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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

All of the legacy entrants to the EV market are meaningless sideshows for the simple fact that they don't make their own batteries. Building an EV is a trivial commodity. Manufacturing high energy density LiPo battery cells at a low enough price and high enough volume to build millions of cars is the actual barrier. And Tesla is currently the only manufacturer in the world with this level of vertical integration. Everyone else is just competing for supply from LG Chem and Panasonic, which is why no other manufacturer has come close to Tesla's volume or performance/price.

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> Everyone else is just competing for supply from LG Chem and Panasonic, which is why no other manufacturer has come close to Tesla's volume or performance/price.

But LG Chem is spending billions to expand production capacity in Michigan specifically to supply the legacy brands.

This isn’t a sideshow. If Ford, GM, and VW follow through on their commitments Tesla will be 4th or 5th place in EV market share. Now... I’d be willing to believe that none of them will follow through, but I certainly wouldn’t assign a high probability to it.

> If Ford, GM, and VW follow through on their commitments Tesla will be 4th or 5th place in EV market share.

First, Ford, GM, and VW need to figure out charging. Even if you assume they are going to catch up in terms of battery production, they still have infrastructure which is only marginally capable of supporting the small number of non-Teslas out there now. Double the number of EVs and the problem just gets worse.

Maybe Electrify America is going to come through. I haven't seen a ton of evidence they will.

Meh, I don’t see that. In the early days of gasoline cars, people bought their fuel at various stores. The profit motive caused individuals to create fueling stations. We’ll see that with electric charging too. Where there is a demand, supply will follow.

Some people below saying batteries are a commodity: Battery cells are a commodity, but the battery packs where thousands of battery cells are combined with monitoring, heating and cooling systems are not. They're a very complicated bit of kit.

Building an EV is a trivial commodity

This isn't true either, its all about efficiency, if your drivetrain is not efficient then you waste money and weight on a bigger battery pack than is necessary.

In summary: EV batteries are not simple (battery packs are actually very complicated). EVs are not simple either - the drivetrain, braking/regen systems, power management, heating are all very hard to get right. If you dont get the right performance/efficiency balance, your car is heavier and more expensive for a given range than it should be.

VW builds its own packs for the ID cars in Braunschweig (with externally purchased cells) [1]

[1] https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2018/10/powerfu...

Indeed. I was just replying to the people who were saying 'batteries are easy' - people miss the cell/pack distinction.

Agreed. It's easy to miss that distinction if you are not following the technology.

That seems backwards. Batteries are indistinguishable components, cars aren't. It's the batteries that are commodities.

> Batteries are indistinguishable components, cars aren't. It's the batteries that are commodities.

They're not though, that's the thing. There's absolutely nothing new about EV's themselves; they've existed for a century. The entire reason they're taking off now is battery technology. Being able to manufacture enough cells with enough energy density for a low enough cost is the actual secret sauce for any EV manufacturer.

There's absolutely nothing new about EV's themselves; they've existed for a century.

This is nonsense. The drivetrain in a tesla or a Kia or Hyundai bears no resemblance to stuff that was around 100 years ago. To make a good EV you need:

- good battery cells

- thousands of those cells combined into an intelligent and well designed battery pack (with cooling, heating, monitoring etc)

- an efficient drivetrain

All three of those elements need to be right, and thats why e.g. competent manufacturers like Audi are still struggling to make an EV with decent range at a decent price

Another element for your list: the rest of the car

Indeed

And they will be commodities in less than 10 years. What is the range that would cover 99.99% of use cases? 500 miles/800km? After that it's just a bragging number. Tesla will release new model S that can do it. It took them 10 years of optimisation to achieve this number.

Only if there is no innovation and there is no supply constraints, otherwise you have a competitive advantage.

I think you’ve focusing too much on aesthetics.

Tesla only survived by selling greenhouse gas emissions credits, without them Tesla would be deep in the red. Tesla won't be around to use those factories unless they come up with something to make money as in 2025 the income from credits will likely be zero. That is a huge hole more than ten times the size of its income they have to pull out of a magic hat in 2-4 years. Not likely to happen.

It is amazing to me that people have fallen for the propaganda that Tesla is a battery company. They buy their batteries from the same companies as everyone else.

Tesla doesn't make its own batteries. That is the fact. Anything else is bluster.

You need to distinguish between battery cells and battery packs - a pack being thousands of cells combined with complex monitoring, heating and cooling systems.

Cells are made at the gigafactory by panasonic (to a tesla design). But the battery packs are manufactured by Tesla, and there is a lot of engineering and innovation in the packs themselves.

What are they doing at the Nevada factory then? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-04/tesla-fli...

https://www.tesla.com/blog/battery-cell-production-begins-gi...

> by 2018, the Gigafactory will produce 35 GWh/year of lithium-ion battery cells, nearly as much as the rest of the entire world’s battery production combined.

The battery cells are made by Panasonic on-site https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/08/panasonic-to-expand-batter...

What they’re doing is “working with Panasonic”: https://na.panasonic.com/us/whatmovesus/gigafactory

(Not that I begrudge them for having good strategic partners; Apple doesn’t manufacture the iPhone, Amazon doesn’t manufacture the Kindle).

Can you explain Tesla's 10 GWh/year Kato Road battery pilot plant then? Even though it's experimental, it's already about 10th largest battery production plant in the world.

People seem to loose the ability for critical thinking when they become worshippers of a product/company or man.

Tesla's battery slideshow showing their new battery that supposedly has 50% more energy also happens to be that much larger. But for what ever reason their marketing people thought it would be ethical to make them the same size on the slides.

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