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Tesla Used A Third of All Electric-Car Batteries Last Year
cartechboy writes "We've heard about Tesla building this new gigafactory to produce battery packs for its electric cars. Heck, the company's current bottleneck is its ability to get battery packs for its electric cars. In fact, last year Tesla used a bit more than one-third of the auto industry's electric-car batteries, and that was with only selling 22,477 cars last year. Tesla is expanding its model lineup as quickly as possible with the introduction of the Model X crossover next year and a compact sports sedan in 2017. With the rapid expansion of its vehicle line, Tesla is going to need a crazy amount of battery packs, and quickly. Thus, the Silicon Valley upstart is building the gigafactory to engineer and produce battery packs in much larger quantities. If Tesla can remove the battery production bottle neck it's currently facing, the only question left will be market acceptance of a mainstream electric car."
Don't go crazy. There is still brake fluid in an electric car. And they still have radiators of various types for cooling purposes.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Our Tesla is almost a year old (about 12k miles) and the only things that have gone into the car is air in one tire (until they fixed it for free), electricity, and windshield washer fluid.
We did buy the maintenance plan (good for everything except tires for 8 years) and I'm sure it will need something, but so far its been basically nothing.
Greed is the root of all evil.
It has an electric motor. Those do wear out over time.
Brushless AC induction in this case. As long as they used durable chemicals in the windings and relgulate/cool it correctly, I'd expect the chassis to rust out before it needed more than a new set of bearings.
Someone had to do it.