Pezpunk
Active Member
Raw materials (Nickel, Lithium, etc) is the next upcoming bottleneck. Tesla has foreseen this and put themselves in a better position than anyone else, but raw materials is still going to be their constraint in 2023 and beyond.
By the way, only somewhat related to your question, but on the subject of batteries: does anyone else think there is a lot of evidence that the 4680 cells are not meeting the specifications laid out on Battery Day? We can already see with our own eyes that they require side-channel cooling in the latest iteration of the packs, something that was absent in the representations shown on Battery Day. If they were forced to change their approach, this would diminish the energy density of the pack, and negatively impact potential range and performance. It also indicates some of their initial assumptions regarding heat dissipation were inaccurate, which raises potential issues with charging, performance, and possibly even longevity.
Looking back at the slides themselves from that presentation, there are three that concern me:
1. "The challenge with larger cells is supercharging" i.e. heat dissipation. The tabless design was presented as the solution to that issue. The presence of cooling channels between the cells on the production pack may indicate this solution did not meet their expectations.
2. Compared to 2170s, the 4680s were said to have "5x the energy, +16% range, 6x the Power". This is a weird slide. I assume the first and third claim here are per cell (4680 is obviously more massive than a 2170), while the middle claim about range might be per battery pack? per kw/h? i can't tell. This makes the first and third claims very hard claims to evaluate, since we don't know how many 4680s there will be in a pack, at least not yet.
3. Dry Electrode process would result in 10x less energy used creating the cell, and 10x reduction in factory footprint. Does anyone know for sure if the 4680 lines being built use this Dry Electrode process? I admit I haven't followed the Berlin and Austin construction as closely as I did Shanghai.
(There were a bunch of other slides that were tangential to the 4680, regarding factory footprint, recycling, mineral mining, etc. -- i'm omitting those because this post is about the 4680 Battery Day specs vs. what we are seeing going into production.)
The presentation mentions different chemical profiles will be used for different applications (standard-range sedan vs. performance models vs. Semi vs. stationary applications, etc) but does not specify that multiple form factors will also be used, but I suspect they will. In fact, my concern is that the 4680 might prove unsuitable for ultra high-performance applications such as the Roadster and Plaid, and also may have limitations with supercharging.
I welcome others' thoughts on this, I'm not trying to claim expertise in this area.
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