Meanwhile, after sending production overseas for a few months, the Model 3 is back on the top 10 sales list for passenger cars in the US. Haven't there been several articles recently on the lack of Model 3 demand? lol!
The Building Tesla web site has a great set of GF3 pics, right now. By swiping the bar left and right, you can see progress between Saturday and Thursday. It's pretty amazing. Yesterday's pic makes the building look almost complete. Don't be fooled by the aerial shot. The high sections are skeletons with roof panels perhaps 15% complete. The small building looks to be either weather tight or nearly so. Nobody seems to be paying attention to that building. https://www.buildingtesla.com/compare/Gigafactory 3/
Yep, Phillip Morris, RJ Reynolds and the rest, may be dead here but their doing a good business in China. I recently mentored a young Chinese engineer who smoked Marlboros and explained to me it doesn't have the taboo status over there, not even close.
Apparently, it's over for Tesla. Lol! https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/tes...rs-now-face-tesla-reality-market-watcher.html
The Maxwell acquisition does not seem to be going well. I'm starting to question if it will close. The current deadline is Wednesday.
The solar roof ramp continues to be abysmal. I was hoping they would produce panels for more conventional solar installations, as that would be a popular product, but it doesn't sound like this is the case. When I value Tesla, I do not include the solar roof product or solar panels; both are dead in the water, as far as I can tell.
On the contrary, they write that they will try to confirm the lower limit of the range, to prevent the breakdown down.And on the chart Tesla stopped the movement down, and seemed to freeze.
This morning, Tesla announced completion of the Maxwell acquisition. From here on out, I'm confident a large number of monkeys will announce a large number of Tesla killers but the game is over. Tesla has won. The rest of the players just don't know it, yet. There is no valid reason for anyone to attempt competing with Tesla in the heavy haul space. Competition with cars is still a factor but only on the low end. I expect Tesla's power pack to bump from 200KWh to 500KWh. Welcome to the next generation. It's time for the media to set the lie machine on kill because they are going to need every ounce of untruthful deception they can muster.
On the 5-year weekly chart, the volume profile essentially shears off somewhere around 193. Below that one eyeballs some psychological pivot points around 181, but beyond that it's difficult to see any reason for this thing to self-arrest it's slide down the ice-fall.
I've read some conflicting opinions on what Maxwell means to Tesla. I've read two orders of magnitude production speed increase of anodes. I've read 4x increase in capacity *or* 4x increase in longevity. This morning, I read an article on CleanTechnica citing 10~15% reduction in cell production cost. The same article also cited 20% improvement in energy density. These numbers worlds away from earlier notions of potential improvements but are still profound. If I understand the technology, future energy storage density benefits will come from multi-ion technology. As far as I know, multi-ion is still in the lab.
This graphic does a nice job of illustrating what Tesla longs hear when people who have never driven an electric car analyse Tesla. I understand Tesla is doing a ton of stuff and it seems impossible for them to do a good job at all of it. Perhaps that's why I find it reassuring their solar business has tanked. Still, the EV market is Tesla's to loose. Every time I hear a new Tesla killer hyped, I chuckle. People are still hyping the Ford/Rivian partnership. How many cars has Rivian sold, again? Rivian could be amazing. The point is, we don't know that at this time. All we know is they came up with an interesting couple of prototypes. Where Ford/Rivian will come up with cells to power their energy hungry vehicles at scale is beyond me. Perhaps I'm the only one who concerns myself with trivialities like.... reality.
I don't know about the other stuff on TSLA but I'm fairly certain Elon bought out FSLR because 1. They're his cousins 2. Huge tax write off It's probably why I don't really trust the guy either, he's a shrewd businessman imo but I do find it extremely ironic that Elon is much more similar to Edison than Tesla.
Back in early March, I was pretty sure Audi was lieing about their charge rates. You cannot charge a Li-ion pack at 5C without pretty substantial negative consequence. At that time, I knew there were only three options: 1) They were lieing 2) They were going to trash their battery packs 3) They developed new battery technology I also posted they were going to have extreme difficulty getting their packs to last 100K miles. The math I used at the time was: 5C charge rate will cause a *good* cell to have cycle life of around 300 cycles. That is to 50% capacity. At 300 miles per cycle, that is 90K miles. Yesterday, someone at CleanTechnica posted an article about this. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/1...charges-over-2-times-faster-than-audi-e-tron/ From Tesloop data, we know Tesla packs last 300~500K miles and still carry 80% capacity. For those unfamiliar, Tesloop supercharges their Teslas for every charge (which is a worst case usage profile for a battery). Meanwhile, Elon has indicated Tesla is working on a 1M mile pack. That would be difficult to believe, were it not for Tesla's work on efficiency and the dry anode technology they just bought from Maxwell. It's plausible. While the world is waiting for other manufacturers to catch up, Tesla is padding their lead. I'm also looking forward to VW's car that will be as good as Tesla at half the price. lol! Over the next two years, it's going to become clear, even to a lot of people who have strong opinions based on no knowledge whatsoever, that Tesla has no peers in the EV market. These folks simply aren't smart enough to realize it, yet.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the roof on GF3 is 95% done. I count 5 more roof panels remaining to be attached to the tall section. It appears this will be done within 24 hours. The walls are 85% done but apertures are not yet filled with doors and windows. It appears this work has not started. They have started coating the roof with a white membrane. This is early stages of work, perhaps 5% done. This is the first I've seen this process so we will need a couple more data points before we can predict completion of this phase. If it's a torch down membrane, I expect it will be complete before June. We will see.
Someone in a private Tesla group just posted some images from Shanghai. A small amount more white membrane has been applied to the roof. Of far more significance, a caravan of heavy haul trucks streamed into GF3 with huge loads, covered in giant blue tarps. I suspect it's module and pack production equipment. They will also need to set up a seat shop (Tesla is the only domestic maker that produces their own seats). I understand setting up a factory is an epic undertaking. It may be optimistic to think Tesla can get one general assembly line operating in four months but I expect they can. They certainly got GA3 operating in far less time, although GA3 is only the final link in the manufacturing chain. If production can begin in earnest in September, that will be an additional 2000 cars per week for 4Q19. The next question is: when will they will break ground on GF4. Will they wait until GF3 can carry itself or will they spend some of the 2.7B they just raised to get an early start on GF4?
