Even the first Leaf’s did very well in very moderate climate locations, but not so well in very hot or cold ones. Without much question, IMHO, the absence of BMS was the crucial weakness. Carlos Ghosn gets credit for the Leaf but his real ‘contribution’ was a “Le Cost Cutter”, with not so much concern for effectiveness.
The contrast with Tesla, and only Tesla, was amazing. It still is, as most legacy OEMs are using third party, often Tier One, suppliers. That is the same process that brought on B787 fires, and continuing travails with pouch batteries, those winning so often because they’re easy to fit in converted ICE.
Hindsight has shown that in general too much of the 787 was outsourced. This management blunder caused tremendous integration problems and cost billions of dollars and many years of schedule delay.
However, the Boeing 787 Li-ion battery fires were not caused by outsourcing per se, and it would not make sense for Boeing (nor Airbus) to produce their own batteries, because the volume is too low and other companies are better at doing the job. I would even guess that insourcing would have increased the probability of a flawed design, all else being equal, because of Boeing’s lack of expertise in this specialty.
Insufficient qualification of the battery and its production system was partly to blame, given that the NTSB investigation report indicated that the supplier’s verification plan did not have a way to detect the type of defect that resulted in thermal runaway incidents. Boeing’s Supply Quality organization should have caught that.
Also, another major factor was that outsourcing was supposed to help as part of a big-picture political negotiation strategy with countries beyond the USA. Boeing is America’s largest exporter by total dollar value, the average transaction size usually exceeds $1B and thus purchases can require major and complex financing deals, often involving the Export-Import Bank. Additionally, many of the customers are foreign governments, both for defense and space hardware and also for jets going to airlines which are
often majority- or wholly-owned by national governments which was an even more common ownership arrangement in the early 2000s when the development began in earnest. Establishing deeper overseas supplier relationships for the 787 was a strategy to help improve these overall business relationships.
(I worked at Boeing 2015-2022)
I want to bring this point up because we need to be careful about using superficial analogies with other industries, because apparent similarities might be spurious and lead to learning a false lesson. These reasons and many more make Boeing’s make-buy decisions majorly different from Tesla’s.
Also, Tesla is using plenty of suppliers too, including for most of their battery cells. The question is whether vertical integration is applied where it makes sense and how well the company manages the supply chain for the rest.
deeeemannnnnd problems. Heard it from a reliable source.
