Tesla Investment Day

 Ian Page 2023.03.02

I flogged through the 4 hours and here are some comments.

1. As usual, it's incredibly unusual for a company to put engineers on stage, and this time Elon was looking tired, and there were a lot of engineer types mumbling their way through their presentations. Despite the style, the actual significance came through brilliantly.
2. The nice screen in the Tesla and the computer are installed very early in the production process. What I hadn't realized is that as each piece of the car is added, the central car computer checks that it was installed correctly and runs all sorts of tests reporting on the screen and production line to the control computer. The individual components are also tested extensively before installation. It's more like the way that proper software was built than a typical production line.
3. NEW: the Tesla has a personal profile- things like seats, heating, radio channels, door opener code, etc. If you put a Tesla into a repair shop the loaner configures itself automatically to your profile, the idea being that you don’t notice that you are in a loaner from the first moment you see it.
4. The wiring system in cars is typically a tree structure from a central controller with wires running everywhere. The Tesla wiring system is moving to a distributed ethernet packet-style approach with end-to-end encryption. The advantage is that if you want to change or add something, you just have to branch from the nearest ethernet junction and add a new packet code. Instead of trying to find somewhere to run a new cable halfway around the car. (We recently put front and rear cameras into our little car and now have cables tacked on to the roof and sides. It would have been so much easier if we just had to plug into an ethernet socket)
5. The AI scale is impressive. there are 30 petabytes of live traffic data from cars, going to 200Pb when dojo is upgraded, and they now seem to be in the final stages of transitioning to a single integrated stack covering both motorway and town driving and throwing large amounts of live "corner case" video at it to train it on unusual cases. They showed a slide that accidents per mile with FSD were 1/5 as common as the US average. ( I have watched wham bam Tesla channel, and it's clear that FSD has avoided many accidents, by stopping or swerving before the driver reacted, by seeing oncoming cars that the driver did not because he was looking in the other direction, and that Tesla accidents leave the driver and passengers shaken but unhurt even in the most serious crashes - even a couple where the driver appears to have been deliberately trying to commit suicide and walked away from the remains of an expensive car without a scratch. (Motto | if you want to commit suicide don’t drive a Tesla!)
6. They have been adjusting their charging strategy. In Texas, it's windy at night and they find 50% of charging is at AC slow chargers and the other 50%  at their DC fast chargers. As a result, they are offering all-you-can-use overnight charging in Texas at $30 per month to balance renewable electricity demand and supply, I skipped over a section showing that the value added of a Tesla allowed the owner to receive money (or a discount not sure) because of the value to the grid of matching supply to demand. That may have been the $30. They see the Tesla car/home /company integrated software creating a lot of value for grids in addition they have increased the utilization of superchargers while reducing the need to wait from 2% of visits to1% and they are working further to use a sort of "air traffic control system " to direct and schedule charging points within journeys matched to availability of chargers.

I also noted that the chargers are built on a platform for a number of chargers and the control equipment in the factory so they can just be dropped onto a flat piece of ground. (In Thornbury our car park is out of action for 6 months while they add a few chargers...) The chargers also cost much less than the competition for various reasons, but one is that the power circuitry uses a Tesla designed replacement for expensive silicon carbide chips that achieve the result with 1/3 as many chips.

The European supercharger network has opened 50% to non-Tesla cars. I think the required Tesla app is going to encourage people into the Tesla ecosystem.

The planetary scale of charging is visible as they reckon 9 petawatt hours per year will be needed for complete ICE replacement. Thus, the work on matching charging to supply. which also reduces the cost of electricity.

7. 4680: they say that the battery production rate per line has increased by 20X since battery day and they are using the tab-less dry electrode process, requiring a 10x smaller factory to produce the same amount of batteries. They are still targeting 1TWH of battery production per year. There was no information on whether they are going to make LFP batteries in-house.
8. Lithium: end of 2023 they open a Corpus Christi lithium refinery (12 months from breaking ground to production) aiming at a 50wh equivalent battery supply per year by 2030. This inputs spodumene and uses a soda ash leach process without roasting to break down the structure. It should be green and have lower energy than roasting methods, but I haven't looked up how it manages to break down the rather strong bonds preventing the lithium from escaping the crystal structure. There is an Outotec process that seems to do the necessary while producing safe byproducts.

https://www.mogroup.com/insights/blog/mining-and-metals/the-outotec-lithium-hydroxide-process--a-novel-direct-leach-process-for-producing-battery-grade-lithium-hydroxide-from-spodumene/

They are importing spodumene concentrate which is at best 7% lithium, so they are moving a lot of useless material around. There was no mention of the US clay process.

9. They said their next platform would have 50% lower cost than the current one, which in turn was 50% lower than the earlier one. It seems to be a combination of lower-cost battery, and lower-cost manufacturing, with many improvements. This will be terrifying for ICE and competition which can’t even achieve the current cost structure. particularly noted that their motors will be lanthanide free. This is significant. Rare earths are critical for most magnet-related things including cars and wind turbines. If Tesla has achieved a high-performance car motor without lanthanides this changes the power of China significantly. They just showed a quick slide and moved on without picking out the significance. 
10. They're obviously planning to use Optimus on the production lines. Instead of building the car from a base and adding things, they are reconfiguring to build four or five large parallel sections and then bring them together at the final stage. This means that it's easier to get at the inside of the car during fitting out and also you can get more people/robots working on it at once. It also removes the necessity to partially disassemble after painting. The robots will thus have an easier job getting into things, with less bending and twisting. Optimus was shown in a video, walking unaided, and working an electric bolt fitter. Definitely still proof of concept but a huge step forward in only 10 months. Two aspects. Firstly, they could not find suitable actuators and various other components despite the market being flooded with them so had to design their own. Secondly, the robot is designed to watch someone doing the job and then figure out how to do it rather than being given instructions or manipulated through it.
11. Mega pack A significant figure and target market: megapack handles 300Mw per acre. A gas-fired peaking plant is only 150Mw/acre. Also, the key aspect of the megapack is as you might expect the design for manufacturability, which has several unique features including container size and dropship with self-configuration as more are added to an installation. 
12. Elon and Drew front-ended the whole masterplan 3 with some framing slides of the world's transformation to full electrification, demonstrating that there are enough resources (nickel being the main issue), showing that the rate of growth of the key industries is enough to do the job, and setting out the targets. google mail will only let me insert a little bit. 

Firstly, renewable energy doesn't have to produce as much as the primary consumption of fossil energy because most of fossil energy is wasted as heat in producing electricity or motion. As a result, when you go electric you actually need less than the simple primary energy comparison suggests. Thus, nearly half the primary energy doesn't have to be replaced! (I can add a recent realization of mine that 50% of the world's ship fuel is used for long distance movement of fossil coal, oil and gas. Which is 50% we don’t need. In addition, when DRI steel is made and shipped (30% saving in volume, move to green), or lithium sulphate or carbonate instead of spodumene (90% saving in volume). far fewer ships are needed and thus far less fuel. I haven't developed this further yet but it is clear that a rearrangement of where various steps of the supply chain are done, can deliver major energy and equipment savings.) Elon made the major point that the capital investment to make total electrification occur is a 30% saving over the current annual investment in fossils (and he didn’t say this, but the fossil investment is to replace existing production each year, while the renewable investment is generally one off with a much lower replacement element most of which is recyclable)

The eye watering amount of storage 240Twh, includes the storage in EVs.

He also pointed out that self-driving vehicles means a significant reduction in the number of vehicles required, since the utilization factor is much larger.

Brilliant content, a great planetary overview (I had some qualms over their arbitrary conversion of resources to reserves but that's for another day), and great things coming up, particularly very efficient gigafactories factories being brought up at high speed, and an exponential increase in overall production rates.