Tesla
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2021
2:11:30 · 4.2M views · Sep 22, 2020
Tesla's 2020 Battery Day event, with a company update and a keynote on new cell design, manufacturing, vertical integration and cheaper lithium and materials. It ends with the Plaid Model S and a Q&A.
Treated as the essential primary source for Tesla's battery and cost-reduction plans, and a feast for engineering nerds.
6 comments from Hacker News
This is directly related to their set of battery day announcements [1]. Some of the key points from their battery day are: - focus on simplifying process from ore to EV in order to maintain cost declines per unit energy while enabling scale up - key to that is simplifying the lithium extraction process (noted patent for this thread), they spoke about the core of this patent before - getting enough factories constructed and dealing with expected limitations in raw material - reducing costs by simplifying manufacturing process / reducing parts - reduce parts by having bigger batteries (also more energy dense) and single casted sections of the vehicles - also interesting work on incorporating Si (which increases energy density) while solving the issue of cycle life when increasing Si ratio. Overall, for anyone even remotely interested in this space and this topic, I think it is an essential watch. [1] keynote starts at 33 mins this video
Copy pasting previous comment since the number of people misrepresenting the ground breaking tech that was announced is to high to spend energy on: 1)56% reduction in cost (which blows way past the $100/kwh holy grail for EV to sub $40). This by itself is insane and most people in the industry thought it wont happen for at least another decade. This puts the last nail in the coffin for the future of ICE cars. 2) 54% increase in range. The new Model S will have minimum 520mi of range and much more actually when they start production. Range anxiety gone out the window. 3) New manufacturing tech along with vertical integration will allow Tesla to scale 55x their current rate of production and become the world's largest auto manufacturer by many multiples. Tesla will not only produce their own battery cells but they're even getting into mining!! Along with many other things announced in a 3+ hour technical video: this video
The five times more energy dense and 6 times the power refers to the design explained on Tesla's Battery day. Seriously, they made a 2 hours presentation about it. Total nerd porn : this video This really applies to the cells, not the battery itself, I think they just misunderstood. This is in comparison to the current design. They did that mostly by... making the cells bigger! I think the battery itself is 35% smaller because this removes the need for using tabs and the cell volume/surface area is greater. Also note that "six times the power" doesn't mean six times the range. Power is energy per unit of time so it really only tells you how fast you can use the energy in your battery (and I'm assuming how fast you can charge.)
At "Battery Day", Tesla alluded to their plans to make their organization more vertically integrated: Lithium mining, battery production, and new vehicle designs that incorporate their own cells directly into the vehicle structure [1]. It has been reported in the press that Tesla will (likely) move away from Panasonic as a vendor [2]. Panasonic probably sees this as a good reason to divest and focus on future customers. From [2]: > Tesla will continue buying batteries from longtime Japanese supplier Panasonic until at least 2022 despite the U.S. electric vehicle maker's plans to produce its own cheaper alternative. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
What are your thoughts on the upcoming battery tech from Tesla they announced during their "battery day" in September? Your comments don't seem to reflect what they've been working on and what's coming. this video