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

[Surfer of Life]

Battery Cathode Plant & SACMI Machinery Discussion! 31 January 2023 Giga Texas Updates

I don’t get it. They might as well be installing a combine harvester for all the relevance I see to producing battery cathode material, the video explains little.

WHAT, exactly, does this thing press???

 

[growler23]

Aerodynamically, it's difficult to beat the Model 3 by a lot as it already has a pretty small frontal area and the Cd of a smaller car will actually be considerably worse. People who understand aerodynamics get this (you have to multiply the frontal area by the Cd). The net effect is not a wash, but it's closer than you would think. So, to get the same range, you still need 90% of the battery.

I ran into that same realization when Toyota came out with the smaller Prius C ("city") version. I expected the smaller footprint would blast the already hyper-efficient Prius into a whole new efficiency range. Instead, it got marginally better city mileage and worse (!) highway mileage than the regular Prius. This was due to fundamental physics such as Cd and aspect ratio, and actually not due to poor design as I understood it. The "C" never sold that well; perhaps somewhat due to this, and perhaps somewhat due to their target market not having as much disposable income as Toyota hoped...

 

[M|S|M MYP]

I don't know how they're going to dump unsold cars into the ocean from here.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1620481619432968193

Ummm...this is obviously for the robotaxi network to smuggle illicit goods

 

[Ogre]

For those following the TSLA "funding secured" trial, the current testimony
is by finance professor Hartzmark, who is trying to explain to the jury about
how TSLA options went haywire that day and the next few. To wit, medium/long-term
straddles collapsed, while short-term options didn't change much, affecting
plaintiff Littleton.

Hmm.

Does Musk have a fiduciary responsibility to people who don't own stock in Tesla?

That's a bad precedence IMO. Are we going to have lawsuits against Tesla for beating their estimates next year because it damages shorts and put buyers?

The stupid settlement with the SEC set a really bad precedence.

 

[StealthP3D]

A battery researcher at Dalhousie University battery lab discovered the polyethylene tape used in many li-ion cells degrades into compounds that increase the internal self-discharge of battery cells and this can be avoided simply by using polypropylene tape instead.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/battery-power-laptop-phone-research-dalhousie-university-1.6724175

Anyone know what kind of tape is used in Panasonic 2170 cells from GigaNevada?

 

[Ogre]

I'm suspicious that the glass roof is actually cheaper to make and install than a metal roof. The metal roof has to be welded in, painted and a headliner installed after the roof is in the car. A glass roof just needs to be glued in - 1 step for glass - about 3 much more elaborated steps for metal roof.

You are essentially comparing something which is manufactured separately versus something manufactured as part of the assembly line.

The Glass is 3 layers plus tinting. That's a separate process, additional inventory and additional potential for supply chain issues. If it were cheaper to just drop a glass roof on every car, you'd see it all over the industry. Instead it's often an expensive upcharge.

Maybe the next step is a composite roof with fiberglass on top and a built in headliner they just drop onto the top and use adhesives to apply.

 

[sonofjorel]

It’s fairly obvious to anyone who pays attention to Elon Musk that the reason the compact car is taking so long is because Elon is a perfectionist. There will be 2 compact cars released for differing markets. For markets on the metric system the exterior dimensions will be 1.69m wide by 4.20m long. American markets will be slightly larger since we desire our space and will run 69in wide by 169in long. The Tesla teams are currently hard at work nailing down the designs to fit within the must-have dimensions.

 

[UkNorthampton]

You are essentially comparing something which is manufactured separately versus something manufactured as part of the assembly line.

The Glass is 3 layers plus tinting. That's a separate process, additional inventory and additional potential for supply chain issues. If it were cheaper to just drop a glass roof on every car, you'd see it all over the industry. Instead it's often an expensive upcharge.

Maybe marketing would stop engineers taking the better, cheaper route?

 

[Nocturnal]

Smaller people --> smaller cars.

That and you are less likely to be tboned by a lifted F350 dually in France vs Ohio.

 

[Ogre]

Maybe marketing would stop engineers taking the better, cheaper route?

Price is its own kind of marketing.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

Smaller people --> smaller cars.

Motion to ban @ZeApelido for this racist remark!!!

 

[Rashomon]

I ran into that same realization when Toyota came out with the smaller Prius C ("city") version. I expected the smaller footprint would blast the already hyper-efficient Prius into a whole new efficiency range. Instead, it got marginally better city mileage and worse (!) highway mileage than the regular Prius. This was due to fundamental physics such as Cd and aspect ratio, and actually not due to poor design as I understood it. The "C" never sold that well; perhaps somewhat due to this, and perhaps somewhat due to their target market not having as much disposable income as Toyota hoped...

It's not impossible to get a decent Cd from a 4.2 meter car, just more difficult. As an extreme example, the 4.3 meter long GM EV1 had a Cd of 0.19 and a CdA of about 0.37 m^2, about a third better in CdA than a Tesla M3. When you package for 4 people, you're not going to be able to match this, but you could certainly do a 4.2-meter four-seater that was no worse than an M3.

 

[Curt Renz]

Man gives free cataract surgery to 1000 blind people and a Tesla Model 3 to one of them.

MrBeast - Sunday:

 

[petit_bateau]

How high of a global market share do you think Tesla can reach without selling to people that need a car smaller than a VW Golf? They are at 2% global market share. I think they could easily double or triple that without even approaching the need to address that market segment. Tesla will do what's best for the mission and Tesla shareholders, not enter market segments too early simply because those market segments exist.

I wouldn't be hammering on this single point so hard if it were not so apparent that people are forgetting how to think logically. Tesla doesn't do things "because it's there", they do things because it makes sense to do them.

I understand your point. It makes absolute sense for Tesla to work in a very logical fashion down the creaming curve. This has always been explicit in the plan.

My guesstimate is that the size constraint probably is a hard constraint on about a 1/3 of cars in WOUSA. There is of course also a price constraint that is similar to the USA curve in WOUSA, but with the lower end shifted somewhat in many countries. To a certain extent there is an overlap of the two constraint sets, so poorer people can sometimes have a space constraint in mind, but this is by no means a full overlap of the two sets. You only have to look at car sizes in some very high cost real estate areas (Tokyo, Berlin, London, Paris, Shanghai) to appreciate that affluent people sometimes have real 'needs' (in this case hard-space-constraints) to address. This is where hot hatches came from in many ways, selling Golf GTIs to the yuppies in Sloan (Kensington) back in the day.

If you throw away 1/3 of the world vehicle market as being so price driven that they'll never buy a Tesla I think that is fair. My expectation is that Tesla will continue to price itself at the upper end of all the segments it chooses to enter, so that will price out about that third. Then let's assume that some folk will stay in the "anything-but-Musk" category, perhaps another third. Whether that is genuinely because they hate Musk or more positively because they love SEAT/FIAT/Mini/whatever doesn't really matter. So that leaves a third of the market across all segments that are realistically open to Tesla if they choose to enter them.

Then I've just pulled up a segmentation graph (Passenger Cars - Worldwide | Statista Market Forecast) and it seems to me they are using the Euro segment definitions ( Euro Car Segment - Wikipedia ). The Golf is a C-segment which is the medium on this, competes with the Corolla for example. In some markets the Golf is made in the hatch version, for others the booted version, just like the Corolla.

(a complication is that Tesla seems to target segment break points rather than segment mid-points, likely to maximise coverage, but set that aside a moment)

Medium car C-segment is 12m worldwide. The next segment down is the small B-segment, typified by Clio at 7m worldwide. Sum them and you have 19m/yr which is almost as significant as the SUV segment of 25m that the Y targets.

So if Tesla needs to enter C-segment using a low-cost (and low-price) next-generation model 3 then it would be able to sell 1/3 x 12m = 4m/yr excluding the size constraint issue and provided they were geographically present in all car markets. Assuming random distribution of the two set types the size constraint would then knock out 1/3 x 4m/yr = 1.3m/yr leaving 2.7m/yr. Allow for geographical factors and that is probably excluding 1m and leaving 2m in the cheap-but-long-model-3/Y.

Given that 3/Y production is 1.3m in 2022, 2.1m in 2023, and 3.0m in 2024 it seems to me that Tesla will have exhausted the available buyers in the current set (premium/exec and large) and also your mooted set (cheap-large) within the next 24-months. I don't think the strategy of cheap but largish sedan is viable that much longer (though it is good until then). Hence the need to go smaller fairly soon. But the SUV segment can likely be mined for far longer as it is 25m/yr and that is of course why the Y was launched.

From product announcement to product release needs to be short for the Golf-hatch equivalent. Less than a year ideally, about the point where info leakage cannot be contained any longer.

I think that Tesla will position to overlap Golf and Clio segments, this is the normal strategy that Tesla adopts. Also they generally go with a platform approach so it will be a 2/Z, not just a 2.

There is unhappy experience of 'just' cutting the backs off of sedans to create a hatchback. See BMW 3-series for a case in point. Ditto going the other way - the Bora is a poor sedan. So a comptitive hatch really needs to be purpose-designed and probably to get another product out of the same underlying production line (because the line is part of the product platform always in automotive). I've a few thoughts as to what that second product might be - likely a crossover light van / small MPV.

Inside volume in BEV is better than dino juice. Therefore I suspect we will see something that externally fits this, but internally has more volume.

Clio : 4,050 mm L x 1,798 mm W x 1,440 mm H
Golf : 4284 mm L x 1789 mm W x 1456 mm H

Probably coming to market in 12-24 months. So announced in 0-12 months. I'm not sure whether that is the March-2023 announcement or (more likely imho) a March -2024 announcement. I think they need to get the Cybertruck out the way and 4680 running and ramping smoothly before they announce the 2/Z.

My guess is the 2/Z will be a one-piece base casting to reduce cost. Perhaps only one (FWD) motor in the normal variant with two motors for the AWD sport version. Done like that the margins would be insane for this both in the high and the low end versions. And notice that it would be highly attractive for all of the 19m/yr C+B combined segment that is second only to SUVs globally in volume terms at 25m/yr.

Just my guess.

 

[FastEddieB]

This talk of small cars reminded me of this photo I took in 2001, in Munich, I think:

It drove home to me how much cars had advanced (?) between the 1960’s and the 2000’s.

 

[JRP3]

Joe Tegtmeyer said yesterday that he would release a deep-dive video on the SACMI press technology, which appears to be related to the DBE process for cathode rolling / calendaring.

Seems to be a press to take ceramic powder and press it into ceramic plates. I don't see any evidence of rolling or any way to incorporate it into a continuous roll production that would be used in 4680 production. I have no idea what flat ceramic plates would be used for in cell or pack production.

 

[EVNow]

Don't get your hopes up too much - I am being polite. I think that for everything except utility scale storage the signal in the data is already clear.

And also, this is not just about the energy division. Again the real signal is what it tells us about corporate governance issues, something that goes right back to SolarWorld acquisition.

But I am always open to learning from new data.

I wanted to revisit this with a bit of information.

I got a quote from a dealer for PowerWalls (without Solar). It is expensive ... ~ $20k for 1 Power wall and $34k for 2. The dealer sells other batteries too (LG, until Bolt fires, Generac etc). They said the prices are similar. They count equipment/install costs as 60/40, which makes the entire system quite expensive. But this would give automatic switchover and good support. The install costs are probably higher in my area too. BTW, 1 Power wall + 6 kW solar is $40k. ps : I think these systems make sense with solar and/or where you can use TOD pricing to recoup some of the cost. As pure backups for power outage a handful of times a year they are very expensive. BTW, a similar gas generator costs about $10k to install.

I decided to go with EcoFLow (2x EcoFlow Delta Pro) that I could connect to the panel with a simple power inlet & interlock kit. No automatic cut-over but simple enough. Total cost is ~ $7k for 7.2kWh system. Good for my use case of perhaps 5 times a year of power outages. I could also go DIY, build my own system using battery kits for cheaper.

So to conclude - there are clearly two markets
A. Full contractor sell/install with system warranty
B. More of a DIY approach

With A, Tesla PowerWalls are quite competitive. These are bigger budget, costly systems. Slight cost advantage of no-name Chinese LiFPO is trumped by brand value and support.

In DIY market, obviously LiFPO and Chinese brands are the king. Tesla will not be able to compete in this market - not would they like to.

 

[Dutchie]

Elon is out of this world. Even able to make his own spiral galaxy!

Mysterious 'whirlpool' appears in the night sky above Hawaii https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64458511

 

[SO16]

Man gives free cataract surgery to 1000 blind people and a Tesla Model 3 to one of them.

MrBeast - Sunday:

Not to mention 63 MILLION VIEWS in a little over 2 days.

 

[MC3OZ]

The article you linked clearly explains that all of the tech pre existed years before, and that CSIRO is just a very good patent troll. It is a very good article, with a poor and misleading title.

I knew a scientist who worked on the project.

The explanation is simple. CSIRO turned WiFi from a very limited technology, into a very useful technology.

He thought that they had invented something useful, and he was a very modest understated guy.