tesla lowers pricing to increase demand to meet the increased supply out of China - presumably Troy should now raise his quarterly unit estimates.
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Dikkie Dik
If gets hard, use hammer
European 2022 GDP was up 3.5%. Fear of recession is overblown, considering the war and energy crisis.
Sales so far have been solid and tracking to match Q4 2022 which would be great considering Q1 is always weak.
My guess is they’re clearing out inventory because HW4 is coming.
Sales so far have been solid and tracking to match Q4 2022 which would be great considering Q1 is always weak.
My guess is they’re clearing out inventory because HW4 is coming.
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
The profit angle is fun to contemplate, but even the more prosaic Zach angle is pretty cool too:
Tesla spent $28B for 2M per annum capacity, so $14B per million capacity
If they spend say $162B for 18M more capacity, that is $9B per million capacity
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
Skit time, folks ...
Location: Tesla HQ, a collaborative meeting involving manufacturing and design teams
Franz: I brought some gorgeous drawings for you guys to build
Lars: I was thinking ... a box would be really cheap to build
Location: Tesla HQ, a collaborative meeting involving manufacturing and design teams
Franz: I brought some gorgeous drawings for you guys to build
Lars: I was thinking ... a box would be really cheap to build
My first thought was, do the structural battery with a big casting too, for the top and sides, so all locations that might need to be precise would be so between the casting and CNC finishing, with the bottom being stamped and glued/bolted on. Then similarly horizontal members that connect the front and back across the roof line. Give them all very precise alignment holes (made more precise with CNC touch up after sprue removal), affix a few bolts to hold it together, and let the robots weld that structure, then slap on the exterior panels that are normally welded on and if necessary weld them too.
But then it occurred to me, as long as the front and rear are positioned perfectly, and then everything else accordingly aligned perfectly, we don't actually need those things aligning them to be welded into every car. Why not instead have a jig that the front and rear are bolted to, and you can align the other structure and body panels to and weld things, weld up those things, then remove that jig from the car, leaving space for the structural pack to come in later?
It would need to have a way to shrink and be removed, but you can sort of already see how that could work if you just think of an inside out Giga Press, or a nested Giga Press.
Instead of injecting molten metal, there would be a frame that the front and rear casting are fixed to, either with bolts or just simply by a combination of geometry and gravity. There would be a center part that correspondingly locates into the castings, and itself can expand and contract in the front to back direction. By having all the "press" parts riding on the same set of rails/slides/whatever, you ensure repeatability as long as the other parts can be precisely positioned by way of geometry etc.
- At the start of a cycle, the system is empty, the outer "press" parts are retracted away from the center, the center is in the fully extended position
- Front and rear castings are inserted horizontally between the outer and inner "press" parts
- The outer "press" parts move inwards towards the center "press" until things are aligned properly
- Whatever other things that need to be welded are brought in from the sides, tops, etc, similarly precision aligned
- Welding happens
- Repeat previous 2 steps as necessary to do multiple layers or overlapping sequences of welding, if needed (possibly you only do this for some basic structural components, and leave all the rest to more regular welding setups later on, to facilitate physically getting welding robots to where they need to be for those later steps)
- All things are welded up, attached to the front and rear castings
- Body is grabbed by some robot to be removed (probably vertically, probably up), and is supported by this robot
- Both the front and rear "press" parts retracted to start position, center "press parts" contract inwards so nothing is grabbing on to the front or rear castings, body is entirely supported by the removal robot
- Removal robot pulls the body out of the welding press contraption
- Center "press" parts extend to their start position again
- Repeat from first step for next vehicle
It's probably a simpler short term engineering challenge to just make "everything" a casting and bolt it together with high precision, but building this large alignment and welding fixture might provide eventual better efficiencies (it doesn't preclude more castings, but also allows for a mix of castings and stamped panels beyond the main structural components, and possibly can have a higher cycle speed since potentially no bolting required, just place and weld), plus potentially you could design it once big enough for something the size of a van, then produce multiples of it, rather than them being bespoke to each line. The programming of the robots would be per vehicle line of course, and you'd swap out the fixtures that receive the front and rear castings depending on the line it was installed on, but it would let you have a 90% common machine that you could probably get IDRA to build for you.
Buckminster
Well-Known Member
I would need to read this more carefully but are you talking about welding the structure together? You then mention a Gigapress that makes castings?
petit_bateau
Active Member
Why spend money unnecessarily ?
There are at least four or more feasible rail yard locations that align with the flat land of the valley floors, don't require tunnelling, wouldn't require massive rebuilding of the major roads, and which have sensible rail radiuses to go out to the existing railroad, and which are entirely compatible with the likely required road, electrical, and other provisions to site. Doing it all above ground is much more flexible than getting locked into inflexible and costly tunnelling operations.
I've sketched a few options below. The factory block is approximately to scale and location from the image that Tesla have revealed which is looking from the west towards the east (strictly just north of east). The image of course is just marketing blurb at this point. I've put the main building at about 400m x 1km size, much like the Austin main building.
Putting service roads for car-cargo to access the railyards for loading doesn't require tunnelling. Just stuff them through narrow apertures like this (which I grabbed from the railroad just by El Durazno)
and the Mexicans are well used to bridging over the top of railroad tracks - these are where the #100 goes over those same tracks in El Durazno.
But they'll definitely be a plan as they will need access via rail to at least one Atlantic port (most likely Altamira) and one Pacific port (prob Manzanillo) for export purposes. So I suspect that they've purchased all the land they need in one initial buy so as to avoid being held to ransom.
To put things in perspective here are a couple of images from the VAG-SEAT plant at Martorell in Spain, just outside Barcelona. It is a similar 400m x 1km plot and you can see the rail loading yard in the lower left (SW) corner. I've included the scale bar. I picked this plant as an example because it has steep sided valley constraints that are much more stringent than the Monterrey ones.
and a close up of that corner showing all the cars waiting to be loaded.
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There's a new SuC just opened in Brussels, quite likely that's v4 too, I'll pass by and check
Yeah, based on the casting machines in that it would have large assemblies sliding on those linear motion rails, but instead of casting, you use it to hold things together in a precise manner to do the welding (the welding bots would come in from the sides or top or bottom or whatever, no depicted). My previous post has a more in depth description of the idea.
Indeed, and wire sizing is based either on self heating (typical ampacity) or voltage drop (which is also a power loss).
A wire carrying 4 amps is equivilent to 4 wires of 1/4 the cross-section each carrying 1 Amp, so no violation there. In fact, the 4 wire case is generating 4 times the heat per unit length vs the down sized single section.
A wire carrying 4 amps has 4 volts of drop for every ohm of resistance. A wire with 1 amp of flow has 4 volts of drop for every 4 ohms of resistance. Thus, resistance can be 4x (1/4 the crossection) for the same drop over the same length. Again, this is overly conservative if the requirement is actually a percentage drop in voltage (or power) as the source value has quadrupled (see also: wire gauge charts for 120 vs 240 AC).
6 AWG levels is roughly half the diameter which is 1/4 the cross-section. This shows dropping current to 1/4 typically* results in 6 (or more) gauge drops.
*there are other factors in play, but middle of chart shows the trend.
East Penn Wire Guide Chart, minimum of 18 AWG:
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Unless they explicitly referenced the current motors as SRPM and the new rare earth free ones as PM (which I don't remember to be the case), it's most likely just a simplification for presentations sake.
Likewise pure iron magnets are still PMs just usually with less magnetic force per weight/volume.
FWIW, Italian prices have declined just enough to be able to receive incentives. I expect solid sales from Italy, as February is already indicating.
Health care cost are probably 10 times less in Mexico.Wages in one GM plant in Mexico (representative?) are ~10%-12% of Midwest US levels.
New union at GM Mexico plant could benefit US autoworkers
Workers at GM's pickup plant in Mexico voted for a new union. It will be good news for U.S. autoworkers. But could it impact future pickup prices?www.freep.com
Inventory trends suggest more EU discounts are coming.
All the cars will move, the question is at which prices. The Tesla leadership team clearly knows all this and Elon @ investor day specifically talked about the barrier being the purchase price, hence the big focus on cost reduction.
If the intent is to continue pumping out 3s and Ys without a smaller/cheaper model and interest rates stay higher for longer, it seems sensible to expect further downward pricing pressure. More discounts across the EU have been apparent just from watching what inventory has been doing.
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