You sound so authoritative, it is a shame you are wrong. Please, do the research before you post. Is There Enough Lithium to Maintain the Growth of the Lithium-Ion Battery Market?
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The "Is Tesla Going Bankrupt?" thread
- Thread starter Swissmoneychf
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You sound so authoritative, it is a shame you are wrong. Please, do the research before you post. Is There Enough Lithium to Maintain the Growth of the Lithium-Ion Battery Market?
Akikiki
A'-Lo-HA ! y'all
50x bigger does not mean the stock will go up 50 times. Tesla is not apple. It's an automaker. it has much bigger capital needs. It can't just produce a million products overnight. How do you think Tesla is going to pay for that model 3? Think the cash flows from the mode s will be enough? Its gonna print, print and print more.
alseTrick
Active Member
Musk and Straubel were pretty definitive in stating that there is enough global lithium and that it could be 100% recycled during their Q&A at the Gigafactory opening.
I tried to find something too. Boeing inherited the plant from McDonnell Douglas in the merger. When the MD-80/90 production ended they closed down the plant and sold the property.
Tesla could be the largest manufacturing employer in the state at this point. I looked for information on who was the biggest, but couldn't find anything definitive.
There is some overlap of acronyms around here. I find it confusing sometimes. Not only are there two meanings and soon to be three for SC, FWD can mean Front Wheel Drive or Falcon Wing Doors.
The article sites out of date numbers for the world reserves. The USGS number is about 13 million tons (metric) of lithium, but that was 2009 (that number jives with the 365 X 37000 tons in the article). Much more has been found since, Wyoming is estimated to have 18 million tons alone. Current estimates of world reserves is around 39 million tons.
Lithium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lithium is extremely common in the universe and we have just begun to prospect for mine-able deposits. At one time John D Rockefeller said that he would personally drink any oil found west of the Mississippi. This was a year or two before Spindletop (the first big find in Texas).
We also don't know for sure that EV batteries in the distant future will use lithium. It's possible lithium will continue to be used for hundreds of years or it could be an obsolete chemistry in 50 years. Add to that in the next century we will be able to mine the asteroids for minerals. Elon is targeting getting humans to Mars in his lifetime, but once we have the tech to get people to Mars and back, we will have the tech to get mining ships to the asteroid belt too. The asteroids are further out, but you don't have to contend with a gravity well when you get there.
You know, company goes to bankrupt when it can't pay its bills. I don't think it is completely impossible for Tesla to run in that situation.
I could theorize the following event; all the cash goes to Gigafactory and Model 3 ramp up. At the same time there is some critical design flaw which forces Tesla to recall and stop deliveries and at the same time global sentiment on market goes negative and Tesla can’t get new capital.
I’m not saying it is likely. I’m saying it is not impossible.
Unfortunately, the problem is getting the pure enough amount Tesla needs, to the factory, at the right price, without breaking environmental laws. We will see if they can do it, looks about 50/50. Please explain the market pricing fluxuation in the price of Lithium for us. What is the price today per ton, vs the price a year ago? See any problems there?
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
Odebek
Don't Panic
That article says that there is enough lithium to support 100x current demand for 17 years. That is more than enough time to replace the entire global fleet of automobiles. From that point forward, the battery packs are 100% recyclable, and we will need fewer cars globally due to partial ownership/autonomous/ride sharing... That is all without active mining for new Lithium deposits... I don't think Lithium will be the issue.
I can't find the video of Elon and JB answering a question about the rising cost of lithium, but I did find this article about it:
Elon Musk: Our lithium ion batteries should be called Nickel-Graphite…
I recall in the video Elon was asked how the rising price of lithium would impact Tesla's costs. He said it was minimal because less than 2% of the battery is lithium. JB Straubel chimed in saying that li-ion batteries should be called nickel-graphite or something similar. Elon called lithium the salt on the salad. JB also commented after that they are much more concerned about the cost and supply of cobalt.
That's what I remember seeing anyway. The article is close to what I remember.
Every ICE car made today in every developed country has platinum in its catalytic converter and that has been the case in the United States for 40 years. Most of the rest of the world has adopted them since. Whereas lithium is very common, platinum is one of the rarest naturally occurring elements and it is very difficult to process from ore. It's very expensive, currently almost $38K USD a kilo. Only 3-7 grams are required to make a catalytic converter, but just the platinum in one can cost over $200 USD.
There are around 100 million cars and light trucks built a year. If every one had 5g of platinum in the catalytic converter, that's 500 metric tons of platinum a year required by the auto industry. Worldwide production (as of 2012) was 179 tons a year according to Wikipedia. The car industry manages to make that many catalytic converters a year because of platinum recycling. New production can't keep up with demand.
Lithium is 4000 times more common in the Earth's crust than platinum. You need about 4 Kg of lithium to make a battery pack the size of a Model S/X 90 KWh. That is about 800 times more platinum than needed to make a catalytic converter for an ICE, but it's a material that is much more abundant and much easier to process into it's final form than platinum is.
We have enough lithium to keep us going for now. We don't know what the next big battery chemistry will be. In 40-50 years we may turning up our noses at puny li-ion batteries in favor of a much better technology.
Wikipedia shows that Tesla had some 13,000 employees in 2015 (not sure what % are CA).
From America's Career InfoNet: Largest Employers there are a lot of companies with more employees, but for manufacturing, Tesla could be the highest. I'm not sure how timely that list is.
roblab
Active Member
It always interests me to see how many people think that Tesla people may not have thought of something, or are planning to do something illegal and they must be watched. They might go bankrupt! After all they have done and are doing, and doing right, doing quickly, doing better than any hundred year old company with no guts or motivation, weeelll, its just humorous. I'm sure anyone sitting at a computer for a half an hour can see that they will fail within the next 6 months.
That doesn't make the distinction between manufacturing workers and people doing everything else. They have a design studio in So Cal with no manufacturing people at all, sales and service staff on every populated continent, and an engineering and administrative workforce in Palo Alto, CA. They may have as many as 2-3000 people at the factory, but I would be surprised if their production workforce was the majority of employees.
Tesla is white collar heavy compared to other car companies. Not only are the sales and service people all Tesla employees and in other car companies those people work for the franchise owners, but they also spend more on R&D proportionally than any other car company and that means their ratio of R&D people to manufacturing people is higher.
That will change with time as their production expands and their fleet matures. A large car company is only putting a major R&D effort into 10-20% of their fleet at any time (as well as working on tweaks to the rest of the fleet). Tesla is currently working on doubling their platforms in production and they will be demonstrating prototypes of several other vehicles in the next year. Not only that, but they are running and expanding a chain of "gas stations" as well as branching into the stationary storage business.
Chopr147
Active Member
All very good points and hard to fathom. Superchargers worldwide! as well as sales staff worldwide! It is a huge operation considering they have only sold what, 120,000 cars
They are well over that. The VIN numbers for Model Ss being assigned today are over 150,000 and the X is up above 12,000. So the actual number built is a little over 50% more than your estimate.
One reason the S and X cost what they do is they need to employ more people per car sold than other car makers. The M3 changes that equation somewhat. If Tesla meets their scaling schedule, they will go from production numbers 5% of Subaru's to more than Subraur's world sales volume in 4 years. Subaru is the smallest of the major auto makers in the US with worldwide volume just under 1 million cars a year.
Chopr147
Active Member
Your right I am way off. My S on order VIN is over 150k Duh! I was thinking US sales but even then I am still way off. 
I believe that is more like 80k area.
I believe that is more like 80k area.
Your right I am way off. My S on order VIN is over 150k Duh! I was thinking US sales but even then I am still way off.
I think most of the Xs sold thus far have been sold in the US, but inside EVs has 76,431 Ss sold in the US as of the end of July. It's interesting the overall S sales appears to be right at 50% of those built. It's been that way since I started tracking it about a year ago. They are probably selling a little more than 1/2 overseas right now because almost all of the first two years' production was sold in the US.
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