What will the Gigafactory be doing? Does this mean Tesla's battery-supply advantage is gone?
For consumers (at least in my own experience) there is a range threshold that, once surpassed, means I almost never have to worry about fill ups again. So the Every day convenience outweighs the once or twice a year inconvenience of longer “fill ups“ vs gas for extended drives.
I bought mine because I hate little annoyances like having to remember/go to the gas station and fill up periodically.
For long-haul trucking though Tesla's benefits would be in automation/assisted driving, not in electrification. Short of some sort of carbon credits/regulations it’s difficult to imagine widespread adoption of a technology that has more downtime and higher initial costs than a previous technology.
The stop/start of small truck deliveries (and subsequent energy recapture) makes sense but for long-haul I can’t see it feasible until the battery energy densities jump by a sizable margin without a corresponding increase in price.
And at that point there's still few financial advantages of electrification I can think of... what am I missing there?
Perhaps in super cold climates it starts getting silly though
Possibly building LFP batteries as well now that the patents have expired. The reason CATL has such a lead on LFP manufacturing is that they had a free license for using LFP patents for domestic consumption in China.
There was a part of Battery Day where they explain their approach to battery chemistry, here is the slide: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/JvxPA/s1/2020-tesla-shareh...
They say in the title "All Standard Range Teslas", but only the Model 3 has a standard range version and they're still like 2-3 years away from their compact/25K car.
If other parts of the car production are the constraint, stick with the big batteries and high prices.
LFP is just for lower range vehicles where the advantages of LFP outweigh the decreased energy density.