And cost-wise LG Chem seems competitive enough to Panasonic anyway, keeping in mind leaked figures for Bolt.
Sibling post also has the link but I don't want you to miss it.
It's essentially the Apple move - by outmaneuvering competitors on key resources it allows higher margin or products that others can't even create.
Apple also uses some fairly specialized, extremely high-precision equipment that only a few companies in the world have the skill to manufacture. Apple has enough purchasing power to buy up all of the capacity that those manufacturers can produce for years at a time, and in doing so they lock out competitors from using that equipment.
It's possible, but seems really unlikely to me that Tesla has the capacity or purchasing power at this point to corner the supply chain like Apple does.
https://www.engadget.com/2011/08/04/apples-hold-on-metal-cha...
Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848283
> When Apple's iPhone4 was nearing production, Foxconn and Apple discovered that the metal frame was so specialized that it could be made only by an expensive, low-volume machine usually reserved for prototypes. Apple's designers wouldn't budge on their specs, so Gou ordered more than 1,000 of the $20,000 machines from Tokyo-based Fanuc. Most companies have just one.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_38/b41950584...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-...
If China were to produce many times more cells than Tesla, we could still have a major battery shortage for most of the world's auto manufacturers.
> But getting prices down this way has not just produced cheaper, better batteries. It has also resulted in significant overcapacity. Cairn ERA estimates that last year the manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries exceeded demand by about a third. Both it and BNEF say that the battery manufacturers are either losing money or making only wafer-thin profits on every electric-vehicle battery they produce. Despite the seeming glut, though, they all have plans to expand, in part to drive prices even lower. Mr Jaffe explains their thinking as that of the “traditional Asian conglomerate model”: sacrificing margins for market share. This may be a sound strategy given the ever-greater hopes for electric vehicles in the near future. But at the moment it is also one that looks rather unnerving. Although Mr Jaffe believes that increased demand for both electric vehicles and stationary storage will justify the rush to expand, he accepts that, for now, “It feels like a gold rush—but there’s no gold.”
https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21726069-no-need-sub...
2) Tesla also likely has a significant advantage in battery pack architecture, from safety (they offered to teach Boeing how to design battery packs so their EV planes don't catch fire a couple of years back), to withstand more extreme weather conditions (hot or cold), to having an industry-leading battery degradation performance. I think I've seen reports of Tesla batteries only losing 4-5% of charge capacity after 100,000 miles.
That one is easy to do with overprovisioning - similar to SSDs and I believe even HDDs do this to account for inevitable degradations during operation.
I thought Tesla was always marketing that their selling point is cheaper batteries, which cant be a USP, as Panasonic can always manufacture the same for GM/Ford etc.
Ludicrous mode being a software update could easily be that you already have the performance innately but they cap your output at 85%. Same as any game where you have to pay to get the extra features/items (DLC) but every other player in the game already has the item when you're around them. All the players get it, it's just a flip of a bit to enable the item for you. Just costs $10k in this case...
Of course, today all Tesla P100D get built with that fuse already in place - so it's "just a software upgrade" today.
There's quite a bit of electrical magic going on for a fuse to be able to handle insane current bursts while retaining a good response time in case of a catastrophic fault.
What's going on is that the current drawn while flooring a ludicrous vehicle is a largish fraction of the current that should cause an instantaneous fuse blow. A fuse that melts at a given temperature and heats up as I^2 R wasn't going to cut it. In the electrical distribution industry, you'd get a fancy circuit breaker with an electrical trip device and call it a day. This has two issues for Tesla. First, your average electrical trip device uses a current transformer, and those don't work for DC. Second, DC current is considerably harder to interrupt than AC, and the current the fuse needs to carry is in the kA range (I have no idea what the short circuit current is), so a circuit breaker would be rather large. Hence a fuse, with a little explosive inside, with an active circuit, presumably using a Hall effect sensor, the voltage drop across the fuse, or maybe just a reed switch.
(Hmm. It's nice when fuses and such don't need external power. I wonder if there's sufficient voltage drop across the fuse during a fault to power the circuit that blows the fuse? I bet there is. It could even be a very simple circuit like a Zener diode in series with a resistive heater that sets off the explosive.)
Initially when I heard that, I thought Tesla was bluffing. But the Ludicrous mode with P100D performance, and the fact that no other electric car maker is able to match that, leads me to believe that they are not bluffing.
The 100,000 dollar plus luxury electric saloon market isn't exactly overflowing with competition yet, so I'm not sure this really proves anything. Given time and a stronger focus on electric models, I have few doubts the usual German contenders will build electric cars every bit as quick.
The "legacy" car manufacturers have been slow to wake to Tesla's successes in some regards, but that looks set to change rapidly over the next decade.