Something leaves you calm: Did Elon Musk really look stupid to everyone on Tesla’s big day?



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Let’s be quick at first, the head of Tesla really made his word in terms of presenting a number of cool things on Battery Day from an industry perspective. By redesigning the cell, making the battery cells more efficient and changing their chemical composition, and integrating the battery pack into vehicles, Americans have made great strides along the way to finally being able to produce large numbers of low-cost batteries. cost.

At the same time, there is also talk that the show lacked detail in key areas, so hardly anyone deviated from the event, as Musk had previously predicted. One of those very important areas was the evolution of the expected price of the Tesla battery pack. Compared to the fact that Elon Musk and Andrew Baglino, the company’s vice president of powertrain and battery technology, have built pretty much the entire presentation on how much the battery pack price will fall in the future thanks to the innovations,

It was unclear exactly where Tesla would go by the end of 2025.

However, while we waited for the values ​​to appear on the y-axis of the graph that blinked several times at the end of the presentation, this did not happen. All the world could know was that the new solutions would reduce the cost of manufacturing the battery pack by 56%, not what it was. However, it would have been very important for the industry if Tesla had kept its previous promise and announced that by the end of 2020 they could reach the dream limit of $ 100 / kWh and that value could fall even more in the future. At this level, the price of electric cars will be competitive with cars with internal combustion engines, according to industry experts. And thanks to better prices, the transition period, repeatedly mentioned by Musk, during which electric cars will displace their internal combustion engine-equipped counterparts from the world’s roads, may be accelerated.

In addition to the four servings of sizzling coffee, the giant Haribo bag, the students’ delicacy, the two sliced ​​apples, the twenty homemade cookies, and the four pre-filled glasses of water, some good data sets and graphs were also prepared. This is because it pays to prepare for such events in advance so that you don’t have to pre-extract and extract the relevant data in the middle of the night. Of course, the industrial development of the battery pack price was prefabricated as well, so I figured that even though the Musks didn’t give the y-axis values, all I had to do was see how they had evolved in previous years, to what change from The industry price they were referring to and using the values ​​thus obtained, I will be able to determine how fast Tesla intends to go in the coming years.

When I started this, the awareness, the scale of the graph shown by the muskets came quickly, because the development of the industry trend was not related in any way to what we usually consider as a reference for ion batteries. lithium based on previous research and calculations by BloombergNEF.

The Tesla chart showed only 0 as a starting value, according to the BloombergNEF collection, the cost of manufacturing a 1 kWh battery pack in 2013 was $ 663 in the industry, so taking into account the 11 divisions indicated by the Muskes, there was a release of approximately $ 60. BloombergNEF calculated that by 2014, the cost of producing a 1 kWh battery pack had dropped by $ 75 to $ 588, a representation that might even have been realistic on a graph of Tesla. The only problem is, in 2015, there was a huge $ 207 drop in battery production cost, so the $ 60 pass-through theory was immediately overturned. It was also not correct, as the industry trend presented, that if we accept the BloombergNEF data, they should have plotted a much steeper drop between 2014 and 2015.

It is also important to note that the dashed line in the graph presented several times in the presentation, which shows the expected evolution of the price of the battery pack in the industry, is very similar to the BloombergNEF forecast, at least in terms of its slope between 2019. and 2025.

Based on this, the price of the battery pack by 2024 may already approach $ 100 / kWh in the world.

because due to stricter environmental regulations, manufacturers and suppliers are spending more and more money on research and development, and because of the dynamically expanding demand to increase their production capacity, which already allows for larger production and cheaper.

Given the above, I can only imagine three scenarios:

  1. Tesla used completely different values, presumably based on his own calculations and expectations, when creating the graph.
  2. The featured graph has been deliberately redesigned so that the exact values ​​cannot be determined by accident, so that rival companies and industry players cannot pinpoint in time how much Tesla will have an advantage over them.
  3. The Elon Musks just looked at everyone stupid.

Whatever the truth is, or that is closer to it, it must be affirmed that a company

WHAT RESEARCHERS CONSIDER AS THE MOST VALUABLE AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURER, PEOPLE WOULD EXPECT TO BE IN THE WORLD ON A GREAT DAY WITH A WRONG GRAPHIC.

Cover Image Source: Maja Hitij / Getty Images



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