1) Tesla's Autopilot driver assist product is now largely feature complete, but how much further does it have to progress to achieve reliability 3-5x greater than the average human & allow removal of human supervision?
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2) This is the March of 9s.
Tesla’s self driving strategy from the start was chosen & optimised for this moment now; putting a system & infrastructure in place without data or hardware bottlenecks to allow largely automated progress for a feature complete AP on the March of 9s.
3) But how far do they have left to March?
Is Tesla 99.9% there, does it have 9,000x further to go or its it 33% there? It’s all a matter of perspective.
And most importantly does this all mean is Tesla 1 year away or 10 years away from Robotaxi level reliability?
I may be very wrong, but this looks like a proof of concept of Tesla's proposed new Lithium Clay + Salt + Water method. 1) The method appears to have been discovered by accident by SGS working on the Clayton Valley Lithium Project in Nevada, without them noticing the consequences
2) SGS discovered that for some surface lithium clay samples you could leach lithium in water, but then that this didn't work for other subsurface samples. cypressdevelopmentcorp.com/site/assets/fi…
3) They decided the reason for this discrepancy must be because surface samples must have had "some component of surface enrichment in the form of water-soluble salts".
4)Then they finished and said ok, water doesn't work, we have to use expensive acids instead.
Tesla likely started the Roadrunner cell project in ~2013 & built general battery cell expertise since foundation in 2003. They have also acquired & hired decades of experience.
The analyst/media takeaway from Battery Day looks that Tesla only started the cell project ~a year ago
Tesla has many huge challenges still to solve (with big delay risks) to ramp Kato road cell production to 10GWh by the 3Q21 target (& full rollout of all the BD innovations isn't targeted until 3Q23) but I see a very large misunderstanding on how far they’ve already come already
Tesla revealed 50+ separate but elegantly entwined cell & raw material R&D projects. They're in varying stages of development & Tesla couldn't explain detail in 90mins (& for competitive reasons) but @elonmusk, Drew, @tbc415 & hundreds more achieved a huge step to ending ICEs
From @KelvinYang7's two independent sources (one of which is a supplier's stock offering filing) linked below, I now see very high probability that Tesla is preparing for a final Model Y production rate of 450k at GF3 (together with Model 3 at 200k).
It will obviously take time to ramp to target capacity which may not be hit until late 2021.
Tesla will also have to ramp demand otherwise it may not pull the trigger to ramp from 2 to 3 shifts.
It also needs to ramp cell supply (fortunately battery day is now very soon!)
I’ve been hoping for Tesla’s Gen1 roadrunner cells to deliver ~30% volumetric energy density increase vs Model 3 at pack level. This could be achieved with ~300-310 wh/kg vs GF1 cells at ~250 wh/kg.
Initially i expect largest progress to be cost, footprint & capex.