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Tesla Employees Say Gigafactory Problems Are Worse Than Known (cnbc.com)
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, but they were expecting 2^30?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
What can I, AC, do? Maybe write a letter of encouragement
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.
Rather...
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
What can I, AC, do? Maybe write a letter of encouragement
Write a troll post about Trump, or a reaction to someone else's troll post about Trump. This has been scientifically determined to solve all problems.
You could try to rectify the situation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...as long as Gigafactory batteries are not composed *of* Panasonic employees.
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
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?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
In Washington, D.C., I presume?
Ezekiel 23:20
The funny thing is, the cells are 18650's
No, they're not. 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.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's one way to go
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.
Companies always have internal problems that are not known outside the company. Companies also have management in place to address and resolve those problems. In a start-up situation, it is one problem after the other, sometimes many at once. If it weren't Tesla, it'd be a non-issue.
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...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Automation engineering is a science. The time Tesa 'estimated' was woefully wrong, but those saying it's impossible or that Tesa will never make this viable may well be eating their own words soon.
I don't read AC
If they're batteries they're already DC. Maybe that's the issue?
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.
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 for some reason, bigger cells have higher risk of overheating, bigger cells will require more cooling, if the cell goes boom, the boom will be bigger, necessitating more massive containment structures.
Compare it with Chinese cars with huge brick cells. They have 12 to 64 of them per car. They are air cooled. They use plastic casing. They have bigger internal conductors that use copper, that have low ohmic heating. Lower cell count makes cell balancing easier and more efficient. While the cell chemistry Chinese use is less energetic, they do get MUCH better energy density because they are bigger. Because they use less energetic chemistry, cells are less likely to go boom by themselves. Because they use bigger , flexible cathodes, cathode swelling is much less of an issue. Lower cathode swelling, greatly extends the cell lifetime.
Chinese simply have better batteries.
It's easy to make fun of Tesla for being a stereotypical Silicon Valley company bumbling through the actual hard work of manufacturing, but none of this stuff affects their marketing appeal or sales potential. Their target demographic, even for the Model 3, is *not* the average person buying their first electric car or whatever. Teslas are luxury goods for conspicuous consumption. A constriction in supply only increases the appeal, and diehard Tesla customers will look past any quality problems that might suggest their purchase wasn't very practical.
I'd never own one, but I'm not worried about their future. It's just not the "mass-market EV company" people seem to believe it is, against all evidence.
Panasonic itself published that it was hand making some batteries in the Giga factory, where it is in partnership with Tesla.
None of this was not already or worse than known.
I donâ(TM)t quite understand why there is almost a hope in some people that this project and all associates Musk ventures collapse into oblivion.
LOL someone's never seen a factory start up before. I love these oh-so-wise internet commenters who come in with harsh rhetoric for other people, with zero knowledge of the topic at hand or how things usually work. I mean, seriously, "Musk and his band of semiskilled dimwits"? This is some kind of emotional release going on here.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So you're saying that the Chinese have simply avoided high power density. Well in that case it's rather obvious that many of those things that Tesla is doing don't worry the Chinese. But I'm not sure why you have to contradict yourself on a space of two paragraphs ("small cells all require a lot of cooling ... bigger cells will require more cooling ... huge brick cells are air cooled"). And why would copper conductors be necessarily better when copper is heavy per unit of conductivity? And why do you think Tesla doesn't use massive internal conductors already? And how come that cathode swelling is suddenly such an issue for lifetime but suddenly thermal control isn't? Mind you, data shows that battery lifetime already isn't an issue even for the older and presumably worse Tesla packs, why should it be a worry in the future? And that's with the smaller cylindrical cells already, which you said are worse, not with the bigger ones.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.)
--Jim (me)
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
Possibly. In that time an alternate standard could have become entrenched.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That would be invertunate.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think a bigger story would be "Company is pushing the envelope and nothing goes wrong at all."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
euh, aren't you full of shit. Most EV cars started out the way of using big cells. They switched to smaller cells exactly because of cooling. There's a reason the first generation Nissan Leaf had a lot of angry customers in hot climates. Bigger cells heat up much faster under load because they have much less surface area compared to volume. It's basic physics.
Also these are COTS battery cells and is probably the reason Tesla started this route in the first place. Tesla increased the size for density purposes, but you can find the exact same cell size from I think Samsung and Panasonic that Tesla is using in the model 3 under different product names.
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 hindrance.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
A few months back I read in a European newspaper (sorry, forgot where) that Tesla is experiencing an unsurprising problem. They transition from manufactory (small series production) to industrial manufacturing – for cars, which makes the problem worse. In essence, all "traditional" car factories have spent years (if not decades) devleoping and honing their production processes. Building a car 1,000's of times at a consisten high quality (fit and finish, let alone reliability) is a difficult business. It was said that the car companies felt almost sorry for Tesla, because they all know how hard it is. They also were confident that Tesla would figure it out. To me the question is really, will they still be around by the time they have figured it out? With Musk leading (and his deep pockets), maybe.
Think of it that way: Tesla is a bit like Rolls Royce. They have a production line, they can produce nice, high margin cars (ok, maybe frumpy, overpriced, and all that, but they are still "nice"), and now they want to produce 1,000's of car a week. Virtually nothing they do now would scale to those proportions, it's like starting form scratch. Tesla has been in a similar position. They have come a long way. And they have a long way to go. I'd give them a 50% chance they make it.
BTW, if they fail, they have at least served humanity by jump starting the switch to electric cars. And I would not be surprised that, even if their car business ultimately may fail, their battery business may not.
At any rate, I would not buy one now. I drive a lot, my vehicles need to last 300,00 miles/12 years, and that does not seem like a winning proposition with a Tesla at the moment. Although the Tesla range would be good enough for me, so it's a bit of a shame. I'll reconsider when the first Tesla 3 hit 200,000 miles.
Do your own thing. And overdo it!
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.
It's probably also the reason why they stayed with a small-ish format. You can sell these cells for consumer electronics, too; with large cells, your potential shrinks.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wonder how much of the production woes are really due to to resources being diverted to supply that massive grid tied battery they supplied to Australia. Remember on time or free.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Mac took three more years, and was sufficiently different that the IBM PC extension card market would have helped IBM PC succeed anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
You must be a Project Manager.
I remember quite distinctly you arguing nonstop for hours about how the Model 3 production schedule was going to be on track by December waay back in October. When the production schedule was months behind in December you argued that there was a new production schedule, they were only one month behind, and the old promises didn't matter anymore anyway.
Now they have failed yet again, the rate of production increase as compared to all their promises and estimates has been falling, and the rate of which they produce new estimates is down to every two or three weeks and you are still arguing.
"Ignore my promise to get to work at 9:00 today from last week, for at 8:59 this morning I made a new promise to start by noon and it is still 11:20, so I actually might be early."
lol fuck off shill
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, about Tesla, which isn't a story about how VERY DOUBLEPLUS BAD Tesla really is.
Feds to investigate Tesla crash driver blamed on Autopilot
Tesla factory workers have filed a lawsuit claiming widespread racism, unsafe conditions
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/01/elon-musk-tesla-fired-700-people.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/tesla-firings-former-and-current-employees-allege-layoffs.htmlTesla employees detail how they were fired, claim dismissals were not performance related
Tesla employees detail how and why they were fired
Tesla cites performance reviews as it fires SolarCity employees, though workers say reviews never took place
Tesla fires hundreds of employees while trying to ramp up vehicle production
German report calls Tesla's Autopilot a "hazard"
Senate committee calls out Elon Musk, wants answers on Tesla Autopilot
Tesla under investigation for possible breach of securities law, WSJ reports
What the NTSB know
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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 there been another person posting with my name: Here's literally all of my posts about the Model 3 schedule between November and my first post in January:
17 nov:
"if you're asking how production is going: spyshots and VIN tracking currently suggests that they're up to about 100 per week."
Model 3 has been launched since July. They're about 3 months behind schedule, with about 1k produced so far.
Funny, could you boldface for me where he promises in that statement a $35k Model 3 in 2017? ... (Re: "No you will not see a single $35,000 model manufactured by January.") So to you, "a couple months" means "under 1 1/2 months". Interesting.
Tesla always delivers. Almost always somewhat late**, but they do deliver. ** - Model 3 actually broke this trend by launching on time (on a schedule that they had accelerated, at that) - but their scaleup hit a number of snags and ended up 3 months behind, so, Tesla is still clearly Tesla ;)
25 nov:
Model 3 is about 3 months behind schedule. Oooh, stop the presses
First off, the original plan for the Model 3 was for production to begin at "some point" in 2017; it was moved forward to July. Secondly: we were not discussing schedules. Tesla is frequently late; Model 3 being 3 months behind schedule should surprise nobody.
2 dec:
The production curve lagged a few months, but now it's following the S curve nicely (over twice as many produced in November as October). Highest VIN spotted in the wild so far (just today) is over 1900.
4 jan:
The fact alone that they're now up to over 1000 Model 3s per week is in and of itself ~$8m per day in extra revenue.
Noticing something: I reported on the VIN tracking (and compare those numbers to the current ones - over 6000 spotted in the wild and over 10000 registered - and talked about how they were ~3 months behind schedule, not 1, never once saying that they were going to "catch up" with the original schedule. Quite to the opposite, I repeatedly pointed out that Tesla is always late, which would make for quite a contradictory argument if I was also - in your mind - claiming that they were going to "catch up" to the original schedule.
So please, if I have a doppelganger on Slashdot, please point me to them. Otherwise, you can cut it with the straw men.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
Batteries are heavy. They can "sag".
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
At some point profits matter.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
If companies are asking VCs and more for money to keep them afloat, they deserve to be under a microscope.
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 taking off after the success of the Australia battery), no revenue from the solar gigafactory (which is now starting deliveries), and they pretend that there's no revenue from Model 3, despite the fact that they're now up to 1k per week, reporting (as of today) to be on track to 2,5k by the end of Q1 and 5k by the end of Q2, and that Model 3 purchase prices / margins are frontended by delivering only the premium versions first.
The shorts' math is laughably bad. Which is why they keep losing money over and over on TSLA. They first really started hyping that argument in early November, when the stock was down to ~$300. It's at $343 right now. Care to lose your money like they have?
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
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 successful, especially a US company, the us could do with a very very successful company actually producing a physical item (rather than just software)
However, Iâ(TM)m not a finance guy, there may or may not be merit, but I can tell you the articles Iâ(TM)ve seen and continue to see, seem to lay it out in a pretty straight forward way. It sounds like itâ(TM)s an ever inflated balloon just burning through cash. That guy needs to seriesly ship some cars and soon. He needs more revenue than just pre orders and stock purchases, like actual sold items.
(I have not shorted tesla, Iâ(TM)ve considered it but my understanding is the hype for this company is so ridiculous, it continues to buck logic, apparently, hence the articles)
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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? :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's no extrapolation. You really think that nobody is tracking deliveries but Tesla?
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
What could have varied was how much influence he had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
This space intentionally left blank
So power tools use LiPol soft packs now? And one might debate the "cheap" designation. If they're so cheap, why is it that electric cars are still expensive? Clearly they're still not cheap enough.
Ezekiel 23:20
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 and cathode simply by the geometry, and need to have enough space left to accommodate for swelling.
About bigger cells requiring more or less cooling, the matter is not about that, but more about the chemistry used. Chinese use phosphate cathodes, that are more chemically stable than manganese or cobalt, and higher current limiting characteristic (no runaway), and thus they can run them hotter, despite them having lower surface area to volume ratio. There are other subtle moments there.
And finally about battery life: Tesla gets more battery life by simply using patently huge batteries that are extensively balanced and conditioned through the lifetime. They do not fully charge or discharge the pack, and to accommodate that they have to put a lot more extra cells.
Chinese have smaller, and much lighter packs that can be charged and discharged near completely without cell lifetime reduction. Smaller battery pack is faster to charge, and when it comes to replacement, it is cheaper to replace. And we should mention that they are much lighter, Chinese make their EVs from steel, and steel manage to come out being lighter than aluminium Teslas.
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.
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.
Wait... power tools are considered electronics now? Did I miss a meeting?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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 slightly more power per unit volume than smaller ones, assuming all else is equal. And again, that's for consumer-grade cells, designed to be handled roughly by humans.
For a cell that's going to sit inside a permanent pack for the rest of its life and won't be individually handled after assembly, the need for any sort of mechanical strength is even less. After all, most modern personal electronic devices these days use thin, soft pouches for their batteries, because the device itself provides adequate protection against damage by itself, without the need for any sort of shell at all. :-)
Besides, AFAIK, Musk didn't say that the batteries were more dense purely because the cells were bigger. He just said that they were bigger and more dense. Technology improves. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is what was happening in November, but the issues have since been resolved.
i could live a little longer in this prison
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.
So what you're saying is that it's a failure of vision, because the choice was basically to use untested, unproven manufacturing technologies and processes in a production vehicle? That seems even worse that teething pains at a factory; what you describe is an abject failure of leadership and a fatal flaw in decision making.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Which I was saying in the linked post is something that was never promised by Tesla.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
To paraphrase a presidential quote: Who would have thought battery technology would be so hard?
or Who would have thought ramping up production would be so hard?
I don't see anything in your post that contradicts the above in any way, shape, or form. Nowhere did Tesla say "A 35k Model 3 in January". Ever. The plan has always been to start out with delivering versions with the long range battery and premium upgrades first, and only moving to the non-premium versions as they worked their way down the waiting list.
Model 3's pricing is highly competitive with the 3-Series, A4 and C-Class. The Model 3 LR for example is as fast as a 340i, but costs $5k less without accounting for tax credits or energy savings. The premium upgrades package is $5k, but some of things that are standard on the Model 3 are premium upgrades on the BMW, let alone what you get with PUP on the Model 3.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
While see great things for TSLA, I'd never buy their bonds. The stock has all the upsides; the bonds have all the risk.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
Hey dude, you might want to revisit your basic math & physics:
You might want to revisit your basic reading comprehension.
Yes, but that relationship isn't strictly linear with respect to volume
a commensurate increase in thickness results in ZERO change in ratio of active volume to total volume.
You're the one claiming that the ratio of active volume to total volume must be constant. I said that this isn't true, and proved it with real-world examples of hardware where your claims don't hold true even in the consumer space.
inane volume data of AAA,D
wasted space
Obviously wasted, because you didn't bother to read it.
bigger cells typically have slightly more power per unit volume than smaller ones
at least try to get power and energy right
Meh. Your pedantry doesn't impress me.
For a cell that's going to sit inside a permanent pack for the rest of its life and won't be individually handled after assembly, the need for any sort of mechanical strength is even less
has no relevance on the fact that larger form factor require thicker casing
Repeating inaccurate information over and over doesn't make it true.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So my bit of conspiracy theory is this. The Boring Company is simply a way for the US government to funnel billions of dollars over a period of decades into the Elon Musk ventures, keeping him afloat, without looking like they are subsidizing them.