HUGE Announcements at Tesla Battery Day! (Highlights)

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Hey guys! Welcome back to the channel. In this video, I'm going to be doing a full breakdown of Tesla's Battery Day. So, I literally just finished watching the presentation. It was a good couple of hours.

What I'm going to try and do in this video is condense all that information into a succinct 10 or so minute video so that you guys don't have to sit through the whole presentation. But if you do want to, I'll leave that link down in the description because it was a very informative presentation.

So, let's get started! Let's get stuck straight into it. The first thing that Tesla's Battery Day was all about—really, this is the overarching theme—was it was all about efficiency. Efficiency—essentially talking a lot about cost savings, how they're going to start making their own batteries, and how they're going to do that as cheaply as they possibly can, and how this leads to more production of their vehicles, vehicles with longer range, cheaper cost, etc.

Their overarching goal that they flashed up on the screen was essentially more affordable EVs plus more affordable energy storage while building factories faster, with less investment. The first thing they focused on is that they need to start building battery production into the terawatt-hour scale. They showed that for the whole world to start transitioning the transportation fleet over to electric vehicles, they need about 10 terawatt-hour production of batteries per year.

Then, if you also take into account the grid requirements for transitioning over to sustainable energy, they need another 10 terawatt hours per year of production. So, for Tesla, they've got to try and figure out how do they best contribute to that massive change, that massive amount of battery production that the world is going to need to achieve those goals.

Interestingly, Elon showed a bit of a comparison: like, what even is 20 terawatt hours of battery production? Well, it equates to about 135 Nevada Gigafactories. So that's obviously a big task. And one thing they highlighted is that the cost per kilowatt-hour—that curve that's been slowly coming down, making batteries cheaper over time—is simply not trending down quickly enough.

So Tesla's overarching goal that was carried through the rest of the presentation was to try and reduce the cost per kilowatt-hour of battery production by over 50 percent. How are they going to achieve that goal? Well, in Tesla's eyes, it is a five-pronged approach.

The five different areas that they talked about in depth in this presentation were: cell design, the cell factory, then anode and cathode materials, and then cell vehicle integration.

In terms of cell design, Tesla came out and announced that they're working on building their own new battery cell—the 4680 cell—which is a bigger, chunkier battery and it's got a completely new cell architecture within it as well. They were discussing how they've created a tabless battery cell, which actually helps with a lot of the thermal problems behind charging the batteries, and which is going to lead to drastically improved supercharging times.

The new cell, as well, should deliver 16% more range. It's got six times the power and, most importantly, a 14% reduction in cost per kilowatt-hour of production. So just from changing the form factor alone, they are able to achieve a 14% cost reduction in producing the battery cell, which is pretty impressive.

Moving on to the next category where they aim to improve efficiencies: that is in the actual cell factory itself. The theme of this section was to essentially make the factory, the manufacturing process, the assembly line process as fast and efficient as possible. They made the analogy that they want their battery production lines to be like the highways—they want to be going at breakneck speed.

To do this, they looked at all the parts of the assembly line process. They looked at electrode coating, winding, assembly, and formation. A lot of what they were talking about in this section was the dry battery electrode technology. With the new dry battery electrode coating process that they've been working on, they're able to achieve a 10 times reduction in footprint and also a 10 times reduction in energy cost, which is fantastic.

Now, they also talked about actually increasing the speed of that line itself. What they've figured out is that with their new kind of cell factory that they're building, they can achieve 20 gigawatt-hour production rates from one assembly line, which is seven times higher output. Elon drew the analogy here that, obviously, if you can have a line that just goes seven times faster than another line, then you can essentially have one factory instead of having seven.

So that's a big, big improvement. It's at this point in the presentation where Tesla flashed up on the screen their own battery production goals, which sit at 100 gigawatt-hours by 2022 but 3 terawatt-hours by 2030. So, overall, from what they were talking about, the cell factory side of this five-pronged battery production approach—as just the cell factory part—is going to help them reduce the cost per kilowatt-hour of their system by 18%.

Then moving on to the third prong of their five-pronged approach, they talked about the anode materials. The big takeaway here was that they're going to start using silicon. They talked about how silicon is much less expensive and it can actually hold nine times the amount of lithium than graphite.

Now, this was the part of the presentation where a lot of the stuff started kind of flowing over my head a little bit. But what I took out of it is that their approach is to really not heavily engineer the base metal and, essentially, what that's going to mean for Tesla is an increase in range in their vehicles and a reduction in cost.

So all the changes that they're making in terms of the anode materials are going to lead to an overall 5% reduction in the cost per kilowatt-hour of the production of their batteries.

The next thing to talk about is, of course, the cathode materials. In this section, Drew and Elon talked about how they're going with a bit of a diversified cathode materials approach. They've got a nickel option, they've got an iron option, and then they've got an option which is a combination between nickel and manganese.

They also announced that they're going to start up their own cathode production facility, and a big part of this section was them talking about how they're going to start locally sourcing all of the different bits and bobs that they need. They're locally sourcing, they're kicking out cobalt, and overall, there are a lot of different factors in this section which are leading to big efficiency increases.

They also spent a lot of time talking about their future plans to recycle all of their batteries. One fact that I didn't know is that, in fact, 100% of Tesla battery packs are currently recycled, which is pretty crazy. Overall, when it comes to the cathode materials, all of these things added together are giving Tesla another 5% reduction in cost per kilowatt-hour of their battery cells, which is awesome.

Moving on to the last prong—the final section of their master plan to manufacture their own batteries—it is cell vehicle integration. In this section, Elon was basically talking about how they're making changes to the battery pack itself so that it's actually now structurally important to the integrity of the vehicle.

So now, essentially, the front of the car is going to be one piece, the back of the car is going to be one piece, and then in the middle, the battery pack itself—they've made changes to the actual pack itself to actually form a part of the structural integrity of the vehicle. Making these changes gives a 10% mass reduction as well as a 14% range increase, and overall, there are 370 fewer parts in this process that they're finalizing.

This new system also leads to a 35% reduction in floor space required to assemble it, which is fantastic, and also a 55% reduction in investment per gigawatt-hour. So with this new battery pack itself that they're going to be putting into the Teslas of the future, this gives them another 7% reduction in cost per kilowatt-hour.

So overall, as a grand summary, they have a total reduction of 56% in cost per kilowatt-hour of the production process, which is fantastic. Overall, they think this is going to give a 54% increase in range and a 69% reduction in investment per gigawatt-hour.

So, as you can see, the theme definitely was efficiency, right? It's a new way of doing it. This is just further—this is more Tesla vertical integration. Okay? They think about things from first principles. They build from the ground up, and they don't think about, you know, legacy ways of doing things. They think about what's the best way possible in order to build a battery, to build a battery pack, and they've done that.

They've completely re-engineered it. They're going to start making their own cells, changing up the pack, changing up some of the materials, some of the architecture, and this leads to massive, massive improvements in efficiency.

Then overall, that was really the grand presentation of Battery Day. They did have a “one more thing,” which is where they officially, I guess, announced the Plaid Model S. But I don't think there's really too much to talk about. We already knew that was coming. They didn't roll out a Plaid Model S.

It doesn't really look that much different to a normal Model S. I don't know if the design isn't finalized yet; maybe they literally were just running the same Model S body with the Plaid powertrain. But definitely to me, I think the Plaid Model S is just going to be a difference in powertrain. The vehicle itself, I should say, is going to be basically the same.

But overall, that's something as well that they're excited about—something for us to look forward to, and they said that they’re going to start building the Plaid powertrain at the end of 2021.

So overall, that is it! That was Tesla's Battery Day. That is it summarized. Hopefully, this video was reasonably concise. There was a lot to pack in; there was a lot announced at this Battery Day.

So if you want to check out the full event, I definitely encourage you—if you've got the time, check it out. Link's down in the description. But that'll do me for today, guys! If you enjoyed the video or if you found it useful, leave a like on it. I super appreciate it.

But that's it from me for today! I'll see you guys in the next video. Been a little too nice to y'all. Now I got a price for y'all. Snake eyes [Music].

Off record, I let them take advantage. I was welling on wrecking. Off record deals, tell them chuck the column for the quote.