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Tesla officials, led by CEO Elon Musk, on Tuesday outlined a series of aggressive plans to lower battery production costs, something that will allow it to bring a $ 25,000 battery-electric vehicle to market over the next three years.
Those were two of the key takeaways from the company’s “Battery Day,” a show-and-tell session after its annual meeting. During the three-hour event that was broadcast live from a site by Tesla’s assembly plant in Fremont, California, Musk and other executives went into extensive detail explaining how they plan to reduce the cost of batteries, the most important part and more. costly of an electric vehicle – by 56 percent. They then revealed a variety of new product shows that will launch over the next few years.
“We are convinced that we can build an attractive $ 25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous,” Musk said.
“The battery material is clearly revolutionary and essential to Tesla’s goal,” Musk said, “to accelerate the (transition) to sustainable energy.”
Battery costs have dropped substantially over the past decade, from an estimated $ 1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to less than $ 150 today, according to research by analysts at the Boston Consulting Group, AlixPartners and others. For their part, few manufacturers will discuss hard figures, considering that battery costs are the automotive equivalent of a state secret.
The downward curve has “flattened out,” Musk said, and it will take significant progress to go further down. According to many experts, the figure will have to be close to $ 70 per kilowatt-hour before battery electric vehicles, or BEVs, are truly cost-competitive with vehicles that use an internal combustion engine. For a vehicle like a long-range Tesla Model S, with a 100 kWh battery, the savings would add up to somewhere on the order of $ 7,000 per vehicle.
To get there, Drew Baglino, senior vice president at Tesla Powertrain and Energy Engineering, said the company is reinventing virtually every element of the manufacturing process, in part borrowing ideas from the bottling industry, which runs its production lines in a seamless manner. fluid and continuous, rather than one bottle at a time.
The changes Tesla says it is developing begin with revisions to basic chemistry. Its next-generation batteries will eliminate costly cobalt and rely on various formulations of iron and nickel, on the one hand, while its cathodes will switch from graphite to silicon. The batteries will be somewhat larger, according to Baglino. But more importantly, they will use new production methods, such as applying dry powders, rather than liquid pastes, to tightly wound films inside a lithium-ion battery.
In the process, Tesla believes it will be able to vastly reduce the size of future battery plants and eliminate numerous production steps. In the space now used to produce 150 gigawatts of batteries, Musk said, the company hopes to be able to produce a terawatt, or nearly a 700 percent increase, even while reducing its investment.
Batteries will not only be less expensive, but they will also store more energy – “energy density” in electric vehicle terms. That would translate to a double-digit increase in range or the need to use fewer batteries in a vehicle, further reducing its cost.
That would allow Tesla to finally produce a car that could be affordable for mass market buyers, and Musk announced: “We are convinced that we can make an attractive $ 25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous.”
He suggested the product could hit the market in about three years, around the time when Tesla hopes to fully increase production of its next-generation batteries, although limited production could begin in about 18 months.
However, whether Tesla can deliver is a big question. The automaker has frequently missed production and price targets. It never actually delivered the $ 35,000 base version of the Model S sedan that it had long promised. And while Musk outlined plans Tuesday to implement an almost entirely hands-free version of the company’s autopilot system, he is also far behind.
While Tesla has yet to prove that it can run on low-priced electric vehicles, it has had no trouble finding ways to launch increasingly expensive niche versions of existing products. Next year, that will include the Plaid Model S, the highest-performance version yet of its flagship sedan.
Originally set to be called “Maximum Plaid,” a dark reference to the movie “Spaceballs,” the sedan will deliver more than 1,000 horsepower and will be able to launch from 0 to 60 in less than 2 seconds, Musk said. It will be priced equally at $ 145,000, in line with comparable extreme machines from BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
During the Battery Day presentation, Musk teased a third new product, a scaled-down version of the upcoming Cybertruck truck designed for foreign markets. The initial truck will be aimed primarily at the US and has already generated at least 600,000 advance bookings, Musk said, adding: “We have stopped counting.”
The lengthy presentation by Musk and other Tesla leaders did not touch on several things that had been expected ahead of time. There was no mention of batteries that could lose 1 million miles, something Musk had previously commented on, although the new technology is clearly expected to last longer than current batteries. Meanwhile, the issue of charging times, a clear obstacle to the widespread acceptance of electric vehicles, was largely ignored.
Investors on Wall Street weren’t impressed. Tesla shares tumbled early Tuesday when Musk revealed that new battery technology is still years away. The shares fell as much as 7 percent in after-hours trading.
A clear concern is that competitors are competing to achieve similar goals. GM, in a rare move, revealed that it pays about $ 145 per kilowatt-hour for the batteries in its Chevrolet Bolt EV, but hopes to hit $ 100 when its Ultium battery plant in Ohio launches next year, and the CEO Mary Barra and other officials have hinted at long-term plans that could cut it to around $ 70.
Meanwhile, new competitor Lucid says its Air sedan, an alternative to the Model S, will hit a range of up to 530 miles next year, or about 30 percent more than the long-range Model S on just a 10-inch battery. percent larger.
