Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[Fact Checking]

Interesting insight about e-tron, Taycan versus Tesla battery cooling systems and the implications.

Either Audi & Porsche are just smarter than Elon which is a possibility but hard to believe if we talk Batteries or they did make some marketing statements and users won't have long fun with it...

Audi e-tron Battery TMS: How Does It Stack Up Against Tesla Model 3?

So:

'Here’s how ME systems chief engineer Keith Ritter summed it up:

“I have concluded that the Model 3 TMS with glycol-cooled micro-channel snake tubes glued directly to the cells has better heat transfer capacity than any system that uses flat glycol bottom-plates with either passive conductive fins or natural-convective thermal loops. It is just physics and geometry. more effective heat transfer area + better effective U value. So I don’t see how Jaguar, Audi, Merc or Porsche can beat Tesla in the charge rate game if pure TMS heat transfer capacity is governing. The only way I can see that Audi (and maybe Porsche) can get away with high charge rates is because they “may” have significant electrode/tab-cooling (if our engineered-fluid scenario is correct) and therefore can let the cells get hotter than other designs. Safely charge despite a lower W/ deg. K”'​

I believe @KarenRei came to a similar conclusion as this article.

My cynical guess is that Audi and Porsche are going to use their proven technologies they share with their corporate owner Volkswagen AG: misleading, lying, cheating, stonewalling about the negative effects of high speed charging on cell longevity, and once all these measures fail, buying their way out of trouble via warranty costs and by wearing customers down.

It will take years for cell damage to show up, and they are playing for time.

 

[KarenRei]

My cynical guess is that Audi and Porsche are going to use their proven technologies they share with their corporate owner Volkswagen AG: misleading, lying, cheating, stonewalling about cell longevity, and once all these measures fail, buying their way out of trouble. It will take years for cell damage to show up, and they are playing for time.

And this sort of stuff is going to hurt the reputation of all EVs when it happens. :Þ

 

[VValleyEV]

So:

'Here’s how ME systems chief engineer Keith Ritter summed it up:

“I have concluded that the Model 3 TMS with glycol-cooled micro-channel snake tubes glued directly to the cells has better heat transfer capacity than any system that uses flat glycol bottom-plates with either passive conductive fins or natural-convective thermal loops. It is just physics and geometry. more effective heat transfer area + better effective U value. So I don’t see how Jaguar, Audi, Merc or Porsche can beat Tesla in the charge rate game if pure TMS heat transfer capacity is governing. The only way I can see that Audi (and maybe Porsche) can get away with high charge rates is because they “may” have significant electrode/tab-cooling (if our engineered-fluid scenario is correct) and therefore can let the cells get hotter than other designs. Safely charge despite a lower W/ deg. K”'​

I believe @KarenRei came to a similar conclusion as this article.

My cynical guess is that Audi and Porsche are going to use their proven technologies they share with their corporate owner Volkswagen AG: misleading, lying, cheating, stonewalling about the negative effects of high speed charging on cell longevity, and once all these measures fail, buying their way out of trouble via warranty costs and by wearing customers down.

It will take years for cell damage to show up, and they are playing for time.

Thx much to you and @KarenRei. I have a friend who is a Porsche enthusiast and I suspect a Taycan reservation holder, and have forwarded him the article link along with my synopsis of the cynical hypothesis. He is likely to consider this to be FUD from rabid Tesla fans, but it will give him something to chew on. IMHO Karen has nailed the strongest argument for cynicism as Occam’s Razor.

 

[Silent Ludicrosy]

My cynical guess is that Audi and Porsche are going to use their proven technologies they share with their corporate owner Volkswagen AG: misleading, lying, cheating, stonewalling about the negative effects of high speed charging on cell longevity, and once all these measures fail, buying their way out of trouble via warranty costs and by wearing customers down.

It will take years for cell damage to show up, and they are playing for time.

At least they won’t have that many packs to replace. Batterygate 2021?

 

[CaliBear1]

Spice must flow!

I see what you did there FC.

Great idea to electrify bulk shipping!

A couple of thoughts:

• Business model: I believe it would make sense to approach this issue from the high end as well, just like Tesla approached automotive electrification: instead of bulk cargo, go for really high speed sea delivery, with an electric fleet. Delivery times to Europe and China within 1 week will already favorably compete with air freight - which is a big and lucrative market. A 4x speedup to ~80 mph (radar assisted, of course) would cut delivery times to Europe from 20 days to 5 days and to China from 30 days to ~7 days. 100 mph+ speeds would push things from a safety POV though, but would be even more lucrative - and might allow approaches like a catamaran design, which would lower sea resistance and reduce energy costs.
• Cell longevity is going to be an issue, as the major depreciation factor. The current global commercial shipping fleet's average age is over 20 years. Steel ship hulls can go on forever, and are expected to. How long are the best, most durable cells going to last, and what is degradation curve and how predictable are the failure modes, and is there a continuous maintenance mode that effectively refreshes all cells over the long run?
• Battery module safety: that's a lot of energy stored, many tons of TNT-equivalent, with the nearest fire trucks thousands of kms away. Robust, yet environmentally friendly modes of fire suppression of a battery fire have to be found - probably by compartmentalizing/sealing battery modules where a fire could not escape even if a runaway thermal reaction triggers inside. There's a billion dollar ship to protect ...
  
• Electric motors have other advantages over diesel motors: the huge engines of the really huge cargo ships can take more than an hour to warm up for departure. With an electric ship the ship is immediately ready for departure the moment the containers are loaded. More 'just in time' logistics are possible with an electric fleet.
• "On the go" recharging: it takes capital investment but it's possible to do recharging "on the go": "recharging ships" which carry nothing but huge batteries, shuttling between cargo ships. The recharging ships would then periodically dock with the off-shore wind farms to recharge themselves. If there's enough of them then the offshore wind farms don't need any battery capacity at all: there would always be a "recharging ship" docked, using up available generated electricity.
• What are the risks of weather patterns with too little or too much wind, and the resulting disruption to available deep sea wind energy? Delivery times must be guaranteed even in the face of hurricanes or doldrums. There must be a fail-safe plan to keep the spice going, probably by having the 'recharging ships' go back to the coast for electricity, or enough solar energy to keep things going in the worst case.

 

[Beltsbear]

The

And this sort of stuff is going to hurt the reputation of all EVs when it happens. :Þ

I don’t agree. I don’t think all gas cars suck because VW forgot how to make transmissions for a while. I just know VW transmissions suck.

 

[EVNow]

Just some estimates I found - Tesla has not disclosed the official numbers, AFAIK.

@Mars ☰mperor : Troy's estimate was much lower - 200k.

 

[EVNow]

The

I don’t agree. I don’t think all gas cars suck because VW forgot how to make transmissions for a while. I just know VW transmissions suck.

Depends on how well you know the subject. The more you know - the better you can pin point.

For eg., most people might say Leaf's batteries degrade very fast. But those who have more experience will say - Leaf's batteries degrade fast in hot climates.

 

[Mark's Beagle]

I'm old enough to rmeemrem when peolep were freaking out if there car had HW 1.0 or 2.0. In the end 2.0 was much Ado about nothing.

3.0 hype may end up bursting in similar fashion.

 

[Intl Professor]

Physically Unable to Perform....

Good question...... And soon, foretelling of the future...

I resemble that!

 

[EVMeister]

I'm old enough to rmeemrem when peolep were freaking out.

You typing whilst brushing your teeth again?

 

[Buckminster]

What's the general opinion on S/X now? Are Tesla likely to sell 20% less than Q4 in Q1 but maintain Q4 level profits? ReflexFunds shows a significant drop in Q1 profit in his model.

 

[KarenRei]

What's the general opinion on S/X now? Are Tesla likely to sell 20% less than Q4 in Q1 but maintain Q4 level profits? ReflexFunds shows a significant drop in Q1 profit in his model.

Nobody knows the answer to this yet, but Q1 is usually a poor quarter. And Q1 sales are generally biased toward March. It's interesting that S/X January numbers are up over their equivalent in 2018. Hmm, when did 75D sales terminate exactly?

But yes, I expect annual sales to be roughly 80% of what they were last year, offset by the improved margins.

 

[VValleyEV]

The

I don’t agree. I don’t think all gas cars suck because VW forgot how to make transmissions for a while. I just know VW transmissions suck.

I think I agree with @KarenRei that this would hurt reputations of all EVs.

I suspect that VW’s scam/scandal, getting caught cheating on emissions levels of their diesels, led many folks to believe that “yeah, diesels are all terrible polluters, it can’t be fixed”. Similarly, frying batteries from Porsche will make them think that “yeah, EV batteries are all unreliable, it can’t be fixed”.

 

[22522]

You know, I'm tired of dancing around the "buts" and "maybes" and "what ifs". Let's just call it as it is: Porsche and Audi are willingly frying their cells, because most people won't fast charge that often and they can afford to eat the warranty costs on those who do.

There is no other explanation that meets Occam's Razor. There is no magic cell that somehow only they have that nobody else has heard of, that manages to be simultaneously energy dense and power dense. Their cooling design is primitive. They're not "locking out" half of the pack to make the C-rate appear faster than it is.

Let's call a spade a spade: they're frying their cells.

They may have a lower internal resistance in each cell (better pathways inside each cell). This means less heat is generated.

 

[anthonyj]

Y’all talking about E-Tron and Taycan like they are actually coming out within the next 3 years. VW time is worse than Elon time and that’s really really saying something

 

[OPRCE]

So:

'Here’s how ME systems chief engineer Keith Ritter summed it up:

“I have concluded that the Model 3 TMS with glycol-cooled micro-channel snake tubes glued directly to the cells has better heat transfer capacity than any system that uses flat glycol bottom-plates with either passive conductive fins or natural-convective thermal loops. It is just physics and geometry. more effective heat transfer area + better effective U value. So I don’t see how Jaguar, Audi, Merc or Porsche can beat Tesla in the charge rate game if pure TMS heat transfer capacity is governing. The only way I can see that Audi (and maybe Porsche) can get away with high charge rates is because they “may” have significant electrode/tab-cooling (if our engineered-fluid scenario is correct) and therefore can let the cells get hotter than other designs. Safely charge despite a lower W/ deg. K”'​

I believe @KarenRei came to a similar conclusion as this article.

My cynical guess is that Audi and Porsche are going to use their proven technologies they share with their corporate owner Volkswagen AG: misleading, lying, cheating, stonewalling about the negative effects of high speed charging on cell longevity, and once all these measures fail, buying their way out of trouble via warranty costs and by wearing customers down.

It will take years for cell damage to show up, and they are playing for time.

It is also imaginable that Audi/Porsche's NCM-611 cells generate significantly less waste heat per unit power than Tesla's NCA chemistry, thus obviating the need for so much direct cell contact in the cooling system. And/or they pump the cooling fluids faster through a larger radiator.

In any case the Audi e-Tron Quattro battery has a huge 12% reserve capacity [cf 4% on S100D pack], charges 0..80% at average 140kW over 29 minutes, and allegedly can regen at up to 200kW [cf 60kW on S100D pack], both of which strongly suggest a battery with very low internal resistance and/or superior cooling.

Porsche's system probably doubles this up for an effective rate of ~280kW 0..80%, not necessarily the 350kW specced on the charger.

In short there is no good reason to believe their system unduly damages the battery life, plus many historical reasons to believe they are highly competent in automotive engineering.

 

[Beltsbear]

They may have a lower internal resistance in each cell (better pathways inside each cell). This means less heat is generated.

That has been debunked.

 

[mongo]

They may have a lower internal resistance in each cell (better pathways inside each cell). This means less heat is generated.

I think "frying" was meant in the electrical/ net result sense, not purely the temperature sense. Pushing too much current into a cell (regardless of temperature) causes damage to the electrodes and possibly plating of litium metal. Similarly, excessive discharge current can damage the electrodes.
With poor thermal management, the hotter cells will have a lower resistance and will carry a higher fraction of the total current, thus exacerbating the problems. On a cold pack, the same thing can happen.

Charging at too high a temp can cause gas generation and venting also.

Charging at too low a temp can cause permanent loss due to lithium plating.

The really weird case is a partial frozen battery. The less-frozen cells provide the power. Then when the other cells warm up, they back charge their neighbors.

 

[Beltsbear]

In short there is no good reason to believe their system unduly damages the battery life, plus many historical reasons to believe they are highly competent in automotive engineering.

this is battery engineering and has nothing to do with their experience in making ICE vehicles.

Also while I doubt they have even a 10% advantage in charge rate, that 10% gets eaten up in their efficiency rating which also shows how incompetent their engineering is. So they charge 10% faster but they drain it 10% faster leading to no real world improvement.