Just finished listening to Tesla BD. My takeaways are (1) Tesla aiming to be a best EV manufacturer globally by crushing costs - production is where most of the gains are to be had. They are expanding 30x by 2030. (2) Tesla will make batteries commercially (upto now LG, Panasonic and others have made them using Tesla recipes) to get under $100/kWh - market pace is too slow for them.
From a cobalt view, Elon then talked through the Ni rich (zero cobalt) cathode (+4% extra range) and cost savings (Co is 5% of the cathode cost). Development is early stage with no timeline. He spoke to dry electrolyte processing but that only impacts on the type of metal salts used (eg nickel/cobalt sulphate) not the metal content. At the end they segmented the battery market as:
(1) Non Nickel (LFP) - Large ESS and low range vehicles (such as in China) (2) NCM/NCA - Powerwall and Tesla mass market vehicles (3) High Ni - Cybertruck and semis (where the energy density is needed).
Interestingly no more talk about "ethical cobalt" or "toxic" metal....
The scale up in NCM/MCA is very exciting.....
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