One side of the factory is for the Model Y. The other larger side is for the Cybertruck. That is a huge space.
Semi might be in Austin but likely not in the current building.
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Semi might be in Austin but likely not in the current building.
The location they ended up with, was suggested by the government of Brandenburg. It was one of a few locations.
And selecting a location has many, many, many factors. Tesla simply decided that the extra cost for that environment was less important then the other factors. Such as transportation infrastructure and likely many others.
Simply suggesting that they didn't know what they were doing because of the location they picked is not really defensible.
We also have no indication that the regulatory approval is delayed because of that specific issue.
Complete nonsense. Ford or GM do not have supply of batteries to produce all those trucks you believe they will make. Specially not when also attempting to ramp many of their normal cars.
The claim that Tesla vehicles will drop of in sales after early adopters has been wrong every single time. Cyblertruck has more pre-orders then any vehicle ever. Every single analysis on interest in the truck show gigantic interest.
> Musk already knows it's going to ultimately flop, he has begun preparing the market for that outcome.
This statement is literally wrong. Musk actually did the exact opposite. Musk says its the best product they have ever designed. And they are building a gigantic factory specifically for that product, a factory that cost billions.
Solar, EV, Battery, Grid Battery, Semis are all in exponential growth. Saying 'look at the currently biggest battery company' is an dumb measure. That like saying 'look at what the largest airplane company is worth in 1920, therefore no large airplane company in 1940 can that big'.
I haven't look at that specific forecast, it might well be optimistic. But there is no question that all of those markets are gone grow exponentially and its no question that Tesla is incredibly well placed to take advantage of those growth curves.
> Battery storage is a competitive, commodity business.
No isn't. There is really not that much Li-Ion grid storage being deployed right now and not by that many companies. That market is growing fast.
> Not sure how huge it will be.
The amount of needed grid storage is gigantic.
Edit: Elon just said on the call that they are massively limited on production. Partly because of the chip issue, same chips are used in the cars and the cars have higher margin. But cell supply is also limited. So the demand is growing but they can't increase production as fast.
Energy and Solar margin are much worse but at least not negative anymore. This is a fast growing market and nobody else in the world is set up for it as well as Tesla is, both for home and grid. This will just continue to grow every year and there is large economics of scale that can be reached.
Something that many people miss is that other car companies make a huge amount of money on service, because they have such large old fleets that need parts. Tesla does not have this and service has been a huge negative for them. This seems to be starting to slowly turn. In a few years Tesla service will be a huge cash cow, and Tesla will not have to share that money with dealers for the most part.
Its the same with the supercharger network, huge investment now, hugely negative. But eventually that will be very profitable for them. Again, something people miss on the Tesla story. Large amounts of super-high margin revenue. Unlike players like Electrify America, Tesla builds its own chargers fully vertically integrated. Eventually Tesla can open the network to the competitors and that will give them high utilization on the network, making it very profitable.
They are still not a large car company, their operating margin has a chance to be significantly better in another year. More local production in Europe and Eastern US, more S/X sales, better margin on solar and storage for sure, and profitable Cybertruck.
Model Y/Cybertruck/Semi produced in Texas/Berlin will also use their own Tesla internal batteries, the far away most expensive part that they had to buy from suppliers. Tesla new manufacturing methods should allow them to both remove the profit the supplier would have made, and also produce the cells more cheaply. Storage should eventually get batteries from those plants as well but that might take a while.
Overall pretty happy with the progress.
The advantage there will come from a number of places over the current Model 3.
Structural battery will make the car lighter, cheaper and of course efficient. The perspective $25K car will also likely use a cheaper battery chemistry produced by Tesla themselves and a much smaller overall pack. The range should be the same or slightly only slightly less.
Put those things together, smaller, lighter, lower production cost and slightly lower margin (15%) makes this very much possible. Of course this car would have upgrades to, in the car industry the base model has much worse margin then the upgrade models.
> I know this is proprietary/secret, but I'd love to see a pie chart of where each dollar on a Model 3 goes. In particular how much is pure battery/drive system, and basically the whole rest of the car.
You can go to Munro & Associates and they will sell you a report with a detailed break down of the cost for literally every screw and how much it cost to screw it in. You can even get reports on the difference between China/US and so on.
They also have a lot of video very you can learn about this. They don't show all the numbers of course but they do show a lot of interesting numbers.
See: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj--iMtToRO_cGG_fpmP5XQ
(Currently they are working on Ford Mach-E)
If you are more interested in EV in general, not just Model 3, they have actually made their report of the BMW i3 almost free. You can literally get a report that used to be $50k for $10.
See here:
https://munrolive.com/support-%2F-store/ols/products/bmw-i3-...
You can go and build your own BMW i3.
And it totally ignores the massive issues with hydrogen charging. Charger frozen to the car, constantly broken, incredibly difficult, huge issues handling high volume, require a lot of power and so on.
> Batteries cant hold enough power per pound/size
A comparable Tesla is lighter then a Mirai. Batteries still have massive amounts of improvements to make. Structural batteries is gone make it even lighter and battery density is improving every single year.
FCV on the other hand have far less ways to be lighter then they currently are.
EV will beat FCV on weight and efficiency by far and the lead is increasing.
> like driving across the country
That already works great with EV.
> or powering trains
Why not just use methanol? Almost the same as current tech for diesel trains and you can make it in almost the same way as hydrogen if you really want to make it carbon neutral.
> Furthermore, electricity cant be piped through our existing gas infrastructure.
Electric infrastructure that can do that already exists. Also, doing that is actually very, very costly and not worth doing. This infrastructure then ends up suffering from hydrogen embitterment and has massive leakage and is really expensive to maintain.
> Hydrogen complements solar and batteries but I think solar and battery will get into consumer hands first. Consumers don't require the high density energy storage that hydrogen/oil allows.
There are already many companies who are trying to make batteries that are more efficient and cheaper at storing energy then creating hydrogen. Using hydrogen as a battery is inefficient and expensive.
Grid batteries don't need to be energy dense. The only thing that matters is cost.
The thing is, you don't actually do that in practice. Go and actually listen to the insideev podcast. The Tesla will tell you where to stop for how long. Typically on a road-trip you actually make a few more stops and only charge from 5% to 60%.
Unless you are a really extreme road tripper, peeing and getting a quick snake is more then enough. The guys on insideev actually do a huge amount of road tripping (with all kinds of cars) and they prefer EV to ICE for almost all trips. And in most cases the charging doesn't hold you up much at all.
Also guess what, if you drive uphill with cargo in extreme temperatures you also use more gas and your car doesn't get its normal mileage.
With an EV you actually get much of that energy back when going down the mountain on the other side.
Also, this is probably less then 0.1% of all miles driven. So it really doesn't work as an argument and doesn't apply to 95% of the people. And for another 3% it likely doesn't apply for more then 1-2 a year.
Nobody is saying that EV are literally perfect for every single case ever. But as a practical matter, they are simply better for the majority of people already.
Tesla might not be your taste, but every test and comparison shows that Tesla is at the top or at least incredible competitive.
> To me that's always been the best way to handle these sorts of things, to introduce competition and win people over.
That's exactly what has happened already.
> I also don't really fault Toyota for pursuing hydrogen
You mean talking about hydrogen while trying to prevent cleaner fuel laws and zero emission vehicles. Yeah you really can't blame gigantic cooperation from lobbying against the environment. Where would we be if cooperation could be criticized like that.
> I realize it's not as fully there yet as EVs, but EVs aren't either
EV are going totally gang busters and are on a massive growth curve. They are on an incredibly fast adoption curve, as faster then many expected and its going faster. They are there, but it still needs time.
> In fact, if the EV market is so healthy, maybe the government should be subsidizing alternatives like hydrogen?
Why? Why would you dumb money in a technology stack that has gotten government money for 50 years and has shown absolutely no success what so ever and is worse for the environment by far. What is the logic in that.
Seems much more important to replace ICE vehicles then to fight EV with FCV. Wouldn't you say?
No it isn't. The key difference is that Telsa picked the right technology and Toyota didn't.
Tesla could build its own infrastructure because the grid exists already and building chargers is not that hard.
Toyota couldn't because building hydrogen infrastructure is insanely incredibly stupidly expensive. Even had they tried, it would have been a gigantic money shredder.
Building fuel-cell cars is really expensive, in addition the the infrastructure they are also losing money on each car.
So basically, your asking Toyota to spend billions to build infrastructure that loses money, and more billions to build cars that lose money.
The right technology choice matters!
They call their hybrids 'self-charging electric' vehicles.
Its not actually delayed much. The incredibly optimistic plan was to be ready in September, but that was Elon Time.
So far the bureaucracy has not really held them back that much.
If you compare progress in China, Texas and Berlin so far its not clear that Berlin is meaningfully slower.
Based on what? Tesla makes extensive use of an existing capability to move on development with per-approval.
They have not received any kind of politicians helping them to avoid bureaucracy that I know of. Some local politicians have talked in support but the bureaucracy is just moving at its normal pace.
I guess they paid a fine for installing a few tanks to early but that seems like a planning issue, not some kind of 'we gone install the 2 tanks because we have political backing'.
Its not like the plant is majorly behind.
> Turns out not every country is as corrupt as Tesla's home country.
Again, based on what? What corrupt thing did Tesla do in Texas that is so different? Texas doesn't require a public meeting for input but the overall process is not actually that different.
Maybe the standards are different, but it doesn't have anything to do with corruption.
Btw, what you miss is that other networks can adopt the Tesla charger. EVGo for example will have many of Tesla Proprietary charger on their stations.
They report far more problems with the CCS plugs.
The reason you hear more about Tesla issue is because there are far more Teslas and far more superchargers in the US.
In the US you have Tesla and CCS. CHAdeMO still exists but it will vanish soon, as almost no new car uses it.
Eventually it makes sense probably but as of now in the US, many people still recommend Tesla if you are doing road-trips. Its still a competitive advantage.
Eventually they will open it up and make money, but reality is that fast charging is a losing business strategy right now. Tons of money in, no money out. Having it as marketing and competitive advantage right now is more valuable by far then the small amount they money they would make by opening it up.
It will be years before they open it up in the US is my guess. Sooner in Europe, but not because of regulation but rather because of the competitive advantage not being as relevant and attempting to get higher utilization.
Its a gigantic investment to do high-speed train and almost always is a burning money pit that needs to be constantly subsidies.
You already have an existing road network that with increasingly self driving EV (at least on highways) can be used.
There will be some shakeup in the is there clearly is a different between the type of astronaut that is trained to do experiments in space and repair a space station, and somebody who just sits in his seat and lets the space-craft fly.
That not the case. Suborbital space flight of the model BO or Virgin do is, but that simply not generally true.
It is not very high. Specially now that there is series effort going into lithium production and the whole supply chain of batteries. Much more local production.
In fact, in examples like this lithium production is not harmful at all. At worst its as bad as mining anything else. At best its a totally brine process where you are just extracting a little bit of salt from geological brine and pump it right back.
> worse from a recycling perspective
Worse then gasoline that gets burned up? How? The opposite is true, currently almost all lithium batteries are recycled or are simply going to secondary uses.
Over the long term all major players have recycling efforts going on, because once you have series amounts of batteries reaching end of life, it simply makes sense to recycle as it will be cheaper then mining new.
The air quality around some chemical plant is one thing, even under worse assumptions, its a million times better then driving gasoline cars threw cities where people actually live.
> Is this correct? How (or will?) a switch to electric transportation change the geopolitical world? Substantially?
All the materials needed for batteries exist in pretty much all continents. All the continents have the knowledge to produce all the required materials. Even if now it often happens in China. It will mean a major lost of importance for the big oil states. Other then that not much will change.
Batteries for example can be made structural, so they actually replace part of the weight of a plane, while kerosene has to be carried like cargo. ICE engines are far less efficient too. And the TWR of electric engines is better too. That again reduced the structural loads.
Electric engines also don't need to oxygen and can potentially fly much higher, where there is less air resistance.
Even if you can't get as far, the price to operate these planes will be so much lower, that for the waste majority of the market they will simply be cheaper. Maybe more trips with multiple stops.
Maybe the very longest flights would still be out of reach with good lithium-sulfer batteries but I suspect at that point those flights will be economically not tenable anymore.