Lithium-ion battery

Tesla Motors released more information about the Roadster battery upgrade in an email sent to owners today. The new battery pack will have 40% more energy than the previous version, but it will be heavier therefore allowing a 35% increase in range. The pack will be hand-built at low volume and Tesla doesn’t aim at making a profit on the upgrade, which will cost $29,000 including labor.

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The all-new 2016 Chevrolet Volt electric car with extended range, showcasing a sleeker, sportier design that offers 50 miles of EV range, greater efficiency and stronger acceleration.

The results are in: the new 2016 Chevy Volt will get 53 miles of electric range on a charge of its new 18.4-kWh lithium-ion battery according to EPA numbers. That’s close to 40% more than the previous Volt’s 38 miles and a big psychological jump for buyers.

The typical American commute is around 48 minutes so adding those extra miles gets a lot more people home without using gas. Chevrolet expects many next-generation Volt owners will use power solely from their batteries for more than 90 percent of trips. Today, Volt owners use battery power on 80 percent of their trips.

The biggest turn off for me in the old Volt was the back seat which was split in half by the battery bar. The 2016 lowers the batteries so that a car seat or a passenger can straddle the bar which is worlds better for families.

That, and when you went to gas – like for long trips – you’d only get around 35 miles/gallon with the range extender. The next-generation Volt’s new 1.5L range-extender, designed to use regular unleaded fuel, offers a combined EPA-estimated fuel efficiency of 42 MPG. That’s very respectable but not yet on the same level as a Prius which typically sees 50+ mpg.

I think the new Volt is hitting new spec points that will make sense for a lot more buyers. It doesn’t have any range anxiety problems and it is getting pretty close to the range of the Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 (which also has a very small REX engine). Also, the faster acceleration, better back seat and sportier looks will draw new buyers along with the proliferation of EV charging points around the country.

The new EPA sticker is below:
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SolarEdge, an Israel based inverter manufacturer, released a very interesting video of a 24 hour time-lapse of the energy management system of a house connected to the grid, a solar panels installation and a battery pack. 
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There has been a lot of uninformed banker-speak in the media about Tesla’s battery including by Bloomberg here. The problem is these folks don’t understand the new market that Tesla is opening up.

But I’m also turning to Bloomberg for the first smart analysis and that’s not surprisingly from Solar City’s Lyndon Rive (who happens to be Elon Musk’s Cousin – perhaps you noticed the accent?).

The complaints have been that the battery wall doesn’t make economic sense – that for the average household to go off the grid with these combined with solar (or wind), it would be incredibly expensive.

That’s correct…
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11:24 PM
power wall is “beautiful, fits on the wall, garage wall or outside wall of your house. 6 inches thick. 3 feet across and tall. Really easy to fit in garage or your house.”

[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: Connected to Internet.
Smart micro grids
Ten year guarantee
[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: “Nothing remotely in these price points”
“Our goal here is to fundamentally change how the world uses energy”
[11:26 PM] Seth Weintraub: Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3500 for 10kWh and $3000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.

[11:27 PM] Mark Gurman: Musk says great for cold climates when there are power outages and ice storms
Good thermal management system for very cold environments

[11:29 PM] Jon Jivan: Wayyy below suggested price of $13k by some outlets. Nice to see it come in so cheap.
[11:29 PM] Mark Gurman: “Going to be huge in Germany”

[11:31 PM] Mark Gurman: Doesn’t require heavy foundations
“the integration at the system level is the big differentiator”
Ready to scale to a very large scale today

[11:32 PM] Mark Gurman: they’ve been using it for a year in house

[11:33 PM] Mark Gurman: Tesla will continue to open source the patents on all these
[11:34 PM] Mark Gurman: Giga factory designed in the same as a giant car
Fundamentally different way than approaching manufacturing and engineering

[11:39 PM] Mark Gurman: Installable by two people in half hour to an hour
Installation prices up to distributors

[11:42 PM] Mark Gurman: “This would be bigger in terms of pack utilization than the car industry, actually comparable size”
[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: international, still need to figure out certified installers however

[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: it’ll scale as fast as we can scale it.

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: international next year
Germany and Australia late this year

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: China early next year

Musk said “we own tesla energy.com” when asked if they’d change from tesla motors as name

Update: Here’s our first look. Looks familiar

https://twitter.com/TomerDavid_/status/593964617161805824

https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593967615887872000

Update: Tesla Energy!

Tesla Energy Press Kit

We’ll be covering the Tesla Battery announcement later tonight but Tesla just unleashed the livestream page. Check back soon. We’ll run down the highlights here. We’re expecting Tesla to announce home and industrial battery products that allow users to store solar and lower cost, high availability electricity for use at night or during higher cost/watt time periods.  The battery will be a down payment and rental fee which should more than pay for itself in electric bill savings.

There has been further speculation that, with this announcement, Tesla Motors will change its name to Tesla, Inc or Telsa Energy to note that it is an energy storage company, not just a car company.  We’ll find out more soon, stay tuned.

Tesla just announced details of the Battery Gigafactory to be located in the Southwest US. The location hasn’t yet been selected but will provide 6500 US jobs and, in 2020, enough batteries for 500,000 electric vehicles.

Tesla also announced a $1.6B convertible notes offering to fund the Gigafactory and other ramping.

As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible. In cooperation with strategic battery manufacturing partners, we’re planning to build a large scale factory that will allow us to achieve economies of scale and minimize costs through innovative manufacturing, reduction of logistics waste, optimization of co-located processes and reduced overhead.

The Gigafactory is designed to reduce cell costs much faster than the status quo and, by 2020, produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent. Here are some details about what the Gigafactory will look like.

Learn more about the Tesla Gigafactory

TESLA ANNOUNCES $1.6 BILLION CONVERTIBLE NOTES OFFERING http://t.co/rHkp9L1rWe

— Electrek.co (@ElectrekCo) February 26, 2014

Press release follows:
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You’ll recall that I picked Panasonic and Solar City to be among partners in Tesla’s upcoming Gigafactory announcement back in mid-January. I went on Bloomberg earlier this month to re-iterate those claims. Today, Panasonic got a little bit more official.

Reuters picks up a Nikkei report:

Panasonic Corp is inviting a number of Japanese materials suppliers to join it in investing in a U.S. car battery plant that it plans to build with Tesla Motors Inc, with investment expected to reach more than 100 billion yen ($979 million), the Nikkei reported.

The plant, expected to go on-stream in 2017, will bolster Panasonic’s supply of lithium-ion batteries to the U.S. electric-car maker.

Last week, Tesla shed some light on its plans for building a lithium-ion battery plant, or “giga factory,” that will cut battery costs and allow the company to launch a more affordable electric car in 2017. However, it said at the time that further details would be announced this week.

The U.S. plant, which will handle everything from processing raw materials to assembly, will produce small, lightweight batteries for Tesla and may also supply Toyota Motor Corp and other automakers, the Nikkei said.

Battery costs have been a major stumbling block to widespread electric car adoption in the United States, according to analysts. Tesla’s giga factory will lower costs by shifting material, cell, module and pack production to one spot.

In Tesla’s earnings conference call last week, Chief Executive Elon Musk said the electric car maker expects to build the factory with more than one partner, but a “default assumption” was that Panasonic, as a current battery cell partner, “would continue to partner with us in the giga factory.”

“The factory is really there to support the volume of the third generation car,” Musk said on the call. “We want to have the vehicle engineering and tooling come to fruition the same time as the giga factory. It is already part of one strategy, one combined effort.”

The pieces are starting to come together. The biggest question now is how Tesla funds the other $4B in costs. Will it issue more stock? Will it bring in some very rich partners like Apple? On that note we go to last week’s earnings call for more color on that:
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG2-LNbNnYQ] We’re big fans of the looks of the Porsche Panamera S Hybrid (especially the interior) but were saddened to learn that the onboard battery/motor drivetrain was only good for 20 miles via the sub-100HP engine and 9.4-kWh lithium-ion battery.  That’s a lot closer to the Plug-in Prius than anything else Porsche has made.

That’s why it is amusing  to learn that the original car that Ferdinand Porsche built in 1898, which was discovered this week, actually boasts better electric car range than the current Panamera S hybrid. The specs of the Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle show it has 120 amp hour battery good for around 49 miles of range with a top speed of over 20 mph. Not too shabby. That’s also further than a Chevy Volt.

Jeremy Clarkson famously gave the Tesla Roadster some undeserved bad publicity a few years ago. Tesla then sued Top Gear/BBC for libel and eventually dropped the suit. There is no love lost between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson however as evidenced by his comments earlier this week (above).

With that in mind, commercials are showing that Top Gear USA will be reviewing the Tesla Model S this week. Will it get a fair shake?
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[ooyala code=”1iNnFiZzpGDO8aDQVaNNNplR-qHESdwf” player_id=”null”]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk stopped by the Bloomberg office to discuss TSLA stock valuation and other fun stuff this week. Of course the question of the recent Fire, which the NHTSB recently ruled was not a defect nor compliance issue, came up and Musk reiterated his stance. 
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-xsEjq7pk&start=1380]

As the world loses its mind over the Tesla that caught on fire, it is important to note a few things. Above, from a conversation in July with owners and stockholders Musk indicates some of the pretty incredible considerations that went into building the Model S.

Last month, when announcing the best NHTSA ratings ever, Tesla expanded on Musk’s statement above –that statistically there was likely to be a battery fire.

The Model S lithium-ion battery did not catch fire at any time before, during or after the NHTSA testing. It is worth mentioning that no production Tesla lithium-ion battery has ever caught fire in the Model S or Roadster, despite several high speed impacts. While this is statistically unlikely to remain the case long term, Tesla is unaware of any Model S or Roadster occupant fatalities in any car ever.

The Seattle driver was fine so, as of as of this writing, no one has yet had a permanent injury or death from a Tesla Model S accident.