Elon Musk Talks Future Batteries and Compact Hatchback at European Battery Conference

Elon Musk spoke about EV range and the cost of batteries at a European Battery Conference. Here is the key points from the Electrified copy of the interview with Elon Musk.

1:00 Elon Musk talks about achieving vehicle ranges of 600 km, 700km and 1000 km. Those are 367 miles, 425 miles and 600 miles.
2:20 Elon Musk indicates that Tesla will eventually achieve a cost 50-55 cents per kilowatt hour at the cell level. Elon Musk likely meant to say 50-55 per kwh. $50/kwh is in line with the 56% cost reduction mentioned at the recent Tesla battery day and would half the 2025 cost target for GM.
Elon also says Tesla’s current batteries will last for 15 years.
8:50 Elon says the plan for battery cell production at Giga Berlin is 100 GWH/year and eventually 250 GWH/year.
14:00 Elon talks about the viability of the Tesla Semi. The first thing is to get vehicle without the trailer to the same power and mass of existing heavy duty trucks. Tesla has achieved this with the prototypes. Tesla thinks they will get the cargo capacity penalty down to 1 ton or less. Tesla is then working on getting the range for the heavy duty trucks. They are confident about the 800 kilometer range and see a path to 1000 kilometer range.
18:00 Tesla is working on original vehicle designs for Shanghai and Berlin. They are looking at a smaller hatchback EV in Berlin.

Warren Redlich has some comments on the video.

SOURCES – Electrified, Warren Redlich
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

25 thoughts on “Elon Musk Talks Future Batteries and Compact Hatchback at European Battery Conference”

  1. My guess is it's still based on an opportunistic business model where you have to be able to pick up whoever you happen to run into. Plus, there's still a driver, some taxi drivers own their own taxis (not fleet owned), and the vast majority of cars is 4-6 passengers, so it may be easier to fit the factory lines for this.

    Now cut out the driver, switch to fleet ownership, and a mobile app hailing model, and it becomes much easier to fit the car sizes to the group sizes. With a hailing model and a fleet, you can send a car that fits the group.

  2. But if a significant % of the population move to little self driving mini buses, then traffic congestion should be LESS, not more.
    So no more political support for congestion charges, which have only been introduced for the (relatively small) centres of a handful of megacities anyway.

  3. No, there are vehicles designed especially to be taxis.

    They, while often being better for ingress and egress, and with more suitable layouts, are still aimed at 4 to 6 passengers. I guess because the weight savings of being a smaller vehicle do not make up for the times you can't take a group of people who are traveling together.

  4. There have been numerous proposals for smaller vehicles designed for 1-2 people. Current taxies are large because they're not designed to be taxis. They're designed as family vehicles, since that's the primary market for the manufacturers. Also, there are some safety concerns with smaller vehicles, and likely other considerations.

    But in a world dominated by AT traffic, purpose-designed smaller vehicles may become the norm. With most of the fleet being autonomous (and likely with V2V comms), and with some more focused engineering effort, the safety and other concerns could possibly be mitigated.

    Some larger taxis will remain, but I expect they will be a minority. Roughly, the vehicle size distribution should eventually match the riders group size distribution.

  5. I can't think of a better tool for a despotic government than having the whole population relying on automated transport. Imagine China for instance where not only could your movement be tracked, but if your social credit score was not high enough, your freedom of movement could be restricted. Or, you hop into an auto taxi and say "take me home" but the police decide to have you delivered in for interrogation instead.
    Not good.

  6. People who currently drive personal vehicles don't like to take the bus because it is
    A: Slow
    B: Inconvenient
    C: Full of people with from a lower social class, which engages a disgusts reflex

    A rideshare can be just as convenient (easy to summon) as a personal robotaxi, and nearly as fast. It will certainly be cheaper. But cheapness drives the lower class connection, and honestly, C is the bigger deal. Anyone who can afford it just doesn't want to sit next to someone they think is gross.

    If they design the rideshare vehicles to have separate doors and compartments for each row of seats, it might work. We would have to call it a Covid-inspired hygiene upgrade so we don't acknowledge the class tensions.

  7. You forgot to define "k" in your argument.

    From context: Adding B more kg of batteries requires B.k more kg of overhead, where k ~ 0.3.

    It's also worth noting that, in a road vehicle at least, sheer mass has both negative AND positive effects.

    Take a standard sedan, eg. Toyota Camry. Redesign it to be a BEV and now it goes from ~1500 kg to 2000 kg. That puts more weight on the suspension and tyres, with well known negative effects, but it also makes the whole thing feel more solid, quieter, lower frequency vibrations, and a lot of other factors that turn it into a more luxurious, more desirable vehicle.

  8. Now this makes sense. If the self driving vehicles are all little minibuses, and every vehicle is carrying several people, then we DO get much less vehicles on the road.

    Though dedicated lanes for high capacity vehicles are only a thing because high capacity vehicles are a small minority. If most vehicles are high capacity that would just be a normal lane.

    Leaving aside the issue of whether people will be happy to swap from their personal, leather lined, BMW playing their music and set to their climate control settings, and instead go to a minibus.

  9. Yes, for small vehicles, power beaming is out. "On a larger scale" was about batteries and grid in general, and *standard* longer wavelength beam. Now, you could easily have ocean tugs that had rectennae. Large tankers can nearly just put one on deck. The power can then come from anywhere, beamed. It can be stronger than the usu beam if size/power is still an issue, with perhaps added safety expense. On land, you would build another rectenna instead. Use the power to make H, for the trucks, from Space sunlight or wherever there is power to be had. Hope you don't mind the reference, for those who may be curious, power beaming ppg 12-13: http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/pdfz/documents/2009/70070criswell/ndx_criswell.pdf.html

  10. When you think about it, $55 per kilowatt hour is pretty inexpensive.  $55.00 ÷ 1,000 = $0.055 or 5.5¢ per watt-hour.  Given (say) 3.5 volt cells, then that's 300 mAh for 5.5 ¢, or just over 55 mAh per penny.  Today, on the open market, one can purchase (fake, provably lying) 9,900 mAh or REAL 3,500 mAh cells for maybe $2.00 a throw.  17.5 mAh per penny. 3× as high as Elon's prediction. 

    Ultimately, just having more kWh under the carriage delivers more mileage range. Nothing could be simpler than that.  

    There is SOME (but not all that much) overhead to the increased weight of a car for additional battery.  Higher energy absorbing shocks, greater amounts of metal in joints, more mass to frame.  And the 'multiplicative' factors, of course.  More 'overhead' requires even more 'overhead' to support it, and so on.  As long as the 'k' is less than 1, well, it converges.  MUCH less than 1 is best.  

    Kind of like airplanes.  More 'motor' means more 'mass of gas', which means larger tanks, and more mass to wings to support them.  And more mass to support the wings, and the forces hitting the plane. Turbulence. Safety. Margins.  Economics.  Materials strengths.  

    'k' is surprisingly high.  0.3 or so. Sometimes even more. 

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  11. POWER BEAMING … is almost out of the question. Sounds lovely tho':

    № 1, is beam disperson.  
    № 2, beam energy.
    № 3, pointing and obstacles.  

    DISPERSION = widening of the beam over distance from transmitter to receiver, depending on wavelength AND both transmitting and receiving antennæ size. 

    Key formula:

    | d⋅D = 1.22 λ

    Where 'd' is receiver dish diameter, 'D' is transmitter dish diameter, 'λ' is wavelength in meters and ' ' is distance (max) between the pair of dishes.  As an example:

    | d = 0.5 m
    | D = 2.5 m
    | = 100 m
    |
    | λ = dD/(1.22 )
    | λ = 1.25 ÷ 122
    | λ = 0.01 m or 1 centimeter… about 30 GHz.

    BEAM ENERGY is also key: when exactly will the beam be aimed at the truck? On the highway?  If so, either a ridiculously large number of transmitters required, or WAY smaller wavelengths; (then how to 'hit' 250 trucks simultaneously?)

    Moreover, a freight truck nominally uses well over 75 kW continuously.  Multiply that by 250 … and well, that's more of a weapon than a power source. 

    POINTING alluded to above. Miss a truck's receiver and you fry the driver. Or the car behind the truck. Or the load. 

    Anyway…
    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  12. For most people commuting is costly, dull and a time waster. Eventually, ATs should minimize these problems. Yes, some will still choose to own their own car on their own terms but it will cost much more than it does now because of the expensive tolls that will have to be applied to contain traffic congestion.

  13. Yeah or the rides are shared. Lot's of Uber rides were shared during the non-COVID times.
    Maybe that cuts the privacy for a lot of people, but maybe the cars can be optimized for privacy.

  14. If everyone is using a taxi/uber/self-driving-uber to go everywhere, that still doesn't reduce the number of vehicles needed by an order of magnitude. Because the majority of people want to go to work, and home, at the same time.

    You might get away with having half, or maybe 1/3 as many vehicles, but that would be the limit.

    Bob is picked up at 6:30, arrives at work at 7:15. Car drives back to the suburbs, picks up Carol at 7:45, drops her at work at 8:30, drives back to the suburbs by 9:00, picks up Aisha… she doesn't get to work until 9:30 and that's about the limit. Everyone else needs a different car or they'll be late.

    Now if everyone decided to continue working from home, THAT could slash required vehicle numbers. But that's a different thing.

  15. Some predict MaaS (Mobility-as-a Service) will replace most ICE cars. For this to happen, the World production of autonomous taxis (ATs) would only have to be 20 million per year. If each AT had a 50 kWh battery then 20 million ATs would have 1000 GWh of batteries. This indicates that if all road transport is battery powered then the World will only require about 3000 GWh of annual battery production.

    3000 GWh of annual battery production for World transport is a modest number considering how quickly new battery manufacturing plant is presently being established.

    Presently most cars are individually owned, but the future written about here envisages most cars being ATs in company fleets.

  16. H is very good match for semi, so race is on! On a larger scale, either H or power beaming dramatically lessen the need for batteries, and *transmission* (conduction) lines. Both are coming.

    . . .and what is going on with the cranes in the pic? Rockets and cranes are the trademarks of gravity prisons. The perfect prisoner is one who does not realize he is in a prison.

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