Tesla Just Changed Everything

Tesla's battery day, which has been hyped up for so long, just concluded, and they announced two new cars, as well as a bunch of battery innovations, and I gotta say, it did not disappoint. So first off, this presentation was happening in person, but they have to be socially distanced of course, so they were all sitting in cars, it was kind of a drive-in setup, and it was kind of fun. And we noticed there was the shareholder portion, it was just kind of quiet, maybe not even different than having it online, with no one there. But then as soon as Elon got up there, people realized they can honk their horns to celebrate whenever he announces something cool. And that happened throughout the whole event, and I imagine it was getting to the point where Elon was like, can I talk, please? These horns are loud. But first off, Tesla talked about their $25,000 car, and said that that will be coming within three years. It's really no shock that they talked about this, because they had just finished talking about how they were overall reducing battery production costs by about 50%, actually 56% to be specific. And they talked about how that has been their goal for so long, to make an affordable electric car, but it's just really hard to get there. And they're finally going to be able to get there. They said three years, I can imagine that's Elon time, so it will take a little bit longer than that. But that's very exciting to hear, because a $25,000 Tesla is really going to make sense for the vast majority of people. If it's actually coming in at that price point, and you're getting all the savings that come along with an electric car, that's going to be huge for Tesla. And Elon said that car itself will also be fully autonomous. Although my question there is, by that point, full self-driving might be like $10,000. So does that mean your car is $35,000? But even without full self-driving, if they can make a great electric car with a great range, probably around 300 miles for that price, that will be fantastic. And they gave us this little teaser image with just a sheet covering the car, which obviously we all wanted to see more. And maybe they have something that they're working on already, but they didn't want to show it quite yet. But the important part there is that that isn't just a pipe dream, that is realistic based on everything they announced earlier in the event about batteries that we'll get to in a second. But the second car they announced is the Model S Plaid. And this is the one I'm sure Elon was super excited to announce, even though he just kind of brushed over it pretty quickly. As we know, Lucid Motors announced their Lucid Air not too long ago, and it beat Tesla in every category when it comes to the specs. And then Tesla, of course, just went right ahead and beat them right back with this Model S Plaid, which is what a lot of people expected. And the crazy thing is, you can already purchase the Model S Plaid on Tesla's website, and they say it's going to be available in late 2021. So the Plaid Model S is basically the same design as the Model S, but it's going to have three motors, and it's going to get a range of 520 plus miles, which you know they couldn't wait to write 520 on that website after Lucid Motors announced 517 miles of range. And that also has a plus sign on it, and the top speed of this car is going to be 200 miles per hour, and the 0-60 is under 2 seconds, so it could come in at 1.9 seconds or so, which is what they've promised in the Roadster, and that's pretty insane. This would be the fastest 0-60 of any production vehicle ever, even including 2-door cars, and this is a 4-door sedan. And the quarter mile time is under 9 seconds as well. There are two different wheel options, and three different interior options, and it comes in at the hefty price of $139,990. So we can really see why it's not Tesla's top priority to release this Model S Plaid, because it's going to be amazing, and people are going to be super happy to get it, but it's going to be for very few people who can afford a $140,000 car. But back to that $25,000 Tesla, which we could call the Model 2 or the Model 1, Tesla is planning to do this by massively reducing the cost of battery production in every step of the process. And they made a comparison talking about how they make great electric cars, and they make the factories to build those cars, and in the future, they're going to make great batteries, and make the factories to build those batteries. Versus right now, they're partnered up with Panasonic doing the vast majority of their battery production over at Gigafactory Nevada. So at this event, Elon really emphasized how important this is going to be for climate change, because we really have to fix something, and Tesla knows that what they're doing now isn't enough. They have to grow by a ton, and push the whole industry forward in order to truly reduce emissions. And to do this, they started talking in terawatts instead of gigawatts. And terawatts are 1,000 times greater than gigawatts. They mentioned that they need 10 terawatt hours of battery per year to transition to all electric. And if they just copied their current factories, that would mean they would have to make 135 of their current Giga Nevada factories. So Tesla is planning to halve the cost per kilowatt hour using 5 different things. Cell design, cell factory, anode materials, cell vehicle integration, and cathode materials. For cell design, they talked about their current 2170 cells, which are their cells in the Model Y and the Model 3, and they talked about how they use a tab, which has been standard. And when they transitioned from the 18650 form factor to the 2170, it added about 50% of energy per cell. And looking into the future, they need much more than that. They need a much bigger cylindrical cell because that is going to cost less. But the challenge here is that supercharging and charging in general gets a lot harder the bigger the cell gets. It's not just like the bigger, the better. There are trade-offs. So Tesla has worked really hard to design their new cell, which is tabless. Making the cell tabless means that it's much easier to manufacture and electrons have much less distance to travel. So it's going to be 50 millimeters as opposed to 200 millimeters previously. And Elon talked about how this is a massive breakthrough and it dramatically decreases the cost of production and simplifies production, and it will greatly increase performance. Real quick, if you're enjoying this video, make sure to subscribe to this channel for a lot more videos like this and about the Model Y and hit that thumbs up. So the official announcement of their new cells is slightly different than was rumored, and they're called a 4680 cell. It has five times the energy, it gets around 16% more range, six times the power, and the dimensions are 80 millimeters by 46 millimeters. And all of those improvements are before any other step, just by the form factor and the design of these cells. And they're currently ramping up production at their pilot production line at their factory over in Fremont. But Elon was very clear that they still have a ways to go before this can fully get ramped up. They have a clear plan and they know they can achieve it, but it's just going to take a lot of hard work. But he did seem to talk about that more than once, just maybe to make sure that people know this is a process, it's not coming out immediately. So the next cost reduction they talked about was in the factory itself, making the cells, and they took a lot of inspiration from bottling factories. In the future, Tesla is going to be working with this dry electrode technology that takes out an entire wet electrode step of the process. Now it's going to turn powder straight into film and it's going to eliminate that wet solvent process, as I mentioned. And again, they were very clear to mention that they still have a lot of work to do to scale this. On Tesla's assembly line, they talked about improvements there as well, designing the machines themselves that give them a seven times greater output of cells. And then they're greatly improving the formation process as well, which is when it's actually charged for the first time and tested, and this should result in a 10 times reduction in footprint. So based on all of those factory improvements, they now say that they can achieve a terawatt hour in less space than it takes them to make 150 gigawatt hours. And then they talked about their long-term plan. They're planning to achieve 100 gigawatt hours of internal production, which means production only of Tesla, making the cells completely themselves by 2022. And then they said by 2030, they're going to be reaching three terawatts of production capacity. And Elon said it will be even better than that, maybe even sooner than that. But he was quick to mention they're still going to be working with their partners and suppliers to make battery cells. This is just in addition to that, because to really achieve full electrifications of vehicles, this is what they have to do for batteries. Otherwise, we'd reach a point where there's demand for the cars and not enough batteries to make the car. So they talked a lot about specifics. And if you're really into the super specifics, you should definitely go watch the full livestream. But they talked about anode production and using their own Tesla silicon and how this is going to reduce an entire part of that production process, reducing the cost of the anode specifically to $1.20 per kilowatt. And that improvement alone would result in a 20% increase in range. And then their cathode developments are ultimately going to eliminate cobalt and be much more efficient. And those cathode developments will result in a 15% cost reduction per kilowatt hour. Now, here's the most exciting part to me. It's when they talked about cell vehicle integration. They said this will be an overall 7% reduction in cost, but just the whole idea of it is really cool. And Elon said it's absolutely the future of all electric vehicles. They've already been working on a single piece rear and front casting assembly for the Model Y. And they have that machine to make those single piece castings at their Fremont factory. And apparently that's going to result in a 40% reduction in cost for that specific part of production. But currently there's the structure of the car and then there's the batteries inside there. Well, in the future, they're going to make that so the batteries do both. The battery pack itself will be part of the structure of the car and that'll allow them to pack it more densely and it will dramatically reduce cost. So all of those things together contribute to this overall reduction in cost that Tesla is promising of 56% when considering dollars per kilowatt hour. So long term for Tesla, this means greatly increased scale and sustainability for the future. Everything is going to be speeding up for Tesla and they were quick to mention that this is what has to be done in order to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy, which is their mission. And they mentioned that multiple times throughout this event. And speaking of scaling, they said their goal is to produce 20 million cars per year, which just a few months ago they made their 1 millionth car. So picturing that times 20 every single year, that's where Tesla is planning to go. And then, of course, Elon finished the event talking about the $25,000 Tesla, the Model S Plaid. And then they did a Q&A. Overall, a very exciting event. And I imagine that the vast majority of the people were a little in over their heads watching this thing because they got really specific at times. But overall, they did a great job of illustrating how they're taking out certain parts of the production process to reduce cost and how every little piece adds up. It's not like we just got to make this battery cell better. It's like, no, we got to make the way that we make the battery cell better. And that reduces cost as well. And regarding that $25,000 Tesla, three years, I'm not as hopeful for, but I definitely think it's coming. I'm pretty much 100% confident that they will reach that goal. But what did you think about Battery Day? Do you think they delivered and all the hype was worth it? Or do you think it was kind of a letdown because the technology isn't actually in a car yet? If anything, it's coming to the Plaid Model S in late 2021, as well as the Cybertruck in late 2021. So that's still a little ways off, but it is pretty crazy to see how long term Tesla is thinking. I mean, they're seeing now that they need to be scaling up to reach goals in 2030. And so they're working on every part of the process, which is pretty incredible. They're actually working on the cells themselves, cells themselves, cells themselves. I had trouble with that last video. It's cells themselves. It's hard. And they're figuring out how to best implement those in the car. So best case scenario in a few years, we'll see an incredible Tesla with more range. It's going to be smaller. It's going to be able to be lighter. It's going to be able to be cheaper. It's going to be awesome. But so much has to change and Tesla has to build so much to actually make this possible. It's really exciting to hear about these innovations. But again, most of this hasn't actually been produced yet. They do have that pilot production line at Fremont, and they have all the plans going forward on what they're going to do. But even Elon was quick to tell us that, you know, this isn't quite ready yet. It's not 100% proven. We're not totally ready to scale yet. I'm super excited about it though, and I really hope that $25,000 Tesla does come to be. So battery day finally happened, and I don't think it disappointed. I guess maybe it would have been nice to see the actual $25,000 car render or drive out on stage, but we can't win them all. In the meantime, make sure to subscribe to this channel for lots more videos like this and about the Model Y. Make sure to like this video if you appreciated it. You can also follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Ryan Shaw Tech. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.