Home » Technology » Tesla is preparing an electric car with a price of up to half a million, it will go on the market in a few years! And more news from Battery Day

Tesla is preparing an electric car with a price of up to half a million, it will go on the market in a few years! And more news from Battery Day

Tesla Battery Day is well behind us. Elon Musk and his team presented a dense technological charge, which we and the rest of the automotive industry will probably process for a few more days.

Tesla Battery Day 2020 was packed to the brim with interesting new information. Below we have tried to summarize them for you.
photo: Tesla

The expectations from Tesla Battery Day were huge, and Musk was able to meet them to a large extent. He confirmed that Tesla is a company that must be reckoned with in the next many decades.

To begin with, Elon Musk summed up the past year, during which Tesla had grown by 50%. This year, despite all obstacles, growth of 30-40% awaits. He highlighted the huge success of the Chinese factory in Shanghai, which not only grew and began production in 15 months, but is also the only fully foreign-owned automobile factory in China.

At the same time, Tesla managed to start large-scale production Tesla Model Y. According to Musek, it is not at all difficult to build a prototype, but it is 10-100x more difficult to start its mass production. Today, Tesla is the only American carmaker in the last hundred years that has achieved this and is making a profit. It has been making a modest profit for four consecutive quarters.

Musk talked about why it was important to have factories on every continent as close to customers as possible. This significantly accelerates the company’s profitability. “The faster we grow, the more cash we generate,” said Musk literally. That’s why the new Austin Gigat Factory will be crucial to better supply the central and east coasts of the United States.

According to Musek, the core of Tesla’s future value lies in high-volume car production multiplied by the fact that the cars will be fully autonomous. According to him, the car industry has long been targeting the production of 20 million cars a year.

As for autonomy, a simple statistic was presented when Driving with Autopilot will result in approximately 10 times fewer accidents than the average for driving without it. Autopilot has undergone a major overhaul in recent months, and Musk hopes to launch a private beta version of the FSD (Full Self-Driving) version of Autopilot in about a month.

Musk named it clearly Tesla’s three key competencies: engineering, manufacturing and software. Batteries are the key to a sustainable future. The goal is therefore to move from counting GWh to counting TWh, ie 1000x higher production capacity. And that’s what the whole Tesla Battery Day was all about.

According to Musek, today’s factories are too small. Even Tesla Gigatovárna 1 is designed for a maximum of 150 GWh / year at very high investment costs. According to Musek and his party, however, it will be necessary to produce at least 10 TWh of batteries per year worldwide for 15-20 years in order to replace the entire global vehicle fleet and not only that, but also to replace various methods of heating.

In order for Tesla to reach such a production volume, it thinks about the production of cells and cars from the very beginning, according to the “original principles”. Musk then launched a very technical presentation on how they were going to change every step in the production of battery cells to these as a result, they were 56% cheaper in terms of 1 kWh of capacity.

The path to this is complicated and very difficult, and Musk admitted that everything is far from tight as they would like. The key, however, is new format of batteries with dimensions of 46×80 mm, which itself stores 5 times more energy, offers 6 times higher performance and 14% lower price. The first “Terafactory” is already under construction in Fremont today, with a target production capacity of 10 GWh / year, and Musk expects to reach it in about a year.

But the goal is to have within a few years factories capable of producing up to 200 GWh / year of these new cells. Of course, Tesla will continue to purchase battery cells from other manufacturers such as Panasonic, CATL or LG Chem.

Elon Musk then goes through each step of the battery cell production in detail and comments on the most important changes. One of the main ones is that the new cells are “contactless”, ie they do not have contacts in the middle for the transfer of ammunition. This significantly improves heat dissipation and significantly simplifies and reduces the cost of production.

Musk confirmed that the purchase of Maxwell Technologies was mainly due to the “dry electrode” technology, which again greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of production. “We know where the road to the destination leads here, but we still have a lot of work to do,” Musk said.

Strategic vertical integration is the key to all Tesla efforts. Therefore, it bought manufacturing companies such as Grohmann Engineering or Hibar Systems. That’s why it employs builders, and they all design machines that make machines – extremely efficient factories. “All automakers of one today will have high-range electric cars, possibly autonomous. But not all of them will be able to produce as well and cheaply as we do.” Musk stressed.

He added that Tesla will build its own cathode factory. He also talked at length about recycling batteries, with the proviso that in the future it will be easier and more advantageous to produce new batteries from old batteries. The first recycling pilot plant is to be built within the cathode plant in Nevada. And it will probably have a lot to do with the recent departure of JB Straubel, who is just starting a new company focused on battery recycling.

Another important news was a way of assembling battery cells in the cars themselves. The battery pack now becomes a structural part of the car. Musk likened this to the development in air transport, where previously fuel tanks were mounted in aircraft separately, while modern aircraft have wings designed at the same time as fuel tanks. This will be exactly the new “structural batteries”.

The result of all this should be, among other things, that in about three years, we could expect a new Tesla electric car with a price of around $ 25,000 and full autonomy. At the end of the presentation Musk also mentioned Tesla Model S in the super-powerful version of Plaid, which can be ordered today and the first pieces will be delivered to customers at the end of next year.

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