We may be witnessing the most important moment in automotive history since Henry Ford developed the Model T production line over a century ago.
There is growing evidence that this week’s Tesla Investor Day event will usher in a new era in the automotive industry. Among them, electric vehicles are not only much cheaper to operate and maintain than gasoline and diesel vehicles, but also cheaper to manufacture.
Following Tesla Autonomy Day 2019, Battery Day 2020, AI Day I 2021 and AI Day II 2022, Investor Day is the latest in a series of live events detailing the Tesla technologies that La is developing and what they bring to future plans. future.
As Elon Musk confirmed in a tweet two weeks ago, the Investor Day will be dedicated to production and expansion. The latest part of Tesla’s mission to accelerate the transition to electrified vehicles.
There are currently over 1 billion petrol and diesel vehicles in the world. It’s a billion tailpipes releasing toxic pollutants into the air we breathe every day.
A billion exhaust pipes emit carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, which accounts for more than 20 percent of global annual emissions.
If humanity wants to keep cancer causing toxic air pollution out of our cities, if we want to minimize the climate crisis and create a habitable planet, we need to get billions of gas and diesel exhaust fumes off our roads. Get rid of them as soon as possible. .
The most logical first step towards this goal is to stop selling new toxic fart boxes, which will only exacerbate the problem.
In 2022, about 80 million new cars will be sold worldwide. About 10 million of them are all-electric vehicles, which means that in 2022 there will be another 70 million (about 87%) new polluting gasoline and diesel vehicles on the planet.
The average lifespan of these stinky fossil-burning cars is over 10 years, which means that all petrol and diesel cars sold in 2022 will still be polluting our cities and our lungs in 2032.
The sooner we stop selling new gasoline and diesel cars, the sooner our cities will have clean air.
Three key goals in accelerating the phase out of these polluting pumps are:
Investor Day will show how the world’s largest electric vehicle maker plans to achieve the third goal.
Elon Musk wrote in a recent tweet: “Master Plan 3, The Path to a Fully Sustainable Energy Future of the Earth will be unveiled on March 1st. The future is bright!
It’s been 17 years since Musk unveiled Tesla’s original “master plan,” in which he laid out the company’s overall strategy to start with high-value, low-volume cars and move to low-cost, high-volume cars.
So far, Tesla has executed this plan flawlessly, moving from expensive and low-volume sports cars and luxury cars (Roaster, Model S and X) to low-cost and high-volume Model 3 and Y models.
The next phase will be based on Tesla’s third-generation platform, which many reviewers believe will meet Tesla’s stated goal for a $25,000 model.
In a recent investor preview, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas noted that Tesla’s current COGS (cost of sales) is $39,000 per vehicle. This is based on the second generation Tesla platform.
Investor Day will see how Tesla’s significant manufacturing progress will push COGS for Tesla’s third-generation platform to the $25,000 mark.
One of Tesla’s guiding principles when it comes to manufacturing is, “The best parts are no parts.” The language, often referred to as “deleting” a part or process, suggests that Tesla sees itself as a software company, not a manufacturer.
This philosophy permeates everything Tesla does, from its minimalist design to offering just a handful of different models. Unlike many traditional automakers that offer hundreds of models, each one offers an incredible selection.
Marketing teams need to change their style to create “differentiation” and USPs (Unique Selling Points), they need to convince customers that while their gasoline burning product is a relic of the 19th century, it is considered the last, greatest or “limited edition”.
While the traditional automotive marketing departments demanded more and more “features” and “options” to market their 19th century technology, the resulting complexity created a nightmare for the manufacturing departments.
Factories became slow and bloated as they constantly needed to retool an endless stream of new models and styles.
While traditional car companies are getting more complex, Tesla is doing the opposite, cutting down on parts and processes and streamlining everything. Spend time and money on product and production, not marketing.
That’s probably why Tesla’s profit per car last year was over $9,500, eight times Toyota’s gross profit per car, which was just under $1,300.
This mundane task of eliminating redundancy and complexity in products and production leads to two production breakthroughs that will be demonstrated at the investor’s bottom. Single casting and battery structure 4680.
Most of the robot armies you see in car factories are welding hundreds of pieces together to create what is known as a “white body” which is the bare frame of a car before painting along with the engine, transmission, axles. , Suspension, wheels, doors, seats and everything else is connected.
Making a white body requires a lot of time, space and money. Over the past few years, Tesla has revolutionized this process by developing monolithic castings using the world’s largest high pressure injection molding machine.
The casting was so large that Tesla’s material engineers had to develop a new aluminum alloy that allowed the molten aluminum to flow into all the difficult areas of the mold before it solidified. A truly revolutionary breakthrough in engineering.
You can see Giga Press in action on Tesla’s Giga Berlin Fly in the video. At 1:05, you can see the robot extracting the one-piece rear casting of the Model Y bottom from the Giga Press.
Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley said Tesla’s giant casting resulted in three key areas of improvement.
Morgan Stanley said Tesla’s Berlin plant can currently produce 90 cars an hour, with each car taking 10 hours to produce. That’s three times the 30 hours it takes to produce a car at Volkswagen’s Zwickau plant.
With a narrow product range, Tesla Giga Presses can spray full body castings all day long, every day, without the need to retool for different models. That means significant cost savings compared to its traditional automotive competitors, which insist on the complexity of welding hundreds of parts over the course of hours to make parts that Tesla can produce in seconds.
As Tesla scales up its monocoque molding throughout production, the cost of the vehicle will drop significantly.
Morgan Stanley said the solid castings are a push for cheaper electric vehicles, which, combined with cost savings from Tesla’s 4680 structural battery pack, will lead to a dramatic change in the cost of producing electric vehicles.
There are two main reasons why the new 4680 battery pack can provide additional significant cost savings. The first is the production of the cells themselves. The Tesla 4680 battery is manufactured using a new canning-based continuous manufacturing process.
The second cost savings comes from how the battery pack is assembled and connected to the main body.
In previous models, the batteries were installed inside the structure. The new battery pack is actually part of the design.
The car seats are bolted directly to the battery and then lifted up to allow access from below. Another new manufacturing process unique to Tesla.
At Tesla Battery Day 2020, the development of a new 4680 battery production and structural block design was announced. Tesla said at the time that the new design and manufacturing process would reduce battery cost per kWh by 56% and investment cost per kWh by 69%. GWh.
In a recent article, Adam Jonas noted that Tesla’s $3.6 billion and 100 GWh Nevada expansion shows it is already on track to achieve the cost savings it predicted two years ago.
Investor Day will tie all these production developments together and may include details of a new cheaper model.
In the future, the costs of buying, operating and maintaining electric vehicles will be significantly reduced, and the era of internal combustion engines will finally come to an end. An era that should have ended decades ago.
We should all be excited about the really deep future of cheap mass-produced electric vehicles.
People started burning coal in large quantities during the first industrial revolution in the 18th century. With the advent of automobiles in the 20th century, we began to burn a lot of gasoline and diesel fuel, and since then the air in our cities has been polluted.
Today no one lives in cities with clean air. None of us knew what it was like.
A fish that has spent its life in a polluted pond is sick and unhappy, but simply believes that this is life. Catching a fish from a polluted pond and placing it in a clean fish pond is an incredible feeling. He never thought he would feel so good.
Sometime in the not too distant future, the last gasoline car will stop for the last time.
Daniel Bleakley is a researcher and cleantech advocate with a background in engineering and business. He has strong interests in electric vehicles, renewable energy, manufacturing, and public policy.