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Old 09-26-2020, 04:12 PM   #352
Street Pharmacist
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I'm not confident in Musk's ambitions, but to say Tesla doesn't do anything any other company does is missing some perspective. Electrification is coming. Not just transport, but everywhere. Distributed energy is also coming. Tesla is designing it's future to be the leading electricity storage manufacturer with an edge that quite frankly will not be able to be matched very easily **based on the advancements they just spoke of**.


Depending on your view of for the future will play out, that could be a massive leap in tech that will give them advantages in automotive, distributed energy, and energy storage. That could make a company worth much more than 7x Daimler because it ain't cars you're counting. By building and owning upstream mining/production for batteries and making giant leaps in processing raw ingredient you significant cut costs to where others simply can't compete. By their numbers, they will have less than half the cost to produce the batteries that others will have. When batteries are by a long shot the most expensive part of a vehicle, that's a huge advantage.

Having said all that, I watched a conversation by Benchmark Minerals about the Tesla presentation. Benchmark is probably THE leading consulting group on everything battery from mineral mining to battery production (one panelist is actually previous battery head for Tesla) and they poured cold water on the timelines. They generally agreed that many of the advancements seem reasonable, but some will never happen and the timelines are impossible. You can't claim you found some clay in Arizona and poof you're going to turn that in to raw ingredient for manufacture. You can't simply tell nickel producers to produce more and poof it's there. There's still going to be resource bottlenecks and constraints. I think Tesla continues to have an edge in battery production and technology, but not too the extent they announced. A 56% decrease in costs per kwh would make electric cars cheaper to produce than most ICE vehicles excluding large commercial vehicles. Tesla is also now profitable and likely will be for good. The people calling for their downfall were wrong
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