Tesla Employees Say Gigafactory Problems Are Worse Than Known (cnbc.com) 184
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla's problems with battery production at the company's Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, are worse than the company has acknowledged and could cause further delays and quality issues for the new Model 3, according to a number of current and former Tesla employees. These problems include Tesla needing to make some of the batteries by hand and borrowing scores of employees from one of its suppliers to help with this manual assembly, said these people. Tesla's future as a mass-market carmaker hinges on automated production of the Model 3, which more than 400,000 people have already reserved, paying $1,000 refundable fees to do so. The company has already delayed production, citing problems at the Gigafactory. On Nov. 1, 2017, CEO Elon Musk assured investors in an earnings call that Tesla was making strides to correct its manufacturing issues and get the Model 3 out. But more than a month later, in mid-December, Tesla was still making its Model 3 batteries partly by hand, according to current engineers and ex-Tesla employees who worked at the Gigafactory in recent months. They say Tesla had to "borrow" scores of employees from Panasonic, which is a partner in the Gigafactory and supplies lithium-ion battery cells, to help with this manual assembly. Tesla is still not close to mass producing batteries for the basic $35,000 model of this electric sedan, sources say.
It's a 10^9 factory (Score:5, Funny)
It's a 10^9 factory, but they were expecting 2^30?
Re:How many factories do not have any problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Rather... [electrek.co]
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On track is PR BS. They are way behind waht they promised. They might eventually get there many years late if ever. In four years Tesla will have literally millions of competitive vehicles from manufacturers that know what they are doing.
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They are way behind waht they promised. They might eventually get there many years late if ever.
That makes no sense. Why would it take many years? This is a delay of at most several months. In the long run, it's immaterial. Look at the computer industry; would it have been much different if the IBM PC has been introduced a year later? I don't see that happening.
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Possibly. In that time an alternate standard could have become entrenched.
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Apple could have taken a different path, released a non-crippled Apple IIx. Would have meant Jobs not being such a twit though, with his "users don't need colour" and "users don't need expansion options"
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Would have meant Jobs not being such a twit though, with his "users don't need colour" and "users don't need expansion options"
Jobs being a twit is the one condition that remains constant across all possible universes in the multiverse, so Apple's fate was sealed.
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What could have varied was how much influence he had.
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I searched my posts and don't see anything, ever about Tesla becoming "on track" with the original (aka, accelerated) "5k per week by December" timeline.
Has the
Re:How many factories do not have any problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't that the factory has teething problems. It is that based, on its quarterly reports and other public data, Tesla is on its way to running out of money. It really looks from outside like Tesla needs to start delivering a lot of Model 3s and making a reasonable profit on each if it expects to stay out of bankruptcy court.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that without some significant revenue stream, Tesla doesn't have enough cash and locked in credit to make it through 2018. Google turns up a plethora of articles on this. Are they accurate? How the hell would **I** know?
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TTAC called, they'd like you to write a column for their Tesla Deathwach 7 years ago. ;) The "Tesla is going to run out of money" nonsense that shorts at Seeking Alpha love is tiring (but hey, if you buy into it, by all means short them!). It's premised on the concept of no additional cash streams (Semi and Roadster reservations are basically no-interest several-year loans), no improvements in the Tesla Energy division orders (which by all measures seem to be
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Nope, that was an extrapolation from a couple of days productivity. And who knows if even that was right considering how much bullshit Elon Musk spouts.
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It's no extrapolation. You really think that nobody is tracking deliveries but Tesla?
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I think some one is working hard at buying Tesla hence the drive to make it cheaper, a really aggressive drive. It's so dirty it smells of M$ but it could be more than one, all looking to drive down Tesla stock price to buy it up on the cheap.
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A company with a market cap like Tesla's couldn't run out of money if they ran around frantically torching cash all night. All they have to do is sell a little equity when they need to.
TL;DR (Score:2)
Batteries are heavy. They can "sag".
Re:How many factories do not have any problem? (Score:5, Funny)
You could try to rectify the situation.
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That's one way to go
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If they're batteries they're already DC. Maybe that's the issue?
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That would be invertunate.
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Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced.
This is true, but when as big as the Gigafactory, chances are that lubing it will be tried first. Likely both by Musk and politicians.
How is this different ... (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that different than every other company in the world? I have worked with and for at a lot of places over the years and one thing is universal, most of the people have no idea at all what they are doing.
It is amazing to me that some companies are even able to put products on the market at all. I am not talking only about the small guys either.
I was once testing a wireless product for one of the largest companies in Europe for global radio certification (FCC/ISED/CE and many others). Once I got the devices I told them.. hey, thanks a lot for sending these samples, but it would be great if you could send them with a SMA connector so we could test the radios as well.
What is a SMA connector, was the response. After explaining it a couple of days went by and they called me up and explained that the guy who knows how to do that quit the company so it would be better if we changed the design for them to make it work.
Of course this kind of shit happens ever every company every single day. These are not things which people know about it.
So, you can say that 100% of companies are shittier than people on the outside know about.
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None of those are dependent on their survival by a single product like Tesla are
I'm pretty sure that at least Microsoft and the nuclear power companies actually are. OTOH, if Tesla's cars get eventually beaten by competition, Tesla can still become a great solar+storage company.
Re:How is this different ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's different because most companies realise this and try to underpromise and overdeliver publicly.
It's different because Tesla is operating on hype. Every other car company teases designs, but they only make actual claims about performance and scheduling when they are absolutely sure they can meet them. Tesla can lose money and the stock goes up, traditional automakers have to turn a profit just to keep it flat. But Tesla will die just as soon as the buzz does. If all the unpaid Tesla promoters like Rei stopped doing the work they're doing on behalf of Tesla, the company would fold up like a cheap magazine, because Wall Street would stop rewarding them for losing money.
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>> It's different because most companies realise this and try to underpromise and overdeliver publicly.
> It's different because Tesla is operating on hype
Oh my. I'd agree that most companies realize this, but I've dealt with many startups and some very large companies that are operating on hype. They're not good long term customers, or partners, but they're certainly not rare.
Re: How is this different ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that Tesla always delivers, just slower than anticipated. All companies miss their deadlines. Most companies deliver over hyped products. Tesla always delivers what it promises. Reviews are consistently positive on their products. That's the difference
Re: How is this different ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since Tesla produces only EVs, they always have excess ZEV credits. Part of their finances is selling those ZEV credits. But the closer the other automakers come to meeting their ZEV requirement in a year, the lower the price for ZEV credits. So if Tesla produces too many EVs in a year in which other car companies sold enough of their own EVs, they get little to nothing for their ZEV credits, and they have to bear a larger fraction of the Tesla 3 production cost themselves.
You can tell how well EVs are selling by how good the discounts are at the end of the year. 2015, sales were really poor (relative to the ZEV mandate that year) and there were incredible discounts on EVs (in California - the only state where CARB counts sales/leases). Dec 2015 I almost picked up a 3-year lease on an e-Golf for $79/mo, no money down (there was also a $49/mo with $1500 down offer, but that's more money overall). The EV deals in late 2017 were close to nonexistent, which is a pretty good indicator that the automakers were hitting their ZEV mandate percentages. That means there wasn't much of a market for ZEV credits in 2017, which meant Tesla had to delay Model 3 production to try to push some of those credits into 2018. And that's exactly what they did.
The problem for Tesla is that they set the pre-order price of their EVs based on assumptions for how much they'll receive for selling the ZEV credits. If the other automakers consistently hit their ZEV percentage every year (or come close to it), Tesla is in a world of trouble - all those Tesla 3 pre-orders could have been "sold" for less than what it cost to manufacture because they'd assumed selling the ZEV credit would've made up the difference. So paradoxically, the better EVs sell, the worse off Tesla is financially.
Re:How is this different ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Most automakers run on new models, not merely hype. Studies have clearly shown that consumers prefer to buy the latest thing, even if it's not necessarily the best. Of course, automotive technology moves rapidly enough that the latest thing often is better, so there is that. Tesla is running on the promise of delivering things, not on actually delivering things. Maybe they'll get production up soon and change that, but the fact is that only a tiny minority of Tesla fans actually have a Tesla at this point.
Re: How is this different ... (Score:2)
Automakers not hyping things up is actually new to the industry. One they learned from Honda & Toyota. It wasn't until "car salesman" became worse than "snake oil salesman" that they started toning down. And it took 10 years of being beat the shit out of by Japanese car makers that they really became humble.
When Ford made their first few years worth of mass assembled cars, they were sold with missing windows, door locks, horns, etc. They just told the buyer to bring it back later for repair. Again it to
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It's different because most companies realise this and try to underpromise and overdeliver publicly.
Wow, you've never read a corporate statement that wasn't tweeted by a CEO. Maybe you should actually read a company's quarterly report at some point and you'll realise that there's not a single company out there that underpromises anything.
Re:How is this different ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's getting worse. We seem to have a growth in the amount of complexity of things individually and an increasing number of them, combined with a corresponding lack of investment in training.
As one kind of an example, an IT department 15 years ago had simpler networks, servers and software to manage. Now each of those things is much more complex than it used to be but the number of people managing it is the same and they probably don't know any more details than they did when it was simpler. High level management (virtualization, etc) may have made managing larger breadth easier, but I think the individual complexity has been addressed at all and lots of it is essentially not understood.
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"I think it's getting worse. We seem to have a growth in the amount of complexity of things individually and an increasing number of them, combined with a corresponding lack of investment in training."
It sure is getting worse. Every employee I get has serious lack of training in everything. A lot of companies have thrown training out the door because of "costs", but not realizing that it's making our labor pool worse overall and increasing costs overall upon everyone. I train my employees, but I'm just a
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So much skill development is just kind of dumped on employees who its assumed will just pick it up on their own. Some of that is OK, but there's a point (reached quickly) where it's just not practical or effective -- the technology is too complex to simulate/emulate without expensive hardware, too often there's little practical knowledge gained without practical production situations and workloads, way too much "certification" which just winds up being an exercise in memorizing a vendor's marketing buzzwor
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Another "funny" story (Score:2, Offtopic)
Another "funny" story, my company got asked by a Japanese manufacturer wether we can deliver a pinyin entry method for a device to be released in Taiwan. I replied that we could, but, surely, they'd want bopomofo/zhuyin instead, since that is what people use in Taiwan. They went ahead and ordered a pinyin instead. Somewhere late in the process, they told us that they sent a sample to their Taiwan office and it was asked for it to be switched to bopomofo/zhuyin because they don't use pinyin in Taiwan...
GM (Score:3)
GM built it's own battery factory. Practically nobody knows about it. They make all of their own battery packs for their hybrid and pure EV vehicles. It came on-line on time and roughly at capacity.
GM hasn't run a large-scale battery operation like this but it managed to figure it out. Building the factory in an area already saturated with large factory operations probably helped out a bit. Building a factory in the middle of the desert, where the nearest, largest factory builds slot machines, probably is a
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The location of Tesla's factory actually makes a lot of sense. It's an area with relatively low cost of living, which means they can pay workers less. It is not too far from their manufacturing plant (in Fremont), so transportation is minimized. That manufacturing plant in
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"What is a SMA connector, was the response. After explaining it a couple of days went by and they called me up and explained that the guy who knows how to do that quit the company so it would be better if we changed the design for them to make it work."
That's because a lot of companies basically ride on the back of one person that they abuse to hell. Usually, it's the only person there that can keep said company alive. From the owners to all the management depending on this one person. I know, because I s
Creating a product only half the battle (Score:3, Informative)
I think maybe the worst part of Tesla is that nobody knows how to make a lot of vehicles efficiently and be profitable. Critics have said all along that Tesla needed someone in manufacturing that knew how to build cars. Instead Musk rejected this ideal and went it alone and it shows. Obviously critics said the real test for Tesla would be how it handle's the Model 3 production schedule. Its very clear from reports that they bit off more then they could chew.
Re:Creating a product only half the battle (Score:5, Insightful)
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That alone would be quite an improvement compared to the present situation.
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Wasn't Panasonic invited to the gigafactory party to provide the manufacturing expertise that Tesla lacks? I'm not sure Panasonic knows much about cars, but when it comes to making batteries, this is not their first rodeo.
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They can't make cars either. The few Model 3s coming off the line look like they've been assembled with sledge hammers, and the Model X is the least reliable car on the market. Their cars are riddled with problems that buyers accept because they're fanboys. Why even promise you're going to sell cars when you don't even know if you can make the batteries?
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Doesn't sound so bad... (Score:2)
...as long as Gigafactory batteries are not composed *of* Panasonic employees.
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Tesla Model Soylent 3 is people!
The first one is always the hardest. (Score:2)
Building the first factory is the hardest part about building factories. Once you've built it, you can build 200 more just like it in a fraction of the time.
In the meantime a worker complains about not being replaced by a machine?
Re:The first one is always the hardest. (Score:5, Insightful)
Building the first factory is the hardest part about building factories. Once you've built it, you can build 200 more just like it in a fraction of the time.
Except nobody builds lots of factories all the same. Automakers for example build different factories with different lines to produce different vehicles. The building is not the interesting part, the production line is. And the production lines are different for each vehicle. Also, by the time you've got the first factory completed, new techniques have been developed, and new equipment has hit the market. Maybe you've been just welding all your cars together, and now you're starting to use structural adhesives. Now you're going to change the line again.
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Except nobody builds lots of factories all the same.
Battery makers do.
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Except nobody builds lots of factories all the same.
Battery makers do.
Cell makers do, maybe. MAYBE. That's assuming that manufacturing techniques haven't improved since the last time they built a factory. But people making actual batteries are going to be making new and different production lines just like automakers are — when we're talking about EV batteries. The battery packs are changing rapidly enough that they will require different assembly techniques. And new battery chemistries are coming faster than ever before, now. Some chemistries are baked, some aren't. S
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Except nobody builds lots of factories all the same. Automakers for example build different factories with different lines to produce different vehicles.
Actually plenty of people do. Especially since we're not talking about Automakers here but rather makers of generic lithium battery cells, anticipated as being the most sought after product in the coming years.
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"Once you've built it, you can build 200 more just like it in a fraction of the time."
I can tell you've never done a plant opening or shut down, let alone worked in any sort of actual construction. None of what you said is even remotely true.
Go take your ass to Galveston and do a few plant openings. Let's see that 'fraction of the time' you're talking about.
Protip: We won't see it ever.
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From the point of view of the batteries alone, manufacturing 18650s should be a solved problem. Particularly with Panasonic in the loop.
Hatchet job of a story (Score:5, Interesting)
Those things are already well known; apparently they didn’t hit their stride until the end of December, where they were at a rate of 1000 model 3’s per week in the last three days. Timing now seems designed to hit the stock before earnings.
Also, the base $35k model is a random reference... of course the lowest margin version will be last.
Based on the fact that I have seen a few model 3’s on the road this past week (first ones for me), I am guessing production is consistent now and possibly accelerating beyond 1,000/week.
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I agree, I'm pretty sure things are accelerating pretty rapidly.
I took delivery of my model 3 last week. When I was taking delivery in Bellevue I met a couple employees who were flown in from Texas to help out with the increased load. (They are moving from West to East in deliveries.)
There were at least 5 or 6 other Model 3s in the delivery area waiting for pickup.
I have 2 friends who have also gotten their notifications to do configuration of their orders. (It took about 2.5 weeks from when I got the not
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Tesla's problem is mostly a lack of $$$. They announce cars before they're ready to build them, and they do that because they have to start bringing in revenue, or else they won't have the money to do the tooling to build the cars. Were it a larger car company, they would simply wait until all of their manufacturing capa
Not a surprise... (Score:3)
Automation takes time (Score:2)
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Perhaps Tesla should have selected (or produced) a battery design more amenable to automation and close packing in battery banks with serious cooling requirements. Too many design teams just toss their work over the wall to manufacturing and QA, expecting them to solve problems that never should have arisen in the first place.
Competition is scared of Tesla. Very scared. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be surprised if this weren't some hidden PR bullshit being spread by the competition. Do you remember the blatant lies about the first tests on the model s that were quickly debunked by the data provided by the test models? This has very much the same smell. There are reports of paid goons renting Teslas and deliberately mistreating them to put them out of service. This article is along these lines IMHO.
I'd trust Tesla and Musk more than I'd trust any news outlet, that's for sure.
Highly biased article... (Score:5, Interesting)
Two main sources for the story are people who either "worked at the Gigafactory in recent months"... Past tense...
But more than a month later, in mid-December, Tesla was still making its Model 3 batteries partly by hand, according to current engineers and ex-Tesla employees who worked at the Gigafactory in recent months.
...aaaaand a guy with a huge "shorting" investment, standing to win millions from perceived losses by Tesla.
Stanphyl Capital's Mark B. Spiegel, who has a significant short position in the company, told CNBC:
"While I've no doubt that Tesla will eventually work out its Model 3 production problems, the base model will cost Tesla at least mid-$40,000s to build.
The company will never deliver more than a token few for less than the current $49,000 lowest-cost offering.
Sales will hugely disappoint relative to expectations of over 400,000 a year.
And even at those higher prices Tesla will never come anywhere close to its promised [profitability]."
Also, article is reeeeeaaalyyyy trying to paint a picture of doom and gloom.
It takes a line from a Tesla engineer about how workers were "slapping bandoliers together as fast as they possibly could" back in December - and presents it as a doom&gloom subtitle:
'Slapping bandoliers together'
Hell, it even manages to paint higher test standards as bad, by omission of the fact that test standards are higher than expected not simply "[not] the same kind".
The two engineers also said that Tesla doesn't do the same kind of "stress tests" of its Model 3 batteries which would be expected of other electronics or carmakers.
And then there's that thing where I can't seem to find a single article by that author, [cnbc.com] about Tesla, which isn't a story about how VERY DOUBLEPLUS BAD Tesla really is.
Feds to investigate Tesla crash driver blamed on Autopilot [cnbc.com]
Tesla factory workers have filed a lawsuit claiming widespread racism, unsafe conditions [cnbc.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-tesla-fired-700-people.html [elonmuskpu...ncefirings]
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/tesla-firings-former-and-current-employees-allege-layoffs.html [slashdot.org]Tesla employees detail how they were fired, claim dismissals were not performance related
Tesla employees detail how and why they were fired [msn.com]
Tesla cites performance reviews as it fires SolarCity employees, though workers say reviews never took place [cnbc.com]
Tesla fires hundreds of employees while trying to ramp up vehicle production [cnbc.com]
German report calls Tesla's Autopilot a "hazard" [techcrunch.com]
Senate committee calls out Elon Musk, wants answers on Tesla Autopilot [techcrunch.com]
Tesla under investigation for possible breach of securities law, WSJ reports [techcrunch.com]
What the NTSB know [techcrunch.com]
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Yet all this crap came out. ...I put some flame decals on mine just for humors sake.
Is this really news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a bigger story would be "Company is pushing the envelope and nothing goes wrong at all."
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But...but...robots (Score:2)
Tesla was still making its Model 3 batteries partly by hand
I guess the robots aren't taking over, are they? You'd almost think that success at one specific repetitive task doesn't transfer to success at a completely different repetitive task.
I continue to hear bad bad things about them (Score:2)
I follow quite a few finance people on twitter and at least once a week I see a breakdown of how Tesla are totally doing things entirely wrong, particularly in regards to money management.
I can tell you that every time the stock price goes near 300 Elon will tweet something or have a conference announcing something and it quickly recovers, this seems to happen over and over.
Iâ(TM)m certainly not going to attribute the issues to malice, perhaps inexperience. Honestly it would be good if Tesla is succes
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The bottom line -- both literally and figuratively -- in your link shows a net **LOSS** of $675M. in 2016. 2017 is expected to be much worse because of Model 3 start up costs. You pay for the factory up front, you don't book profits until you sell the product. I think the 1017 financials will be published in March.
So, No, Tesla is not making a profit even though the gross profit before subtracting operating costs and R&D is positive. Some people think it will eventually sell a lot of cars (and batt
this is old news. (Score:2)
This is what was happening in November, but the issues have since been resolved.
Re:3.7 volt 18650's (Score:5, Informative)
The funny thing is, the cells are 18650's
No, they're not. [electrek.co] Chances are that the switch to a cell size that's more efficient in the long term has created problems for them in the short term.
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Not so short term I'll say as somebody with some background in the issue.
Tesla uses many small cells that all require a lot of cooling, weight a lot, cost a lot, and require expensive load balancing circuits.
With them making them just a bit bigger, and getting miniscule cell count reduction, just makes the issue a bit smaller, while bringing up new ones: need for custom tooling, being denied advantage of COTS technology, impossibility of buying cells on open market if your own assembly line goes belly up fo
Re:3.7 volt 18650's (Score:5, Interesting)
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I mean, Chinese use cheap and simple air cooling, while Tesla has to do forced liquid cooling which is whack a lot more expensive. They have to do this because they use cylindrical cells with tiny internal conductors and very energetic chemistry that is thermal runaway prone.
With brick cells where the membrane zigzags through the cell, the penalty for using thicker contact plates for anode and cathode is not as big as for cylindrical cells where you are forced to use copper foil of equivalent area to anode
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Not really. Most consumer electronics haven't used round cells for well over a decade. The energy density (by volume) of round cells is just too low, so pretty much the entire industry uses lithium polymer soft packs now. But for automobiles, that doesn't matter as much, and round cells are cheap because nobody wants them anymore, so why not? :-)
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Because of no competition, there are Chinese EVs that do beat Teslas on individual metrics, but yet to beat them on overall performance. When they will do, prepare for pricefall.
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Wait... power tools are considered electronics now? Did I miss a meeting?
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Leaf used manganese cathode pouch cells with a lot of organics inside, those were not much different from ones stuffed into thin laptops these days. The do degrade and go boom from heat. Phosphate/graphite cells on the other hand can be heated red hot, without going unto thermal runaway.
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There's nothing magic about this. The reason for the higher density is that some portion of each cell is necessarily used for the casing to provide physical support for the structures inside. The bigger the cell (in either direction), the lower the percentage of its volume that is wasted on the casing, and thus, the higher the cell's energy density is (by volume), assuming all else is equal.
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Yes, but that relationship isn't strictly linear with respect to volume even for cells designed for general consumer use:
AAA battery: 3.9 mL, 1.3-1.8 wH
D cell: 55.8 mL (14.3x), 18-27 wH (13.85-15x)
It's close, but IIRC, bigger cells typically have slightl
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Re:Anybody surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen factory startups before. It's what I've been doing for living since 1996. Automotive factory startups, that is. And, yeah, Tesla is a dysfunctional organization. This is organizational incompetence. That's not to say that they won't recover, but this is not normal startup pains. This is a collosal fuckup.
I'd suggest that you're correct about the semiskilled dimwits; Tesla has hired a lot of smart people. But without skilled leadership, you end up with the manufacturing capabilities of Tesla. (I mean operational leadership; this isn't a dig at Elon.)
Re:Anybody surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suggest that there's a difference between bringing up the first factory of its kind and bringing up a factory which is just a variation on what's been done many times before. Even if an entire vehicle is fundamentally more complex than an enormous battery back, the number of novel solutions you need to come up with is probably a truer measure of engineering risk.
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You are confusing two separate issues: connecting a bunch of cells together to create a large format battery, which of course has been done before, and doing it on a scale that will achieve a 30% reduction in per unit costs.
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But without skilled leadership, you end up with the manufacturing capabilities of Tesla.
You mean firing up the world's largest battery manufacturing plant and actually shipping batteries? Yeah they suck!
Now I'm sure you have plenty ideas of how to create megaprojects that work first go. Let's hear them.
Re: Anybody surprised? (Score:2)
If companies are asking VCs and more for money to keep them afloat, they deserve to be under a microscope.
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I donÃ(TM)t quite understand why there is almost a hope in some people that this project and all associates Musk ventures collapse into oblivion.
Shorters will short.
Also, if you prove you're smarter than very smart people on a single, small, issue you are automagically the smartest person ever and your dick is the largest dick around.
And not just around but by length too.
Re:Manufactory - industrial production (Score:4, Informative)
Electric motors are much more likely to last a long time than internal combustion engines. There are virtually no moving parts in contact with each other in an electric motor (I've read reports saying 18 moving parts in a Tesla drivetrain), and the motor(s) are directly driving the wheels. Compare that to an ICE with hundreds of moving/wearing parts (valves, pistons, seals, crankshaft, spark plugs, transmission, etc) that need to withstand high temperatures and low tolerances to seal against burning fuel, then convert the explosive force into rotational energy in a different part of the vehicle at varying speeds.
There are already reports of Tesla taxis hitting 250k miles [teslarati.com] and 300k miles [jalopnik.com] with minimal service.
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Probably the moving parts most likely to fail in an ICE/hybrid car are wheel bearings and alternators. I assume that EVs have wheel bearings, and alternators are just electric motors run "backwards" to generate electricity from rotary motion. The multitude of moving parts inside a modern ICE are remarkably durable so long as the lubrication doesn't fail.
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For it to pass a California smog check. :-) It's not the engines that are the big problem (usually). It's all the emissions crap that they have to tack on—vacuum lines that get clogged by carbon deposits and cause the engine to run lean, O2 sensors that fail, and so on.... And all of those things, if bad enough to be detected b
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FYI: These days, Rolls Royces are insanely priced, tarted up BMW 7s.
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net income of $559M for 2017...am I missing something or are they turning a profit?