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Voltius aquí tienes la transcripción del Q&A que he encontrado en otro foro.
Intro: Any questions related to the company we are happy to take them, but this is the Gigafactory, battery, pack and we want to kind of skew the questions in that direction.
Q1) [1:00] – Thanks, You discussed a constantly improving factory on roughly a two year time frame, what do you see as the capital intensity of those improvements and do you see if 3rd party automation, robotic companies offering solutions that you find acceptable or is that something that Tesla is also working on.
Elon: [1:20] - Well I think the value of a company is the degree to which it has differentiated automation. So you think of like an example of popcorn, if you make popcorn manually, you are going to get thrashed by someone who has a popcorn machine and then you’ll get thrashed by someone who has an even better popcorn machine.
So, differentiated automation I think is fundamental to sustaining a competitive advantage over time. The way that it is typically done in the auto industry is catalogue engineering. So you go to standard equipment suppliers, you look at the things that are on the catalogue, you pick one of those machines and you put the factory together that way. If you take that path you are going to forgo [..] a competitive advantage [..] from a manufacturing standpoint, because if everybody just picks the same set of things from the same catalogues, there is no long term advantage.
So I think it’s incredibly important to invest in the machine that makes the machine and to think about it as a tightly integrated system. Really designing in the same way we design the car. In designing the model S, X the model 3 we didn’t go and look at parts from all other cars and stick together something that would look like a type of Frankenstein car, it would really not be differentiated. Now there are a few parts in the car, not many, less than 5%, that are in other vehicles. So if there is no value to us differentiating them then we don't do it, but I think it is really quite fundamental to focus on differentiated automation.
I came to this realization early last year when I was sleeping in the factory trying to fix manufacturing issues, it was like hell, […] but I just I did some back of the envelope calculations, for like, "well, how fast does a factory go? How fast could the Gigafactory be?" Essentially finding that the rocket equation [……] manufacturing. There are two parts to the rocket equation, exhaust velocity and the proportion of the rocket that is propellant vs not propellant. So you take that approach to a factory and say what percentage of the volume of the factory is active vs inert, that gives you a volumetric efficiency and then what is the exit velocity of product from that factory. And something that is considered to be a very good car factory is one that produces a car every 25 seconds, which sounds like a lot, but that’s 5 meters and its only .2 meters per second. A stroll, a casual walk is 1 meter per second, so the fastest car lines in the world is 5 times slower than a person walking. So clearly there's a lot of room for improvement there.
I think ultimately we should be able to get in well excess of 1 meter per second, at least 2-3 meters per second, exit velocity from the factory. And then the volumetric efficiency of an automotive plant is usually in low single digits, in fact I would say for our Freemont plant it’s probably maybe 1-2%, which is crazy low. There might be some good plants out there that get up to about 5-6%, maybe 10% at tops. Now the Gigafactory will be more like 30%, 30-40% and it's giant. So the output of this thing is going to be insane. It also makes sense why velocity is such an important thing, if two companies are competing and one factory can crank-up the speed of the factory by a factor of 5 and the other company has to build 5 factories, this is not a competition.
JB: [6:07] - Maybe this was obvious from that answer, but we definitely are investing in that capability ourselves. We work with a few outside automation companies, but the majority of the core automation at Tesla is designed and implemented ourselves, now you have seen the recent acquisition of Grohmann Engineering, now that’s a key example of us […] really going deep in automation, especially factory production automation. Now Panasonic does some of these same things, you know they build most of their own equipment, so the things you saw on the assembly like were in many cases designed by Panasonic. It’s not outsourced to some other company. So it's really creating true value there.
Elon: [6:45] You really have to be quite vertically integrated, now were going to take this to a level that’s I think beyond River Rouge. Ideally I’d like to park this factory over a mine and out comes a car. In the limit, that’s the ideal situation. Right now, let’s say with Model 3 we have version 0.5 of what we call the alien dreadnaught design. By the time it’s really working well it should look like an alien dreadnaught. It shouldn’t look like a normal factory. But even with 0.5 we’ve got this global supply chain still, where things coming from all over the world, and this is actually terrible for efficiency and for reliability of the supply chain. If you go to a global supply chain you are essentially inheriting global force majeure. […] Hurricane, earthquake, fires, floods, somewhere in the world guaranteed at any point in time there will be these things. If you have a global supply chain that means you have to take into account global force majeure, its crazy. And we've literally have had everything from ships sinking, to factories burning down, anything you can possibly imagine, everything. We had trunk carpet that got caught in a shoot-out between drug gangs at the Mexican border. It's like, "we just want our trunk carpet," and it got impounded. "There's like no cocaine, it's just trunk carpet. Seriously, just give us... please, can we have the trunk carpet. We'll take it even if it's got bullet holes."
JB: [8:42] - Pollution closures in China
Elon: [8:45] - Yeah, exactly. It’s really ironic, we had 2000 cars on ships, waiting to dock in China at the end of last year, that couldn't dock because of port closures due to smog. We're trying to deliver electric cars. [laughter]
Q2) [9:15] - Jeff […] research. I want to understand and simplify your key competitive advantages, strengths. [Lots more waffle]
JB: [9:55] - Well you know as we discussed earlier, there’s many, it’s not a single silver bullet that makes that possible. I would say the top two things is really around the technology that is in the factory and in the process itself and that not standard, its not out of a catalogue, its something that we are engineering ourselves and we are improving ourselves, with a lot of know-how and a lot of hard work. What that really means is we get higher throughput, so we get higher yields, we get lower capex per unit output, which does translate into end cost because you are depreciating and amortizing the cost, so that’s a key advantage. We can fit more into a smaller building, so that’s again lower capex, in construction and lower capex in building, and a lot of that technology is also integrating multiple steps of the supply chain. So we’re able to find ways to cut-out some wasteful processes that really weren’t needed when the product was not taking a very direct path from its predecessors into its finished goods. So we are working on things that are quite unique there, that no one else is doing, and again that translates into lower cost.
Elon: [11:00] - There are a remarkable number of cases where it's like, somebody's digging a ditch, filling a ditch and then digging a ditch again. So take lithium hydroxide as an example. We use lithium hydroxide in our cells, but most of the lithium out there is, the default is lithium carbonate. So what they will do is they will mine lithium hydroxide, turn it into lithium carbonate, then turn it back into lithium hydroxide for us. Like ok, that’s pretty silly. Just give us high-grade lithium hydroxide right off the bat and don’t convert it into one thing and then back […], But that’s what was happening actually for quite a while.
JB: [11:40] - Maybe I should just mention also that some of that technology extends into the infrastructure. It may not seem like a really critical thing, but manufacturing cells is very infrastructure intensive. There are very dry conditions, there are clean conditions, so [drying clean rooms with?] recycled flows and process chemicals and were investing a lot of time in innovating those steps. [editor's note: see the transcript here for more details] So we are actually inventing and building better ways to make the infrastructure run more efficiently. Infrastructure cost is a reasonably large percentage of cell cost, so we can attack that and we have strategic advantages on the final product cost.
Elon: [12:27] - I mean our rough estimate is that our output per unit volume at the Gigafactory is three times better than the next best factory in the world, and it’s a big factory.
Q3) [… Indistinguishable voice / question …]
Elon: [13:21] - I say, I don’t think about competitors that much, I think you should focus on being as good as we possibly can and try to approach the limit of physics. Then for anyone who’s not trying to approach the limits of physics is going to lose. And so that’s what we try to do here. So yeah we just take a physics based approach to manufacturing efficiency and I think that’s fundamentally going to be what is our long term competitive advantage that people just don’t realise. I like telling people that this will [….] In the short term our advantage is going to be autonomy, short term meaning like the next 2 – 3 years and the long term advantage, like say over 10 years, Tesla will be the best manufacturer on earth, that’s our aspiration. I don’t know anyone who is actually even attempting to do that, maybe there is somebody, but I don’t know who that will be.
Q4) Brian Brinkman from JP Morgan. You have said before that the Gigafactory is critical to the launch or the model 3, I think here today we can pretty much see that the Gigafactory is pretty much on track. Maybe you can let us know what is going on in Freemont, what is the update there, any update you can give us on timing for the model 3 launch.
Elon: [15:00] The Gigafactory I actually feel pretty good about. In terms of pack production, motor production, drive units (basically integrated drivetrain / power electronics) that all seems pretty good. I’d say one of the riskiest long-lead items is actually not the super fancy technology stuff there, it’s actually the fairly basic stuff. The longest lead items are the stamping dies, the stamping dies for the A class body panels and for the seats. That’s the best knowledge that I have. I think [..] it will take 6 months or so to solve that and there are a lot of machine shops in the world so […] pretty good about solving that and the Schuler needs to come-in on time on the stamping press so Schuler is delivering the advanced stamping press for us in Q1 so if Schuler meets their timeline for bringing the stamping press in, then I feel pretty good about the schedule.
JB: [16:20] There is a huge amount of work happening in Freemont. It’s just less obvious than perhaps than here, because its reconfiguring things inside the factory. So moving things out of the way, spaces getting ready and prepared, so that work is all underway and generally tracking on-course. You just don’t see it, obviously from the outside view as much as here.
Elon: [16:40] The final assembly for the Model 3 will be far more advanced than for the Model S and X. […] right now, but it's... when you see it it will be a step change better than final assembly for the S and X. And it's also designed in a way that we think we can increase the velocity of the line. That’s like the best capex way to improve, if you just speed things up you don’t need extra capex, you just turn the knob and go faster.
Q) …. Why did River Rouge fail and why will this be different.
Elon: [18:00] I don’t want to say the reason it failed because it will get me in trouble. Next question.
Q) Bob – DB – You recently had a meeting with President-elect Trump and it turns out there obviously a lot going on, there is a change in the political environment and it could affect our expectation of the auto industry, it could affect the solar and storage industry….
Elon: [19:00] – I think the President-elect definitely has a strong emphasis on US manufacturing, we are building he biggest factory in the world right here so I think that’s something he is very supportive of and jobs in the US, very supportive of that, on the climate issues it’s a little bit more muddled, I would say, a little mixed. But I think we may see some surprising things from the next administration. I don’t think this administration will take a lot of negative action against fossil fuels, but it’s possible they may take positive action on renewables. Possible.
Q) [.. unheard ..]
Elon: [20:00] – The federal tax credit, the $7500 thing which is going to wind down anyway, if you're making make half a million cars a year, that tax credit runs out at a few hundred thousand cars. So it’s not something, all of the tax incentives either don’t scale or they differentially disadvantage Tesla. Which is not, I mentioned this once before at a prior talk, but if you take the zero emission vehicle credit […] 14 states, we get 50c on the dollar for those, but GM can get 100c on the dollar by applying it to their existing program. So we sell them wholesale and they get to use them retail.
That's why GM can do the Volt at a theoretical $9,000 loss. But it's actually not a $9,000 loss because they get 100c on the dollar for ZEV credits. So they get $10,000 — something like $10,000 — more, effectively, than Tesla does, for every Volt. So the real question you should be asking is like, "how are you competing against those companies when they have a differential advantage?" If the President-elect were to — well, those are state-based incentives, but — to eliminate these things, it would actually be adventageous to us, in the case of ZEV credits. And then […] for the federal credit, because it's […]. So these things all become moot.
Q) 22:00 – Right behind these walls the model 3 drive train is being developed. Why here. [… something about model 3 range..]
Elon: [22:50] - […] keep our powder dry with respect to Model 3 announcements. There's certainly […] on Model 3 […]. Anything you want to add?
JB: [23:05] - I don't think so right now, but as Elon said there's upcoming announcements, upcoming changes and things that we can't completely talk about just yet.
Elon: [23:18] - But on the motor […] front, the reason we moved motor production […] just ran out of room at Fremont. So yeah, ran out of room. […]
Q) [… Not heard ..] 18650 battery choice?
Elon: [24:07] – Well I'm not sure what you mean by "comms." You mean like vehicle-to-vehicle communication?
Q) Common standards.
Elon: [24:14] Oh, common standards. Well with respect to battery packs? I don't know. From our standpoint we just looked at what do we think on a fundamental basis yields the lowest cost per kWh and the best energy density and a bunch of other factors like how well can you heat or cool it so it can be effective in hot and cold climates, how long is it going to last, its resilience in a crash.
[.. long gap in audio..] [Elon's saying something about the 2170 cell and how they arrived at that diameter/length]
JB: [28:08] […] Maybe just to summarise, I don’t think at these volumes, you know, standards across the batteries matter much. You know maybe if you […] low volume especially hundreds of thousands of units a year there's really not much point. It’s probably negative to standardise, because it means you’re not really custom engineering for the solution that you want to build. And in terms of form factor, as Elon said, with this we are approaching it from a 1st principals point of view, and we have done the analysis pretty deeply, we did this~, 10 years ago and continue to do this every couple of months even […] and right now we see that as the lowest cost and the highest cost performance type and size of cell. There are a lot of aspects to consider here, it's the manufacturability, it's safety, cooling, all these different contributors and I think a lot of the big other car companies are trying to focus too much on getting a very large cell because it simplifies their module manufacture and you know we’re building modules here in this factory, next to the cell line, you know there is no differentiation, it goes straight from cell assembly into module assembly. But if you have different factories building modules vs cells and you think of them as a unit that you have to worry about […] then it leads you down the road to bigger cells.
Elon: [29:25] Yeah exactly. Also, like the bigger your cell is the worse your yield is, so if you unwrap all the cells you've got a certain surface area of electrode. In the limit, if you said, "ok, we're going to make just one big cell in the battery pack," well your yield would be terrible. Because the odds of their being at least one tiny defect across that whole thing are very very high. So if you can divide the cells up then you can actually have a much better yield with smaller cells than you can with bigger cells. It's similar to like silicon, like a big silicon wafer, it's very difficult to ensure that a big silicon wafer is defect free and that’s why they don’t make humongous silicon wafers.
[… too much noise to hear he last question or answer.. …]
