The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Batteries

Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by kjksf on Saturday February 03, 2018 @07:50PM (#16300598)

This article uses outdated numbers which make CATL look better (compared to Tesla) than it does.

They list Tesla Gigafactory as making ~30 GWh and that (well, 35 GWh) was the initial plan.

Current projections are that Gigafactory, when completed in 2020, will make 150 GWh of batteries (https://insideevs.com/elon-musk-says-gigafactory-output-coul...).

CATL is estimated to be 50 GWh by 2020 so only 1/3 of estimated Gigafactory.

In fact, the current projections is that by 2020 Tesla will make 150 GWh, all of China ~100 GWh and the rest of the world ~50 GWh so Tesla will be making half of all world's batteries.

It's also not surprising. Article said that CATL is raising $2 billion. Gigafactory 1 will cost $5 billion (at least $1.6 billion financed by Panasonic).

That assumes no further investment from Tesla and it's almost certain that they'll start building one or two more gigafactories before 2020 (although it does take 6 years to fully build one). Musk was already talking publicly about european factory and this december there were rumors about china factory.

I collect those tidbits of data: https://www.notion.so/Tesla-watch-4bed70edb73b46c380e2762a0b...

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by richardknop on Saturday February 03, 2018 @11:51PM (#16301401)

Where will Musk get money to build another 2 Gigafactories? If one costs $5 billion, he would need a big round of new funding. Also Tesla as business is burning through cash at a quick pace so that will need more cash to sustain itself as well. Do you think Tesla will need to raise / borrow another 10-15 billion?

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by greglindahl on Sunday February 04, 2018 @02:49AM (#16301843)

TSLA's market cap is a lot bigger than $5 billion, and they have a history of being able to raise money.

If you want to bet against that, by all means, short the stock.

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by richardknop on Sunday February 04, 2018 @04:45AM (#16302088)

Now that interest rates are rising it might be more difficult to raise billions of dollars, especially after history of consistently underdelivering and over promising that Tesla has. That their losses have been growing and no signs of being profitable is also a problem.

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by adamqureshi on Saturday February 03, 2018 @09:04PM (#16300860)

Do you have info on the battery range increase? For example a tesla 2017 model X 100D has a claimed range of 330 miles. How many years would it take the battery range to double, to say 600 or 1,800 per charge?

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by kjksf on Saturday February 03, 2018 @09:23PM (#16300923)

There are 2 aspects to this.

First is: battery density per unit of weight of battery.

According to chart in https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread.php?166243-Energy-De..., battery density between 2008 and 2013/14 (i.e. in 5/6 years) more than doubled.

Price per kWH dropped 5x in the same period.

What that means is that for the same weight, we could put 2x more battery in the car and it would cost 2.5x less (5 / 2). That would double the range, all else being equal.

But mileage doesn't depend only on how big the battery is.

The smaller / lighter the car, the more mileage it gets from the same energy. That means Tesla 3 would get a better mileage than Tesla S or X if it used the same battery because Tesla 3 is a smaller car.

There's also aerodynamic efficiency of the car and how you drive it (e.g. accelerating quickly uses up more energy than accelerating slowly).

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by mchahn on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:31AM (#16301655)

> accelerating quickly uses up more energy than accelerating slowly

Can you explain this to me? I know gas engines have this attribute but I assumed electric motors didn't.

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Re:The Breakneck Rise of China’s Colossus of Electric-Car Ba... by andlier on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:59AM (#16301722)

Resistive power losses in the battery pack, drive inverter, motor, and associated wiring are proportional to the square of the current. Doubling the motor current doubles the torque but quadruples the losses.

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