Recently there were a few posts talking about Tesla‘s new battery as being one of the biggest changes in the auto industry ever. I actually think the gigacasting is a much more fundamental change, and the new battery format/tech just adds to it.
At first Elon thought massively increasing the jobs done by robotics in body construction was the answer to the question of “how do we build a car body” - and that didn’t quite workout, and they ended up needed more humans on the line. But then coming up with giga-casting was a real stroke of genius and the clear “first principles” answer, and that reduction in needed factory space - along with the vastly reduced footprint required for 4680 cell production - I think may set the scene for some smaller integrated tesla auto/cell factories for places like Brazil, Japan and maybe the UK, where something like a ~250k annual unit volume may be more appropriate, at least initially. If they can figure out a way to make a line that can swap between 3, Y, the smaller hatch and/or van with minimal downtime then that would work great in these smaller volume markets.
In principle I agree. Probably for all three of those some form of CKD would work with local sourcing as appropriate. For all three there are substantial tax and other oddities that can make local production outweigh the impediments. For certain Japan would benefit from a narrower and shorter choice than might be the case for most markets, but vehicles with that character are very popular in dense urban environments anyway, so the 'designed in China' platform certainly will work.
FWIW, both Hyundai and Chery have unusual success in Mercosur because they are built in Brazil by a very capable group, CAOA.
The Japan and UK situations are two quite different issues, but both are well suited to predominately local solutions. We also should consider India in the same category as the others.
The Tesla Gigafactory process is unique, highly scalable and benefits from massive scale when considering such issues as cell and battery production, Gigapress deployment and advanced paint shops. We are suggesting a very different approach for substantial but limited scale for which duties, a soupçon of jingoism, actual tariff barriers etc call for specific solutions.
For each of these TE products, Supercharger deployment and provision for charging solutions in Muti-family dwellings and shopping facilities need to supplement the Superchargers. The UK is the easiest of these locations to accomplish all that. Probably Japan will be the most difficult.
The fact remains that for locations other than China and Canada there are some unusual impediments that must be considered.
Finally, The US remains a very challenging market. I will not list the direct sales and service restrictions by State, those are well discussed. The primary impediment is the members of this:
www.nada.org
We now know that will not solve easily. Thus we need to add the US to the list of unusual and difficult markets. Seven of the top ten States restrict direct sales in some way and service is also restricted in several. We should think of how to work around those because they aggregate to more sales that Japan has, with Mercosur and the UK well below that.
Without question Tesla is now sufficiently large that the large US sale States, [especially Texas (#2), NY (#4) and influential slightly smaller volume s Sates such as Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia] are critical to ongoing US growth. Hence creative NADA dealer solutions are probably essential. We Amy be assured that no political will successfully defeat the NADA.
Within the next two years all of these places are crucial to keep growing healthy Auto and TE products.
Tesla is going mainstream now, just look at all the forecasts from our own best people. I will not list them all...
. Not bad for a first month after SOP, wouldn't it?
