I'm going to reply to some posts out-of-order, don't mind me.
What competition??? No other EV out there is competitive with the current version of the S/X.
Tesla isn't competing in the EV market, Tesla is competing in the
car market.
So, for a luxury sedan with similar passenger volume (although significantly less cargo volume) and performance, the BMW M550i xDrive has 360 mi EPA combined range, 450 mi EPA highway range. A Model S 100D is 335 mi combined range (and as combined and highway efficiency are the same, 102 MPGe, it's also 335 mi highway range). (I chose the 5-Series because it's the best selling in its size class right now.)
For a SUV with similar passenger volume and performance, I would use the Audi Q7, but there isn't a comparable performance model in the US market, so the BMW X7 xDrive50i will have to do (still slower, but...), with 372 mi EPA combined range, 460 mi EPA highway range. This is through a bigger fuel tank, but compared to the Model X 100D's 295 mi EPA combined range and 302 mi EPA highway range...
So, there's absolutely a range deficit (and it's worse in the situation where range actually matters, highway driving) compared to the luxury cars that they're competing against... but it gets worse.
The EV has to be recharged instead of refueled, and even though the Supercharger network is good, it's not as pervasive as gas stations, and it's not as fast as refueling. So far, it seems that this hasn't mattered - most people are willing to lose a few minutes every few hours - but if you're trying to get everyone converted, you'll eventually have to address this somehow. Increasing range (whether it's through reducing drag, improving powertrain efficiency, putting a bigger battery in, or all three) helps both issues - you have to stop less often, and you increase maximum charging rate in MPH (if it's through reducing drag and/or improving powertrain efficiency, this is improved for all phases of charging, whereas putting a bigger battery in improves peak rate).
Of course, we all know that in daily driving, this doesn't matter
at all. Average commute 40 miles round trip, etc., etc. But on road trips, it means the ICE is faster, unless you've built long stops in anyway,
and those stops have a Supercharger near them.
We need faster charging and a denser fast charging network.
Bigger batteries are ecological nonsense, since they require more energy for ALL of your kilometers (due to the extra weight), while only solving a problem that only exists for a small number of your kilometers.
I’m pretty sure that if gas stations were spaced 100km apart, people would also think they need a bigger fuel tank.
I agree with improving charging performance (which SCv3 does), albeit I don't want it to be at the cost of damaging the packs (I suspect some manufacturers
are willing to just fry their packs with too-fast charging), as well as increasing the pervasiveness of Superchargers (especially putting them in areas with
good restaurants - a lot of people won't be happy with being forced into a choice between gas station fast food and Applebee's, this came up with a friend that I was trying to convince that a 3 LR RWD is suited to a road trip that he regularly did, we could make the whole trip barely work to his liking... except for his lunch stop, where the location of the Morgantown, WV Supercharger made it impractical to eat at good restaurants in town, instead forcing a choice between Sheetz and Denny's).
But, this isn't an argument against big batteries. (I mean, really, you're arguing for the ~24 kWh packs common in early/mid 2010s compliance cars here, because they have enough range to cover most daily commutes, and then just slamming them with fast charges on road trips every 80 miles.)
Big batteries do create more manufacturing emissions... but this may be offset by lower degradation (operating in a narrower SoC window during normal driving). The other issue with big batteries is the weight, but
battery weight specifically tends to be less harmful to efficiency - cars regularly travel at speeds where aerodynamic drag effects vastly outweigh any rolling resistance effects of the added weight, and regenerative braking partially offsets the added weight as well (and the larger battery is more able to take high regen power).
Big batteries are one of the easier ways to enable higher charging speeds - you can do things with cell manufacturing processes to reduce internal resistance and increase charging speed (at the expense of capacity, and it's not any lighter), and you can switch chemistries to a chemistry suited to low density/high power operation, something like A123's nanophosphate LiFePO4 cells or LTO cells, but with reductions in energy density, you now have to add more cells to maintain range! Just adding more high energy cells, OTOH, gives you good power while also giving you better range.
Additionally, as I understand, a significant part of the Raven not-a-refresh range increases will be through efficiency gains, and that improves everything.
Customers will tell BEV automakers when bigger becomes unnecessarily big.
Some Prius customers very much like having a car with 600-650 miles of range.
People buy diesel vehicles with 700 miles of range.
Some Prius owners insist they will never buy a BEV until there is one with at least 500 miles of range.
When customers refuse to pay for an even larger pack then automakers will know the top end.
An even bigger pack also means the charging times for 100 miles or 200 miles of range shrink.
There is a treadmill of range here, that will likely stop before satisfying the extreme outliers, but they'll have to learn to deal with it, ultimately.
I'm thinking of people like the 1996-1997 VW Passat Wagon TDI owners on TDIClub that do the "ventectomy". From the 1980s through the mid 2000s, VW diesel fuel tanks had a chamber for evaporative emissions left over from the gasoline fuel tank assemblies, with a valve in the filler neck that the fuel cap opened. This wasn't needed in diesels (the fuel doesn't really evaporate), so a common enthusiast practice was to remove that valve, so it was always open, and you could fill that chamber with fuel, usually a couple gallons. In those old Passat wagons, however, you could get about
9 gallons in there, on top of the 18.5 gallon rated capacity, getting
1155 miles of highway range. Combine that with a bit of hypermiling, and there were people bragging about getting 1400 miles range on those cars.
...of course, the successor cars to those didn't have the vent, so they ended up having to suck it up and
only get 700-800 mi highway range.
Tesla chose the 70mm dimension. Suppose for a moment that 70mm was chosen because it was the tallest cell that permitted direct pack substitution. I.e. We are supposing that Tesla calculated they could shave 5mm off the pack height elsewhere.
If that was a factor in choosing that cell height, it’s a factor that could never be openly discussed. Osborne.
Doubtful - cell manufacturers were already beginning to standardize on 20700 and 21700 cells for higher energy density applications. So, Tesla was merely following the market in a direction that they saw as favorable for their applications.
