One of the more interesting revelations to come out of the 2018 Tesla Shareholder Meeting was updated information about Tesla’s current battery costs and projected reductions over the next 2 years.
Tesla dropped a number of info bombs in its shareholder meeting this week. We’ve summarized 28 of them in two separate articles. Beyond the headlines about production numbers and finances, Tesla announced a few major new developments, including some insights into its work on battery recycling.
I just published 11 highlights from yesterday’s 2018 Tesla shareholder meeting. I cut off right around the start of the Q&A session — tweets plus live Q&A. This article continues that initial list to include 17 more highlights. In this case, we have no charts from Tesla, but the highlights may be even more interesting. As usual, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared more details than we could have hoped for, supplemented here and there by CTO JB Straubel, CFO Deepak Ahuja, and Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen.
Elon Musk had some things to say about upgrades in the Supercharger network, replacing the computers in existing cars, and the range of the Tesla Semi at last week’s earnings call.
Ever wondered what’s inside a Tesla battery cell? Well, don’t do what this guy did in a pair of videos from ARIES RC. Opening lithium-ion batteries is a ticklish business. They contain carcinogens, caustic acids, and flammable chemicals that shouldn’t be handled without gloves, if at all. But whatever damage the video host may have done to his own health, there’s no harm for us in watching.
Highly regarded battery storage firm sonnen was one of the big winners of the 2017 Zayed Future Energy Prize, winning in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) category. I interviewed sonnen CEO and co-founder Christoph Ostermann in January just after the company won the prize. It was a fun interview because of how futuristic sonnen’s vision is and also because of Mr Ostermann’s clear propensity for fun.
Once upon a time — a long, long time ago — an amazing little unknown Californian company filled with electrical geniuses and two men heading the team, President Tom Gage and Founder Alan Cocconi, revolutionized the automotive world.
Quoth Straubel: “There’s a new industry that’s yet to be created, which is really a re-processing industry for all of the energy storage devices, all of the batteries that are going into e-mobility. To re-process them and refine them back into new refurbished batteries.”
Tesla co-founder and chief technical officer, JB Straubel, was a guest keynote speaker at last year’s Discovery conference put on by the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE).
In what was likely the most anticipated earnings call ever for Tesla, the auto manufacturer / stationary storage manufacturer / full service solar provider / soon-to-be taxi service / autonomous vehicle technology company (and maybe insurance company in the near future) shared financial results for Q4 2016 and for the full year. Perhaps more importantly, it also unpacked tons of detail for what’s to come in the balance of 2017 and beyond.
