Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk says the company will soon move beyond just electric sedans and SUVs to offer something bigger - much bigger. Musk tweeted Thursday that a Tesla semi truck is just months away and work is ongoing on an electric pickup truck as well.
"Tesla Semi truck unveil set for September," Musk said via Twitter. "Team has done an amazing job. Seriously next level."
[...] "We believe the Tesla Semi will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate," Musk wrote in the plan.
[...] While Musk didn't specifically mention anything about the role that autonomy will play with the company's upcoming truck models, the master plan notes that "as the technology matures, all Tesla vehicles will have the hardware necessary to be fully self-driving."
It would be nice to see them add some extras to the trucks like a hydraulic lift or cargo crane.
Also at NBC, TechCrunch, and Bloomberg.
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Tesla has been sued by an employee for alleged racist harassment and termination for complaining:
Tesla Inc.'s production floor is a "hotbed for racist behavior," an African-American employee claimed in a lawsuit in which he alleged black workers at the electric carmaker suffer severe and pervasive harassment. The employee says he's one of more than 100 African-American Tesla workers affected and is seeking permission from a judge to sue on behalf of the group. He's seeking unspecified general and punitive monetary damages as well as an order for Tesla to implement policies to prevent and correct harassment.
[...] The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Marcus Vaughn, who worked in the Fremont factory from April 23 to Oct. 31. Vaughn alleged that employees and supervisors regularly used the "N word" around him and other black colleagues. Vaughn said he complained in writing to human resources and Musk and was terminated in late October for "not having a positive attitude."
Although customers who have reserved a Tesla Model 3 (at a cost of $1000) have seen their delivery dates pushed back, they apparently remain loyal to the company:
Even as the company led by Elon Musk struggles with manufacturing bottlenecks and pushes back production targets by at least a quarter, many reservation holders aren't budging. Bloomberg News contacted 20 consumers who paid deposits for the Model 3 and none had canceled their orders. Regardless of the concerns raised by slower output and an uncertain future for U.S. electric-car tax credits, Nomura analyst Romit Shah predicts the affinity for Tesla Inc. products will prevail. "We believe there is a real passion for the brand," Shah wrote in a report to clients that reiterated a $500 price target for Tesla shares, the highest on Wall Street. "It is bigger than loyalty because much of the enthusiasm comes from people who have never owned a Tesla. The only comparable we see is the iPhone."
Finally, Elon Musk says that the Tesla Semi Truck will be unveiled during a live webcast at 8 PM on Thursday, and that it will "blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension".
Previously: Elon Musk Says Tesla Pickup and Semi-Trucks Are Coming
Time to Bash Tesla Model 3
Tesla Discussing Autonomous Semi Truck Testing in Nevada
Tesla Fires Hundreds of Employees
Tesla Burns More Cash, Fails to Meet Production Targets
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:22AM (10 children)
This just means that the "consumer" car is not economically viable at present; indeed, there is just not enough Lithium available to make all the electric cars that could satisfy consumers-grade people profitably.
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:26AM (9 children)
There's plenty of lithium.
Even though there is a little more cobalt in the Earth's crust than lithium it could be a problem. It's harder to get at and it has other valuable uses. Of course, we don't have to use cobalt in batteries.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fnj on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:50AM (8 children)
There is plenty of gold too - all you could ever want (20 million tons) is dissolved in the oceans. Extracting it is a bit impractical though. There are dissenting opinions to lithium viability.
A 2008 study concluded that "realistically achievable lithium carbonate production will be sufficient for only a small fraction of future PHEV and EV global market requirements", that "demand from the portable electronics sector will absorb much of the planned production increases in the next decade", and that "mass production of lithium carbonate is not environmentally sound, it will cause irreparable ecological damage to ecosystems that should be protected and that LiIon propulsion is incompatible with the notion of the 'Green Car'". (lifted right out of Wikipedia).
According to the Handbook of Lithium and Natural Calcium, "Lithium is a comparatively rare element, although it is found in many rocks and some brines, but always in very low concentrations."
Lithium is expensive, and the price is mushrooming. The 2011 price of lithium, inflation adjusted to current day, was $4269 a ton. The present-day price is $9100 a ton. By way of comparison, aluminum is $1720 a ton, and copper is $5140 a ton.
(Score: 3, Informative) by KilroySmith on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:40AM (5 children)
At $9100 / ton, with 63 kg of Lithium in a common Tesla battery, the Lithium cost is about $575 for a Tesla battery. There's about the same cost in Graphite, and about $400 worth of Cobalt. Say $1500, on a $70,000 Model S, or a bit less on the Model 3.
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla-batteries-possible-bottleneck/ [electrek.co]
And the problem would be, what, exactly? If the elements double in price, there's a lot of places that'll become financially attractive to mine. In 10-20 years, as the cars get retired, the elements are nearly 100% recyclable from the used packs, opening up a new "mine", if you will. Lithium at $1 / kg isn't economically feasible to recover from seawater; at $2 / kg, perhaps there's enough money to be made to generate investments to improve the process. If successful, this will of course drive the price back down.
If EVs are as uneconomical as you suggest, you can laugh at Elon Musk in a soup line 10 years from now. Me, I plan on upgrading my Model 3 to a nice 2-seat convertible EV about then...
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:56AM (1 child)
If your 63 kg of lithium is from Electrek that appears to be lithium carbonate equivalent, at least according to the comments there.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:06PM
Thanks, I'll remember that.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:54AM (2 children)
How much energy is used to breakdown, remake, recycle, etc. a lithium battery?
Again, the "zero emission electric car" is completely accurate while being completely misleading. The car emits nothing. But it's production, manufacture and maintenance cost just as much as anything else.
There's no way you're going to be buying a new battery for a Tesla for under $10,000 at the moment.
And "lithium" is not "pure lithium, combined in the right structure, with the right materials, arranged into a safe battery".
As yet, the only references for actual, production, lithium battery recycling consists of: "Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process." and "It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium".
Same way that, in theory, we can recycle plastic, or glass, or anything else.
Sure. If someone's willing to pay for the product, shipping it to a centre, using energy to reshape it, putting it back into useful production, selling it off and handling all the legalities between (e.g. purity, safety, etc. with batteries would be especially important).
And using the energy to do all that, every few years, for every battery, in every electric car, then it needs to be taken into account for their green credentials.
Electric cars push energy usage to other places. Whether that's building solar panels, charging the batteries, or end-of-life disposal for them, it still needs to be paid for as it still costs - financially and environmentally.
And, as with all things, all costs are eventually reflected in the actual price of the item. When diesels start polluting, suddenly they become more expensive and get taxed out of existence. When batteries are hard to produce and not as easy to recycle as you make out, their purchase cost goes up. When we all start plugging in EVs into the house charges with 400A delivery, electric prices will start to go through the roof. When we demand that electric companies incorporate solar energy in markets where it's not viable, they push the cost down to users (a British electric company has raised prices THREE TIMES this year, totally nearly 20% year-on-year increase, citing the cost of meeting legal obligations on renewable energy as the cause).
Hence, what really matters at the end of the day is cost.
And electric cars, and their batteries, are still some of the most expensive items the average person could own today, short of a house. More expensive that combustion cars.
There's a reason for that. And it's not to do with "not being mass market". In fact, as they become mass-market, things may actually get a lot worse if those extraneous costs are not reduced by significant factors instead of increased.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by butthurt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:31PM (1 child)
Again, the "zero emission electric car" is completely accurate while being completely misleading. The car emits nothing. But it's production, manufacture and maintenance cost just as much as anything else.
You seem to conflate pollution with expense, while making a distinction (which is lost on me me) between production and manufacturing. Certainly the manufacturing of electric cars, and the provision of electricity for them, can be polluting, but there's very little pollution generated at the point of use. Electric cars needn't carry a pollution control system around with them.
There's no way you're going to be buying a new battery for a Tesla for under $10,000 at the moment.
At the moment, Tesla has positioned itself as a luxury brand.
And "lithium" is not "pure lithium, combined in the right structure, with the right materials, arranged into a safe battery".
I can't tell who you're quoting. It's not the grandparent post, nor the page linked from it. Also, I do not understand your meaning, unless you mean that batteries are unsafe. Certainly batteries can catch fire when there is a crash. That's true of fossil fuels, too.
As yet, the only references for actual, production, lithium battery recycling consists of: "Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process." and "It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium".
Again I'm unsure where your quotations come from. I found a page on the Web which says:
[...] lithium-ion batteries simply do not contain much valuable metal to make them economically useful. [...] lithium-ion batteries are classified by the US Government as safe to dispose of in conventional landfills. [...] the scrap value of lithium-ion batteries is perhaps only $100/ton, compared to $1,000 to 3,000/ton for lead. By contrast, the cost of collecting, sorting and shipping lithium-ion batteries to a recycler far exceeds the scrap value. However, this could be off-set by the fact that the cost of other materials in lithium-ion batteries, such as cobalt, have a lower recycling cost than mining new material.
-- http://www.batterypoweronline.com/main/markets/batteries/is-it-time-for-a-lithium-ion-recycling-revolution/ [batterypoweronline.com]
I found an article about a recycling facility in Ohio, which says:
Most batteries contain only small amounts of lithium carbonate as a percentage of weight and the material is relatively inexpensive compared to most other metals. [...]
“Right now it hardly pays to recycle lithium, but if demand increases and there are large supplies of used material, the situation could change,” says Linda Gaines, a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory’s Transportation Technology R&D Center.
-- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/414707/lithium-battery-recycling-gets-a-boost/ [technologyreview.com]
The problem, if you will, is that lithium is inexpensive.
Same way that, in theory, we can recycle plastic, or glass, or anything else.
Your comparison is apt, because recycled plastic and glass also attract low prices.
Electric cars push energy usage to other places. Whether that's building solar panels, charging the batteries, or end-of-life disposal for them, it still needs to be paid for as it still costs - financially and environmentally.
In our industrial society, that's true of any form of transportation, even walking. The extraction, transport, and refining of petroleum also requires energy and also does environmental harm. The final step of burning it in an internal combustion engine is inefficient, compared to the final step of discharging electricity from a battery to an electric motor. If electric cars are charged from solar power, the charging could perhaps be arranged to take place during the daytime.
When batteries are hard to produce and not as easy to recycle as you make out, their purchase cost goes up.
You seemed to be saying that not much recycling happens. The sources I found seem to say that as well. They say that the lithium has little value. The recycling facility in Ohio (mentioned in one of them) received $9.5 million from the U.S. government to add lithium recycling to its existing capacity for recycling lead-acid and NiMH batteries. The article explains the process, saying it's largely automated. According to my other source, just putting old lithium batteries in the tip is a valid option.
When we all start plugging in EVs into the house charges with 400A delivery, electric prices will start to go through the roof. When we demand that electric companies incorporate solar energy in markets where it's not viable [...]
Without EVs, demand for electricity varies during the course of the day (and night). The outputs from solar or wind generation also vary, differently. Fossil-fired and nuclear stations run most efficiently when they are run continuously. If we normally let EVs charge slowly, rather than quickly as you suggest, their demand can, as I said above, potentially be adjusted over the course of the day. That could keep the renewable energy from being wasted, and let the fossil and nuclear power be used more efficiently (because the plants wouldn't have to be shut down so often). Another possibility is for EVs to feed energy into the grid at the times it is most needed, lessening the need for costly "peaking plants." EV owners who participate in such a scheme could rightfully expect to be charged a favourable rate for electricity; other rate-payers could rightfully expect rates to fall. Of course, that might not happen. A bad thing that could happen is that we could burn more coal--however, it's been said that EVs powered by coal plants could result in less carbon dioxide emissions than would ICE cars burning petroleum fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_plant [wikipedia.org]
Hence, what really matters at the end of the day is cost.
And electric cars, and their batteries, are still some of the most expensive items the average person could own today, short of a house. More expensive that combustion cars.
There's a reason for that. And it's not to do with "not being mass market".
According to the sources I consulted it's not to do with lithium being expensive. And is it even true? I looked at a few advertisements, and it seems that (in the USA at least) the prices aren't outlandish:
Used 2016 Nissan Leaf SL for sale - $18,500, 7,145 miles with Leather Seats, Backup Camera, Navigation System, Alloy Wheels
[...]
Used 2013 Nissan Leaf S for sale - $6,888, 12,197 miles
[...]
Used 2012 Nissan Leaf SV for sale - $6,545, 30,647 miles with Navigation System, Bluetooth
-- https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/l-Used-Nissan-Leaf-d2077 [cargurus.com]
Used 2013 Chevrolet Volt Premium for sale - $11,495, 45,197 miles [...]
Used 2012 Chevrolet Volt Base for sale - $11,999, 32,218 miles with Navigation System [...]
-- https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/l-Used-2012-Chevrolet-Volt-c22985 [cargurus.com]
Used 2016 Chevrolet Volt LT for sale - $20,416, 15,195 miles with Backup Camera, Alloy Wheels
-- https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/l-Used-2017-Chevrolet-Volt-c25655 [cargurus.com]
Used 2014 FIAT 500e Base for sale - $7,200, 15,826 miles with LE Package, Sport Package, Leather Seats, Sunroof/Moonroof, [etc.]
Used 2013 FIAT 500e Base for sale - $5,995, 27,370 miles with Sport Package, Bluetooth, Sunroof/Moonroof, Navigation System [...]
Used 2014 FIAT 500e Base for sale - $8,981, 10,812 miles with Sport Package, Bluetooth, Sunroof/Moonroof, Aluminum Wheels, Power Package, Navigation System
-- https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/l-Used-2013-FIAT-500e-c24318 [cargurus.com]
The Fiat 500e is electric; if anyone is still reading, compare the prices of these fossil-powered Fiat 500's:
Used 2014 FIAT 500 Pop for sale - $5,499, 47,990 miles with Bluetooth
Used 2012 FIAT 500 Sport for sale - $5,999, 53,286 miles with Bluetooth, Sport Package, Alloy Wheels
Used 2012 FIAT 500 Abarth for sale - $9,995, 23,967 miles with Bluetooth, Leather Seats, Sunroof/Moonroof, Alloy Wheels
-- https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/l-Used-FIAT-500-d1327 [cargurus.com]
I only took a cursory look, but they seem rather similar in price.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:03PM
I believe GP was trying to create some kind of moral equivalence between petrol and battery in order to argue that batteries are either no more "green" than petrol or are less "green" than petrol.
Thanks for ruining that with your facts and reasoning!
(Score: 4, Informative) by WalksOnDirt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:48AM
The amount of gold in the Earth's crust is about one 10,000th of the amount of lithium. That make a huge difference in the cost of mining. It's even worse in sea water.
All mining causes environmental problems, but solution mining of lithium causes relatively little. I suspect that, per pound, mining lithium is less damaging than the iron used in a car's frame.
Lithium is cheap. At $9,100/ton the lithium in a 250 mile EV would cost less than $100. Once the supply and demand get balanced out I expect the cost to go down. There are estimates of 100 of thousands of years supply in the oceans.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
That's not what I would call low concentrations. Of course, the oceans are much less concentrated but it would probably still be feasible to mine them.
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:58PM
I could not find that in Wikipedia. Of course, Wikipedia keeps changing, but what article was that from? The original quote is from a study by William Tahil. Ford Motors [wardsauto.com], for one, doesn't agree.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:12AM (1 child)
I can see it now! Greens, cruising in 1/4 ton pickup trucks, and when they come across some un-reconstructed fossil fuel user, time to "roll some photons", boyz! Yeah! 0-60 in how many secs, you mad, mad, enviro-racers? Or, we could just try to reduce our footprint, total travel infrastructure and expendable energy costs, and eat local, and when I meat you on the Drag strip, the question is not acceleration, it is distance per energy unit. Future of male penis competitions: "Hey, man, I'm miling here! Almost got 140 MPL on bio-diesel! Can you beat that, you wimp?" Hi-milers get all the hottest chicks, but they throw them out because the boobs are just extra useless weight. Skinny chicks rule, on the Green track circuit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:47AM
If most trucks are never going to see a dirt road or a construction site, they might as well be electric, since that's how so many women prefer their penis substitutes.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:51AM (1 child)
Electric semi-trailer - a full trailer, half of which is loaded with batteries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:24PM
May not be too hard to add small diesel engine [evnut.com] when needed.
Would likely only be relevant for team driving -- or areas of the country without charging infrastructure.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:27PM
I can see the commercials now. Ranch-type guy in wide flat brim hat and LL Bean flannel shirt, looking thoughtfully out over the hills of the winery, taking a draw on an e-cigarette with a glass of organic Muscadet in the other hand, with a gravelly-voiced narrator overdub: "You work conscientiously, and you need a truck that works as conscientiously as you."