Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Tesla's 2020 annual meeting of stockholders. We're really excited that you could be here with us today. My name is Al Prescott. I'm Tesla's Vice President of Legal. There'll be two parts to today's meeting. First, the formal part of the meeting we'll get out of the way, which will cover the seven items that stockholders have been asked to vote on. After the voting, I'll introduce Tesla's co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, who'll give a presentation about the company update and year in review. Following the conclusion of the stockholder meeting, we'll start our separate Battery Day event. At this time, I'd like to thank the members of the Tesla team and our board, especially those who are able to make it out here in person today, as well as to our representative from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Tesla's independent auditor, who's also here.
Before we begin, I'd like to introduce you to Robyn Denholm, the chairwoman of Tesla, who would like to say a few words remotely.
Thank you, Al. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2020 Tesla shareholder meeting. A special welcome to the many Tesla shareholders that have joined us today in person, as well as online from across the country and around the globe. I wanted to start today's proceedings by thanking you, our shareholders, for your tremendous support over the last year, and especially to those of you who have been with us through our journey over the past ten years since the company's IPO in 2010. While we have stayed true to our mission of accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy, in many ways, our company has evolved beyond recognition over the past decade, and that is a great thing. In fact, the pace of developments and the evolution of Tesla has further accelerated over the past 15 months since I last addressed you in June of 2019.
You'll hear more about many of the specific achievements from Elon later in the agenda. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our Tesla employees across the globe, who have done a tremendous job of executing and staying focused on delivering for our customers and shareholders as the world has gone through one of the most challenging periods in our lifetimes. As a board, we have always taken a long-term view. We have made decisions and supported decisions made by the management team that may not have seemed obvious at the time, but are delivering and will continue to deliver breakthrough results. It's also important to remember why we do this. As a company, we are focused on addressing one of the biggest environmental challenges of our generation, how to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
The last year in particular has seen a tremendous increase in momentum in the movement to sustainable energy from both shareholders and the general public. In addition to developing amazing clean transportation and energy products, we are doing our part by contributing the right facts and information to this important issue. We released an extended version of our impact report in April of 2020. In this year's version, we have covered in great detail many areas that are important to our shareholders and our customers alike, such as our environmental impact, greenhouse and other noxious gas elimination, our supply chain efforts, especially in cobalt, and our culture and people focus. We hope that by continuing to put this data out there, we will underscore to the world the importance and impact that we are having as a company.
Lastly, continuous feedback and input from our shareholders is essential for us to do our jobs, and I would like to thank you for your support in this regard. Many of you have provided me and the team with ideas and insights that we as a board take into consideration as we evolve our governance and company practices. It's especially crucial to the board members as we pride ourselves in adaptability and the diversity of thought and experience that we collectively represent on the board. This brings me to my final two things today. As today is his last shareholder meeting, on behalf of the board, I would like to sincerely thank Steve Jurvetson for over a decade of service to Tesla, the board, and our shareholders. You will be missed.
Finally, I would like to introduce to you our newest member of the board, Hiro Mizuno, who until recently led the largest pension fund in the world. He brings a wealth of experience to the board. Let me hand over to Hiro to say a few words. Hiro.
Thank you, Robyn. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting. It is my real pleasure to virtually meet you, Tesla shareholders, people who believe in Tesla's mission and its growth opportunities. I spent all my career in finance and asset management in Tokyo, New York, London, and Silicon Valley. Until recently, I was a chief investment officer of GPIF, a $1.5 trillion Japanese public pension fund. One of my priorities as an investment chief was to promote responsible investment, which aimed to make financial returns while pursuing ESG agenda, such as environment and social issues. I believe in the market where ESG is becoming mainstream, purpose or mission-driven businesses will gain long-term investor support. This is why I was interested in Tesla, where our mission is to accelerate the world transition to sustainable energy.
I'm very excited to join the Tesla team on the journey and hope to assist Tesla deliver what investors expect by further enhancing its environmental and social impact. Once again, Tesla shareholders, thanks for your support. I'm looking forward to seeing you in person next year. Thank you.
Thanks, Robyn and Hiro. I will now call the meeting to order. Please refer to the meeting agenda that has been provided to you and posted also to our virtual meeting site. The time is now 1:49 P.M. Pacific Time, I declare that the polls are now open. We've already received voting proxies from stockholders over the past few weeks, meaning that almost all of the votes that will be counted were already submitted before the meeting. However, if you wish to vote now or to change your prior vote, you may do so through the virtual meeting site. For those that are here in person today, ballots and ballot boxes were available to you at check-in. Tesla's board of directors has appointed Computershare Trust Company to serve as inspector of elections for the meeting.
Computershare has taken and signed an oath as inspector of election and has certified that starting on August 13th, 2020, the proxy material or a notice of internet availability of the proxy material were mailed or provided to all Tesla stockholders of record as of July 31, 2020. We have a majority of the outstanding shares represented at the meeting. I declare that there is now a quorum present, that we may proceed with the meeting. The items on the agenda are as follows. The election of three class 1 directors, Elon Musk, Robyn Denholm, and Hiromichi Mizuno, to each serve for a term of three years. Two, to approve Tesla's executive compensation on an advisory basis. Three, to ratify the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, as Tesla's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year of 2020.
Tesla's board has recommended that our stockholders vote for each of the director nominees and for each of those proposals. In addition, we have also received four stockholder proposals as described in the proxy statement. I would like to remind our stockholders that Tesla's board has prepared a statement in opposition to each of these proposals, which appear in the proxy. The first stockholder proposal is an advisory vote regarding paid advertising. Our board has recommended that our stockholders vote against this stockholder proposal. This stockholder proposal comes to us from James Danforth. However, Mr. Danforth has notified us that neither he nor his representative will be presenting the proposal at the meeting today, so we will continue. The second stockholder proposal is an advisory vote regarding simple majority voting in our governing documents. Our board has recommended that our stockholders vote against this stockholder proposal.
The proposal comes from James McRitchie, who is on the line to present the proposal today. Mr. McRitchie, I would like to invite you now to present. You'll have three minutes.
I'd like to thank the board for holding such an innovative hybrid meeting during these difficult times. Proposal number five basically asks for a majority voting standard to amend bylaws. I first introduced a proposal on this subject at the 2014 Tesla meeting. Super majority provisions are generally used to entrench incumbent directors and managers. Academic research finds that reducing such devices is associated with higher returns. The board's opposition statement argues they tried to adopt a majority standard last year, but shareholders rejected it. However, 99.6% of shares voted for the proposal. Only 0.4% voted against it. The problem was that a little more than 35% of shares went unvoted. The vast majority of retail shareholders often don't bother to vote. Since only 65% of shares were voted, we didn't achieve the 66.67% necessary to overturn the current super majority bylaw.
It appears the proposal failed primarily for three reasons. One, the board put forth less than robust arguments in favor. Two, they added confusion with another proposal to reclassify the board, not into a single class, that's the norm, but into two classes, elected in alternating years. Third, the board also failed to make a substantial effort to solicit votes in favor. Also, please consider this proposal in context with other poor corporate governance provisions at Tesla. First, shareholders can only remove directors for cause. What that basically means is the director has to be caught in criminal activity for shareholders to remove them. Second, because the board is divided into three classes, shareholders can only hold individual directors accountable every three years. Third, shareholders cannot call a special meeting, nor can act by written consent. I hope you will agree, corporations should not be democratic free zones.
Vote for proposal number five so that 33% of shares cannot overrule the wishes of 67%. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McRitchie. We'll now move on to our third stockholder proposal, which is an advisory vote regarding reporting on employee arbitrations. Our board has recommended that our stockholders vote against this stockholder proposal. This proposal comes from Nia Impact Capital, whose representative, Kristin Hull, is on the line to present the proposal today. Ms. Hull, I'd like to invite you to go ahead and present. You'll have three minutes.
Hello. My name is Dr. Kristin Hull, and I'm the founder and CEO of Nia Impact Capital. I formally move proposal 6. This resolution requests that Tesla's board of directors oversee the preparation of a report on the impact of the use of mandatory arbitration on Tesla's employees and on its workplace culture. The report will evaluate the association of Tesla's current use of arbitration with the prevalence of both harassment and discrimination in its workplace and on employees' ability to seek redress should harassment or discrimination occur. This proposal speaks to the widespread experience of discrimination in the workplace by Black, Latinx, and female employees, despite this discrimination being unlawful under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Tesla has faced a number of serious allegations of racism and sexism at its Buffalo and Fremont plants.
Companies that allow bias, discrimination, and harassment in their workplaces are at risk for unnecessary legal, brand, financial, and human capital issues. Support for this resolution is warranted for the following five reasons. One, research shows that companies benefit from diverse and inclusive workplaces. Two, corporate policies that allow harassment and discrimination risk investors' capital. Three, the use of arbitration exposes investors to an unknown level of risk. Four, broad concerns exist with respect to fair treatment in Tesla's workplace, and Tesla employees have alleged harassment and discrimination on the basis of both race and gender. Tesla, a company investors love for its innovation, leadership, and wide moat, is increasingly lagging behind its peers in its disclosures related to workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Unlike the forward-thinking and innovation in its extraordinary product line, Tesla has not shown proactive leadership in building a positive company culture or in addressing concerns about its workplace practices. In these material issues, Tesla lags behind its technology and automotive competitors. The use of arbitration limits employees' remedies for wrongdoing, precludes employees from suing in court, and often keeps underlying facts, misconduct, or case outcomes secret, therefore preventing employees from learning about and acting on shared concerns. Simply stated, arbitration allows bad corporate behavior like bias, harassment, and discrimination to continue, hidden from employees and investors. To maintain Tesla's wide moat, it is essential that the board seriously assess the implications of the use of arbitration and that Tesla begin to take seriously the need to ensure a fair, equitable, positive, and inclusive workplace. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Hull. Our fourth and final proposal is an advisory vote regarding reporting on human rights. Our board has recommended that stockholders vote against this proposal. This proposal comes to us from the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, New York Province, whose representative, Terrence Collingsworth, is on the line to present today. Mr. Collingsworth, I would like to invite you to speak now. You have three minutes for your proposal.
Thank you. I'm Terry Collingsworth, Executive Director of the International Rights Advocates. I'm here representing the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, New York Province, to present item seven on human rights disclosure, which calls upon Tesla to issue a report to describe board oversight of human rights and its human rights due diligence process, including systems to provide meaningful remedies when human rights impacts occur. Tesla faces serious human rights issues. Failure to establish a culture of respect for human rights will expose Tesla to new liability issues and significant reputational injury, all of which will have a material impact on the company and its shareholders. The need to set a new course for human rights compliance at Tesla is glaring.
Here are five examples of human rights violations occurring now in Tesla's operations. Racism, sexual harassment, and disregard for human safety and dignity harm workers at the Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo, New York every single day, and those workers urge you to remember their experiences in your vote. Tesla has experienced serious labor relations issues at its production facilities and is actively discouraging union organizing. Workers are being exposed to COVID-19 and then are facing retaliation when they ask for greater protections. There are numerous worker health and safety violations, as well as wage and hour issues. Finally, there are serious, even deadly, human rights violations occurring in Tesla's global supply chains. On this last issue, my organization brought the pending suit against Tesla for using cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo by young children.
I personally met young boys who lost limbs or were paralyzed in cobalt tunnel collapses. Tesla sources cobalt from these very mines, and its claim to have, quote, "zero tolerance for child labor" in its supplier code of conduct is simply not true. Tesla is not only tolerating child labor in its cobalt supply chain, it is tolerating the death and maiming of young child miners. This demonstrates why the company must circle back and begin a process to report on its treatment of human rights issues as requested in this proposal. I think consumers will have zero tolerance for a company that is exposed as being indifferent to killing and maiming child miners. We are hopeful that Tesla's innovative spirit can be brought to bear on making human rights a priority at the company.
For example, if Elon Musk cared about implementing a zero-tolerance child labor policy, instead of having a useless paper policy, Tesla could employ satellites or drones at every mine it sources from to actually monitor child labor. I encourage all Tesla shareholders to vote for Item 7, human rights disclosure. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Mr. Collingsworth. At this time, I'd like to thank our stockholders for all of their active participation in today's meeting and for those who just presented on the line. I'd also like to read some of the comments that have been submitted by you over the course of the meeting. The first comment comes from Michael Overbaugh, I take great pride in the fact that we haven't had to stoop to the level of what advertising represents to get where we are today. I'd hate to give in to that kind of temptation now when we're so close to becoming a household name that's based solely on our merit alone.
If assets do end up having to be set aside for marketing, I'd like to suggest that rather than shoving ads down the customers' throats, we establish some sort of hardcore nationwide campaign and event with the goal of getting as many people as possible behind the wheel of a Tesla for an introduction drive. It's well known how far just doing that alone goes to converting people into fans.
A line I recently ran across says, You can talk all about the specs as much as you want, but when it comes to buying a car, what ultimately puts butts in seats is the feeling that the vehicle gives you. By demonstrating that Tesla clearly has both the specs and the feeling, what more needs saying? Our second comment comes from the United Steelworkers on behalf of the Clean Air Now Coalition of Western New York by Sabrina Liu. It reads as follows, Proposal six and seven up for vote this year are the results of widespread concern about mistreatment of Tesla workers at U.S. factories and across the supply chain. It is clear that Tesla is not interested in addressing the harm they have caused to their workers as their board is advising shareholders to vote against the proposal.
We're urging all shareholders to vote in favor of proposals six and seven, on behalf of our workers at the United Steelworkers here in Western New York and for Tesla employees across the country and across the global supply chain. While this doesn't repair the harm that's already been caused to countless employees, nor repair harm to children and communities forced into slave labor in the DRC, they represent steps towards a more just workplace at Tesla. This concludes all of the comments. Thank you all for your participation in the comments. We'll now have a final opportunity for any of you to submit proxies in order for them to be counted. I'll pause and wait for a moment for you to do that. Okay. I declare that the polls are now closed.
Based on the proxies that we have previously received, I'd like to announce on a preliminary basis that our stockholders have approved the recommendations of Tesla's board on all agenda items other than the stockholder proposal for an advisory vote regarding simple majority voting in our governing documents. After the final tabulation is completed, we'll formally announce the results of the voting by filing a Form 8-K with the SEC within four business days of today. This now concludes the official business of Tesla's 2020 annual stockholders meeting, which is now adjourned. Next, we will have a company update and a year in review presented by Elon, and then we will start our Battery Day event. During the course of those following sessions, we may discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. Such statements are predictions based on our current expectations.
Actual events or results could materially differ due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those disclosed in our most recent 10-Q filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements represent our views as of today. They shouldn't be relied on after today, and we disclaim any obligation to update them after today as well. We will now continue with the company update and year in review, and it's my pleasure to introduce Tesla co-founder and CEO, Mr. Elon Musk.
Hey, everyone. Well, this is definitely a new approach. We've got the Tesla drive-in movie theater, basically. It's good to see everyone. It's a little hard to read the room with everyone being in cars, but it's the only way we could do it. Hopefully, it's cool, and hopefully, you can hear me. Can you guys hear me? Okay. All right, great. All right. Well, thanks for coming. I think it's been an incredible year, and I'd like to thank you for your support through tough times, good times. It's been great. Really appreciate everyone who's put their hard-earned money into Tesla. I think it's worked out pretty well. This has been a good year, and I think there's many good years to come. I'll go through the shareholder presentation, I think, fairly quickly because the real main event here is Battery Day.
Really, I'm just going through a recap of what's happened over the past year or so. I think starting from in terms of our ability to create a factory, just the huge kudos to the Tesla Shanghai team for being able to go from literally a dirt pile to volume production in 15 months. It's like, damn. I think something that's really quite noteworthy here is Tesla's the only foreign manufacturer to have a 100% owned factory in China. This is often not well understood or not appreciated, but to have the only 100% owned foreign factory in China is a really big deal. It's paying huge dividends here. We really wouldn't have the results that we have had this year without the great efforts of the Tesla China team. I'm super appreciative of that.
We'll see the Shanghai factory continue to scale quite a bit from where it is right now. I think we really could expect that to be, over time, a factory that produces over 1 million vehicles a year. Yeah, it's cool. Let's see. We also reached, in the past year, volume production of the Model Y, and this was the smoothest launch that we've ever had. I think we're definitely getting better at new vehicle launches and building factories and scaling production. As you've heard me say before, the hardest thing is scaling production, especially of a new technology. It's insanely difficult. Making a prototype is relatively easy, and if I think, what is the real achievement of Tesla in sort of car company terms, it wasn't making exciting prototypes.
It was that Tesla was really the first company in about a century in the U.S., the first U.S. company in the U.S., to reach volume production, and be sustainably profitable. The crazy thing is this has really not happened in 100 years. That's the actual super hard part. We now have four vehicles in volume production, S, 3, X, Y. Also, the toughest joke, I think maybe ever. It was a very difficult joke to make. We also introduced the lowest-cost solar in the U.S. It's only $1.49 a watt. We really just simplified the whole value chain.
Reduced sales and advertising, got rid of a bunch of unnecessary costs, and really are just relying upon the fact that it's just the lowest cost, most efficient solar in the U.S., providing both retrofit and the Solar Roof, which I think is a really great product. A hard product to make work, but it will be a major product line in the future. We also got four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability, which was very difficult. Yeah. Certainly a testament to the hard work of people at Tesla. To do this in extremely difficult times against a wide range of adverse circumstances was insanely hard, but we got it done. I think the future's looking very promising from an annual profitability standpoint. In order to do well financially, you really need economies of scale, and you need, ideally, the best technology.
I think we've had the best technology for a while, but now we are also achieving economies of scale. We're also rapidly improving autonomy, which is a massive value add to each car. I think the value of Tesla is going to be total, just on the vehicle side, total vehicles produced times the value of autonomy. That's a way to think about the future value of Tesla. We also have consistent free cash flow generation. This is really important for growth. A key element here is tightening up the time from when a car is ordered to when it is built and delivered. For a company that's growing rapidly, it's extremely important to tighten the supply chain and to have, from when parts arrive, put it into a car very quickly, and deliver the car very quickly to the customer.
If you can do that inside your payables timeline, then the faster you grow, the more cash you have. Conversely, if you're unable to do it within your payables timeline, the faster you grow, the less money you will have, which is obviously bad for a capital-intensive situation. Just tightening up and having the parts move very quickly to the factory, put it in a car, get it to a customer, makes a massive difference to cash flow generation. That's why it's extremely important to have a factory in each continent. If you don't at least have a factory in the continent, it is impossible to achieve this.
Having a factory in China that's able to serve China and then, soon, many other countries in the region will be key to us tightening that total chain of cash flow and getting, essentially, the faster we grow, the more cash. This is really important. That's also why it's important to have Giga Berlin complete, because then we'll have a factory in China, a factory in the U.S., and soon a second factory in the U.S. in Austin, and a factory in Europe. For Giga Texas in Austin, even if we had exactly the same costs as in California, it would still be advantageous to do it there because it's roughly two-thirds of the way across the U.S. In terms of delivering cars to the central U.S. and to the East Coast, it's just faster, it costs less, and it fundamentally improves our economics.
I think this is also maybe something that's not fully appreciated of just how important it is to have a factory, at least on the continent or reasonably close to where the end customers is, so you can tighten that whole chain. Industry performance. While the rest of industry has gone down, Tesla has gone up. I think this speaks to. Thanks. I'd like to thank all the customers for taking a chance on Tesla and buying our product, and really hope you're enjoying it. Our sales, as Al was saying, really grow by word of mouth. This is really, I think, a very pure, it's very pure in the sense that it's growing on the basis of existing owners recommending it to new customers. This is really, I think, a good way to grow. In 2019, we had 50% growth.
I think we'll do really pretty well in 2020. Probably somewhere between 30%-40% growth, despite a lot of very difficult circumstances. Pandemic, wildfires, it's like a whole bunch of difficult production issues. Thanks to the hard work of the Tesla team and a lot of innovative approaches to overcoming issues, we're able to still see significant growth in one of the most difficult, in fact, I say probably the most difficult year of Tesla's existence. We also published our extended impact report. At Tesla, we try very hard to do the right thing. If the right thing does not happen, it's just because we maybe made a mistake or weren't aware of it. We always try to do the right thing to the best of our ability.
Then we publish the extended impact report to show just a self-examination of, okay, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? What can we do better in the future? We're definitely trying to accomplish the most good, and so if we occasionally make a mistake, we work quickly to affix it and do the right thing. It's worth looking at the average lifecycle emissions in the U.S., and just how much better a Tesla is than, or an electric car than any kind of gasoline car. What we'll talk about in the Battery Day is also just how much the grids around the world and especially in the U.S. are greening. It's actually much faster than I think people realize. The U.S. is moving towards sustainable energy.
As we move more and more to sustainable energy, then effectively you end up building the solar factories and the car factories themselves with solar. With sustainable energy, over time, you'll even mine with sustainable energy, and eventually it will get to an effective emissions of zero. That's where things will end up. Yeah. We also have safety at the core of our design. The Tesla cars are the safest cars ever designed. We have the lowest probability of injury of any cars ever tested by the U.S. government, and that's just passive safety. When you add active safety into that, it's even better. If safety is important to you, which obviously it is, the safest car you could drive is a Tesla. I think some people aren't aware of this, but safety is paramount.
It is actually the number one design objective when we build a Tesla is safety. Our factories are also becoming safer. If you look at the accidents per total vehicle made, it's dramatically better than in the past. It's already better than industry average and we're confident we can get it to the best in the auto industry. Autopilot functionality continues to improve. You can see it in the safety report that we publish every quarter. It's just getting better and better. The U.S. average for collisions is at roughly 2.1 per million miles. With Autopilot engaged, it's 0.3. This is a profound difference, really massive. This will get even better. We're confident that over time we can get the probability of an accident, especially the probability of injury, to 10 times better than the industry average, like an order of magnitude better.
That's just a lot of lives saved and a lot of injuries avoided. That's a huge priority for us. On the Autopilot front, I think it's kind of hard for people to judge the progress of Autopilot. As a matter of course, I've always done this, I drive the bleeding edge alpha build of Autopilot. I sort of have insight into what is going on. Previously, about a couple of years ago, we were kind of stuck in a local maximum. We were improving, but the improvements kind of started tailing off and just not getting where they needed to be. I call this getting trapped in a local maximum. We had to do a fundamental rewrite of the entire Autopilot software stack, and all of the labeling software as well. We're now labeling in 3D video.
This is hugely different from previously where we were labeling essentially a bunch of single images from the eight cameras, and they would be labeled at different times by different people. Some of the labels you literally can't tell what it is you're labeling. It basically made it sort of in some cases impossible to label, and the labels had a lot of errors. With our new labeling tools, we label it in video. We actually label entire video segments. You get basically a surround video thing to label and with surround video and with time. It's now taking all cameras simultaneously and looking at how the images change over time and labeling that. Then the sophistication of the neural nets in the car and the overall logic in the car has improved dramatically.
I think we'll hopefully release a private beta of the Full Self-Driving version of Autopilot in, I think, a month or so. People will really understand just the magnitude of the change. It's profound. Yeah. Anyway, you'll see it's just like a hell of a step change. Because we had to rewrite everything, labeling software, just the entire code base, it took us quite a while. The sort of new, I call it like 4D in the sense that it's three dimensions plus time. It's just taken us a while to rewrite everything. You'll see what it's like. It's amazing. Yeah. It's clearly going to work. Tesla core competencies, we've got engineering, obviously. We're also manufacturing. I think manufacturing is underappreciated in general. The difficulty of designing the machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.
Making a Model 3 or Model Y or a Cybertruck prototype is really quite trivial compared to designing the factory that makes it. Especially if it's new technology and you want to use new manufacturing methods, it's just at least 10 to 100 times harder to do the factory than the prototype. That's why you see a lot of companies out there or startups, they'll bring out a prototype, but they just can't get it over the hump for manufacturing, because manufacturing of new technology especially, is the hardest thing by far. Basically, the prototype is at best 10% of the difficulty and probably closer to 1%. Then software. Tesla is both a hardware and a software company. A huge percentage of our engineers are actually software engineers, and you can think of our car as a laptop on wheels. Software is incredibly important.
Not just in the car, but also in the factory. The factory software is extremely important. Just software in general, these are fundamental. These are the three critical areas that are needed to make for an awesome company. Yeah. Now, we'll soon have three new factories incremental. Well, we have one already, on three different continents. Shanghai, we're expanding the Shanghai with the second phase. Berlin is making rapid progress, and Texas is making even faster progress. Yeah. With each factory, what we're trying to do is also improve the manufacturing technology. In some cases, like the Model Y made in Berlin might look the same, but it actually is made in a much more efficient way. Yeah, we'll talk about that later in the battery presentation. Yeah, launched Megapack, 3 MWh all-in-one energy storage solution. It's been great overall. Yeah.
All right, I think that's basically it, right? All right, thank you. All right. Well, thanks everyone for coming, and we'll be back in a little bit to go through the battery stuff. There's a little bit more in addition to the battery stuff, we've got a few extras as well. I think you'll really like what we have to say on batteries. The battery stuff we're going to talk about is truly revolutionary, and essential to Tesla's goal. The fundamental good of Tesla, it's like if you look back in history and say, "What good did Tesla do?" The good will be by how many years did we accelerate sustainable energy? That's the true metric of success. It matters if sustainable energy happens faster or slower. That's really how I think about Tesla and how we should sort of assess our progress.
By how many years did we accelerate sustainable energy? What we're going to talk about with batteries and a few other things will really explain how we're going to make a step change improvement in the acceleration of sustainable energy. Thank you.
Hi, folks. That was great. We're going to take a short break before we begin the Battery Day event. Stay tuned. If you're local and here in the audience today, you can feel free to get out of the cars and stretch your legs. Try to stay near the cars because we're going to begin promptly in a little bit. See you soon. I know, right?
[Break]
All right. So.
Hello, everyone.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Sure.
Yeah.
Thanks, Elon. Oh, hi. I'm Drew Baglino, SVP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla, and I'm incredibly excited to talk about what we've been doing with batteries here at Tesla.
Great. let's see, you got the clicker?
Yeah, I got the clicker, yeah.
Okay. I'll take it at first, perhaps.
Sure.
Obviously, the issues we're facing are very serious with climate change, and we're experiencing these issues on a day-to-day basis. It's incredibly important we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. Time really matters. This presentation is about accelerating the time to sustainable energy. The past five years were the hottest on record. We have what looks like a wall for CO2 PPM. Obviously, this time is not like the past. It's really important that we take action. Running this climate experiment is insane.
Especially when it's just a transitory one anyway.
Yes.
We're going to run out of these fossil fuels. Let's just move to the future and not run this experiment any longer.
Yeah. A little bit louder.
You got it.
Okay. Anyway, there is a lot of good news, though. A lot of people may not be aware that wind and solar comprise 75% of new electricity capacity in the U.S. this year. This is really major. The grid is going sustainable very quickly. Now, it's also worth noting that the length of time that power plants last is on the order of 25 years. Even if 100% of energy generation was sustainable, it would still take 25 years to convert the grid. It's also worth noting that in the past 10 years, power production from coal has dropped in half. It went from 46% of electricity in 2010 to 23% in 2020. This is a massive improvement. Good things are happening on a lot of levels. We just need to go faster.
In terms of Tesla's contribution, we've delivered over 1 million electric vehicles, 26 billion electric miles driven, and many gigawatt hours of stationary batteries, 17 TWh of solar generated. I think solar is sometimes underrated at Tesla, but it is a massive part of our future. The three parts of a sustainable energy future are sustainable energy generation, storage, and electric vehicles. We intend to play a significant role in all three. To accelerate the transition to sustainable energy, we must produce more EVs that need to be affordable, and a lot more energy storage, while building factories faster and with far less investment. Goal number one is a terawatt hour scale battery production. Tera is the new giga, and a terawatt is 1,000 times more than a gigawatt. We used to talk in terms of gigawatts.
In the future, we'll be talking in terms of terawatt hours. This is what's needed in order to transition the world to sustainability.
Yeah, you can see we're talking about 100x growth in batteries for electric vehicles to achieve this mission, and we are going to get there. It's just a matter of how fast, our intention is to accelerate it.
Yeah. You basically need on the order of roughly 10 TWh a year of battery production to transition the global fleet of vehicles to electric.
The average vehicle lasts 15 years, we're talking about 150 TWh , give or take, to transition all vehicles of all types to electric.
Yeah. It's a lot of batteries, basically. Yeah.
On the grid side, we have a similar mountain to climb, 1,600x growth from today's grid batteries to go 100% renewable on the grid and to take all of the existing heating fossil fuel uses in homes and businesses 100% electric.
Yeah. This number, I think, might grow even more. As the world economy matures and as countries with high populations industrialize, we could see this number be even more. Let's say it's roughly 20 TWh to 25 TWh per year, sustained for 15 to 25 years to transition the world to renewable. This is a lot.
Yeah.
Today's batteries can't scale fast enough. They're just too small. For Giga Nevada, 150 GWh per year is what we probably expect to make out of there, but this is really pretty small in the grand scheme of things. That's only 0.15 TWh . It costs too much.
We would need 135 fully built-out Nevada Gigafactories to achieve 20 TWh a year. It's not scalable enough of a solution. We need a dramatic rethink of the cell manufacturing system to scale as fast as we can and should.
Yeah, I think we should view this as more than just a question of money. Money is sort of like an ethereal thing, but it's really the amount of effort. You have a certain amount of effort in terms of people and machines, depending on how efficient that effort is, for a given amount of effort, you want the most amount of batteries. It's not just a question of, "Well, if we had $2 trillion tomorrow, you could make this." It's not that easy. You actually need to organize a massive number of people, build a lot of machines, build the machines that make the machines. It's incredibly important to have that effort yield the most number of batteries. Goal 2, obviously, we need to make more affordable cars.
I think one of the things that troubles me the most is that we don't yet have a truly affordable car. That is something that we will make in the future. In order to do that, we've got to get the cost of batteries down, and we've got to be better at manufacturing. We need to do something about this curve. The curve of the cost per kilowatt-hour of batteries is not improving fast enough. We've given this a lot of thought over many years to say, "Okay, how can we radically improve the cost per kilowatt-hour curve?" It's been somewhat flattening out actually in recent years.
Yeah. Early growth was promising, but you can see we're kind of plateauing.
Yeah.
That's what's motivating us to rethink how cells are produced and designed.
Yeah, exactly. EV market share is growing, but EVs are still inaccessible to all. You can see, as Drew was saying, it's starting to flatten out a little bit because the rate of improvement of the affordability of cars is just not fast enough. That's why we've got Battery Day.
Yeah. To make the best cars in the world, we design vehicles and factories from the ground up. Next.
Yeah.
Now we do this for batteries as well.
Yeah. It's weird, the slides don't show up quite right. Here. What shows up on the screen is not quite what shows up there anyway.
Oh, okay.
It's different.
Yeah, I think it's because that's. Yeah.
That one's current. It's supposed to be current. Anyway.
Let's get started. We have a plan to halve the cost per kilowatt hour.
Yeah.
It's not a plan that rests on a single innovation, some research project that'll never see the light of day. It's a plan that has taken creative engineering and industrialization across every facet of what makes a cell into a battery pack, from raw material to the finished thing. We're going to go through that plan with you today step by step and build up how we get to these goals and how we accelerate this transition and make our vehicles and our grid batteries more affordable.
Yeah. We've basically thought through every element of the battery, or almost every element. There are a few more elements that we won't get to today, but we will get to in the future.
Yes. First, before we get too far into it, let's talk about what is in a battery cell. We've got the cap and the can, negative and positive terminals of the cell. When you open that cell, you've got a tab connected to those terminals, what we call the jelly roll, which is the wound electrodes on the inside. You can actually see what this looks like as you unwind it. This is over a meter long in a typical 2170 cell, so it's quite a long winding process. You can see the tab still there. To explain what's actually going on here, we've identified we've got anode, cathode, separator, positive and negative terminal. Watch what happens as we, there we go, discharge the cell.
Got lithium moving from anode to cathode, then the reverse when we charge the cell, lithium moving from cathode to anode across the separator. This is the basis of what makes all lithium-ion batteries, no matter what the form factor is. When we look at what's happened to date, at least in our products, we've moved from the 18650 form factor to the 2170 form factor through great collaboration with our partners, Panasonic, new partners like LG and CATL, and probably others in the future.
Yeah. Actually, a slight note on why is the one called 18650, although not on the slide, versus the 2170, is that the first two digits refer to the diameter and the second two digits refer to the length. That helps explain what's up with these weird numbers. Nobody could explain to me why there was an extra zero. I said, "Okay, well, we're deleting the zero that nobody can explain in future form factors." That's why it's like the 18650 bizarrely, but going forward, it's the 2170 because we just got rid of the extra zero because it's pointless.
This was an evolutionary step, going from 1865 to 2170, bringing 50% more energy into the cell. When we look to the ideal cell design, if we were to do it ourselves, we need to go beyond just what we're looking at is in front of us and study the full spectrum of options. As you can see, we swept the key figures of merit, how much we can reduce the cost and how much vehicle range increases as we change the outer diameter of the cell. We found a sweet spot somewhere around 46 mm. It's not just about a bigger form factor. Anybody could make a bigger form factor.
Any fool. Any fool could make a bigger form factor.
There are-
Now we're not any fool.
Yeah, exactly. There are problems as you make cells larger. In fact, supercharging and thermals in general become really challenging as you make bigger cells. This was the challenge that our team set our sights on to overcome. We did. We came up with this tabless architecture that maybe you've heard about, that basically removes the thermal problem from the equation and allows us to go to the absolute lowest cost form factor, and the simplest manufacturing process. This is what we mean when we talk about tabless. It's kind of a beautiful thing.
Yeah, that's what these T-shirts mean. It's very esoteric. It's like nobody could figure it out.
Yeah. We basically took the existing foils, laser patterned them, and enabled dozens of connections into the active material through this shingled spiral you can see. With simpler manufacturing, fewer parts, 50 mm versus 250 mm electrical path length, which is how we get all the thermal benefits.
Yeah. This is important to appreciate. Basically, the distance that that electron has to travel is just much less. You actually have a shorter path length in a large tabless cell than you have in the smaller cell with tabs. This is a big deal. Even though the cell is bigger, it actually has more power. The power-to-weight ratio is actually better than the smaller cell with tabs. Again, this is quite hard to do. Nobody's done it before. It really took a tremendous amount of effort within Tesla engineering to figure out how do we make a freaking tabless cell, and have it actually work and then connect that to the top cap. There's a whole bunch of things that we're keeping a little secret sauce here that we're not telling everything.
Sometimes what's elegant and simple is still hard, and it took us a lot of trials, but we're happy where we ended up.
Everything's simple in recollection. It's hard until it's discovered, and then it's simple. Anyway, there's a lot of really cool things going on that enable tabless and it's really due to a really great engineering team. Drew and the rest of the team have done amazing work in achieving this tabless construction. I think it may sort of sound a bit silly to some people, but this is like for people that really know cells, this is a massive breakthrough.
For cylindricals to be able to get rid of the tabs dramatically simplifies winding and coating.
Yeah.
Has an awesome thermal and performance benefit.
Yeah. Just to elaborate on that a bit, it's like when the cell is going through the system, it has to keep stopping where all the tabs are.
Yes.
You can't do a continuous motion production if you have tabs. You have to keep stopping. There's a rate at which you can start and stop and accelerate again, and it really slows down the rate of production. Sometimes you get the tabs wrong, and you also lose a little bit of active area. It's really a huge pain in the ass to have tabs.
Yes.
From a production standpoint.
Yes. When we put it all together and go to our new 80-mm length, 4680, we call this new cell design. We get 5x the energy with 6x the power and enable 16% range increase, just form factor alone.
Yeah. It's pretty great. Just to clarify that when we see these + 16% or whatever the percentage range increase is, these are the amounts due just to that particular innovation.
Yes.
We'll list a whole bunch of innovations, and then when you add them up, you get a total improvement in energy density and cost. These numbers are what refer to just this thing.
Yeah. I want to stress, this is not just a concept or a rendering. We're starting to ramp up manufacturing of these cells at our pilot 10-GWh production facility just around the corner.
Yeah. It's a video of some of what's going on in the plant. Now, to be clear, it will take about a year to reach the 10-GWh capacity. This is important to appreciate, like when you build a factory, there's a certain capacity that you design to, and then it takes some period of time to actually achieve that capacity. I would say it's probably about a year before we get to the 10-GWh annualized rate with the pilot plant. This is just a pilot plant. The actual production plants will be more on the order of maybe 200 GWh , maybe more over time.
Thank you. Let's stack up everything we just saw at the cell level. Just the cell form factor change enables a 14% dollar per kilowatt hour reduction, just that cell form factor change. Now that you've been teased on this factory, we're going to go on and walk step by step through that factory and discuss a series of innovations there. When thinking about the ideal cell factory, we have inspirations behind us in the paper and bottling industry, where from humble beginnings, over a century of innovation has enabled mass scale, continuous motion, unbelievably low manufacturing cost. When we think about the lithium-ion industry, which is really only in its third decade of high volume production, it has so far to go to achieve similar scale and simplicity.
That was the inspiration that we set out to the team as we thought about how to marry cell design and manufacturing in the best possible factory. Let's talk a little bit about what's in a cell factory. First, there's an electrode process where the active materials are coated into films onto foils. Those coated foils are wound in the winding process we just talked about, where if you do have tabs, you have to start and stop a lot. The jelly roll is assembled into the can, sealed, filled with electrolyte, and then sent to formation where the cell is charged for the first time, and where the electrochemistry is set and the quality of the cell is verified.
We set out at every step of this process to try to take that inspiration we just showed and think about how we make those processes fundamentally better and more scalable. One of the most important processes is where it all begins, the wet process of the electrode coating. Just to give you all a sense of scale, I'm going to walk through what's in that wet process. You've got mixing where the powders are mixed with either a water or a solvent, solvents for the cathode. That mix then goes into a large coat and dry oven where the slurry is coated onto the foil. Huge ovens, tens of meters long, dried, and that solvent then has to be recovered. You can see the solvent recovery system. Finally, the coated foil is compressed to the final density.
When you're looking at this, you're like, "Wow, that's a lot of equipment for one step," especially when you consider that little speck next to the coating oven is a person. This is serious iron involved in making batteries. Wouldn't it be great if we could skip that solvent step, which is one of those dig a ditch and then fill it kind of things, where you put the solvent in and then take it out and recycle it, and just go straight to dry mix to coat? That's what the dry process really is about. In the most basic form, you can see it here on a benchtop. Literally powder into film. As simple as that.
It's hard, actually, just to be clear. If this was easy, everyone would do it. It's not like dry coating electrode is actually easy. It's actually very hard to do what appears to be a simple thing. It's worth noting, we did acquire Maxwell as a little over a year ago, I guess. It's certainly a good company and everything, but the dry coating they had was like, I would call proof of concept. Since the acquisition, we've actually revved the machine that does the dry coating four times. We're on revision four post-acquisition of the machine. There's still a lot of work to do. I would not say this is completely in the bag. There's still a lot of work to do.
As you scale, go from benchtop to lab to pilot to volume production, there are actually major issues that you encounter at every level. It's not like you make something work on your bench and bingo, now you can make a bazillion of it.
Absolutely.
It's insanely difficult to scale up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you do scale it up.
Yeah
What you saw before becomes this.
Yeah.
You can see the motivation. A 10x reduction in footprint, a 10 x reduction in energy, and a massive reduction in investment. As Elon was saying, simple is hard.
Yeah. Yeah, to be clear, I would like not say that right now it's just totally working. It's close to working, but it's not, even now at the pilot plant level, it is close to working. Well, it's fair to say it probably does work, but with not a high yield.
Yeah.
So-
We're still ironing out the kinks, but we've made tens of thousands of cells.
Yeah.
Thousands of kilometers of electrode.
Sure.
We are on the fourth generation of the equipment, so we've learned a lot along the way.
Yeah.
It is super demanding because every atom has its place if you want to deliver the energy density and the cycle life and the supercharging.
Yeah.
We're confident that we will get there.
Yeah.
It will be a lot of work along the way.
There's a clear path to success, but a ton of work between here and there.
Yeah.
This is a really profound improvement. Again, for people that know battery manufacturing, this is gigantic. We'll probably be on machine revision six or seven by the time we do large-scale production. The rate at which the machines are being improved is extremely rapid. Literally every three or four months is a new rev.
Yeah. Beyond the electrode, we continue to innovate on every other process step. Let's talk a little bit about assembly, which is next. The key to a high-performing assembly line is accomplishing processes while in motion, continuous motion, and thinking of the line as a highway, max velocity down the highway. No start and stop, no city driving.
Exactly. No stoplights and traffic lights or anything. You want the highway.
You want the highway.
Yeah.
Together with our internal design team that makes this equipment and designs this equipment, we coupled thinking about how to make the best cell with thinking about how to make the best equipment so that we could accomplish the fastest parts per minute rates on all of these tools. Through all of that development, we were able to get to the point where we can implement assembly lines, one line, 20 GWh, seven times increase in output per line. When you're thinking about scalability and pure effort, having one line be 7x the capability is just effort multiplying.
Yeah. You can think about the fundamental physics of a factory or something like, I think it's actually quite a lot like the rocket equation, where you've got basically the rocket equation, you've got your exhaust velocity and then the log of the start and end masses. It's basically saying, how fast are things going and what percentage of the factory volume is doing useful work? Conveyance does not count as useful work.
Only the value-added steps.
If you break the factory down into cubic meter sections, or smaller, it could be one liter sections, and say, is a majority of this volume doing useful work? You would be astounded at how bad most factories are. They're maybe 2% or 3%, including our factory in Fremont. I think it is possible to get to at least 10x that of volumetric efficiency, so more like 30% -ish, maybe more, and be 10x better, which means the factory can be 10x smaller. The other thing is how fast are things going through the factory? It's like speed and density. A factory that's moving at, say, twice the speed of another factory is equivalent to two factories, basically.
The company that will be successful is the company with one factory can accomplish what other companies take two or three or four factories to do. This is what we're trying to do here is say, "Okay, how do we, with one factory, achieve what maybe five or even 10 factories would normally be required to achieve?
The vertical integration with the machine design teams at Grohmann and Hibar and others allows us to really accomplish that, because we don't have all these edge conditions between one piece of equipment and another. We can design the entire machine to be one machine and remove all of these unnecessary steps.
Yeah. Basically, Tesla is aiming to be the best at manufacturing of any company on Earth. This is the thing that's actually most important in the long run. I think, just from a company standpoint and from basically achieving sustainability as fast as possible, but I think also for long-term competitiveness, eventually every car company will have long-range electric cars. Eventually, every company will have autonomy. I think, not every company will be great at manufacturing. Tesla will be absolutely head and shoulders above anyone else in manufacturing. That is our goal.
Manufacturing is hard, and hard problems are fun.
Yeah.
To solve. Okay, now let's talk about formation. In a typical cell factory, formation represents 25% of the investment. What is formation? It's charging and discharging cells and verifying the quality of the cell. Turns out we've charged and discharged billions and billions of cells in our vehicles, so we know a thing or two about that. The typical formation setup is you charge and discharge each cell individually. In our car, we charge thousands of cells at once. We took our principal and our power electronics, leveraging Powerwall, vehicle battery management systems, and others, to dramatically improve the formation equipment cost-effectiveness and density. 86% reduction in formation investment, 75% reduction in footprint.
So.
You want to take this one?
Sure. Essentially, what this translates to, based on what we know today, is about a 75% reduction in the investment per kilowatt-hour, or gigawatt-hour. It's just basically four times better than the current state of the art to the best of our knowledge. I think there's probably room to improve even beyond that.
Definitely.
Definitely, yeah. We're able to, from a volume standpoint, actually get what, in a smaller form factor than Giga Nevada, we were able to get many times the cell output. You can see, basically, we can get a terawatt-hour in less space than it took to make a gigawatt-hour, 150 GWh. This is pretty profound. It's like, I would actually not have thought this was possible several years ago, that we could actually get to terawatt-hour scale in less space than what we currently envision for doing 150 GWh.
Yes, simpler accelerates terawatt-hour scale, that's what we need to do to accelerate our mission. As Elon said, we're going to try to even improve on this as we push towards our goals.
This is just talking about Tesla internal cell production. As I tweeted out earlier, we will continue to use our cell suppliers, Panasonic and LG and CATL. This is 100 GWh supplemental to what we buy from suppliers. Essentially, this does reduce our weighted average cost of a cell. It does, it allows us to make a lot more cars and a lot more stationary storage. Long-term, we're expecting to make on the order of 3,000 GWh or 3 TWh per year. I think we've got a good chance of achieving this actually before 2030. I'm highly confident that we could do it by 2030.
When you look at the size of that factory on the previous page, it really shows how enabling all these advancements are in achieving a 3 TWh goal by 2030. Not only is all of that manufacturing innovation fantastic for enabling scale, it's also an additional 18% reduction in dollar per kilowatt-hour at the battery pack level.
Wait, there's more.
Wait, there's more.
Yeah.
We have a manufacturing system. We've got a cell design. What are the active materials we're going to put in that cell design? Let's talk about the anode first. Let's talk about silicon. Why is silicon awesome? It's awesome because it's the most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen, which means it's everywhere. It's sand.
Yeah. Sand is silicon dioxide.
Yeah. It happens to store nine times more lithium than graphite, which is the typical anode material in lithium-ion batteries today. Why isn't everybody using it? The main reason is because the challenge with silicon is that it expands 4x when fully charged with lithium. Basically, all of that expansion stress on the particle, the particles start cracking. They start electrically isolating. You lose capacity, the energy retention of the battery starts to fade. It also gums up with a passivation layer that has to keep reforming as the particles expand.
Basically, with silicon, the cookie crumbles and gets gooey. That's basically what happens.
Good analogy.
Yeah.
Current approaches to solve this, which exist, I mean, we have silicon in the cars that you're all in right now, are involved highly engineered, expensive materials in the scheme of things. They're still great, they enable some of the benefits of silicon. They just don't enable all of it, they're not scalable enough. You can see some of the things that maybe you've heard of, SiOx, silicon with carbon, or silicon nanowires. That's the space right now. What we're proposing is a step change in capability and a step change in cost. What that really is to just go to the raw metallurgical silicon itself. Don't engineer the base metal. Just start with that design for it to expand in how you think of the particle in the electrode design and how you code it.
Yeah. I'm not sure if you saw those. Basically, $1 per kWh.
Yeah.
Basically, if you use simple silicon, it's dramatically less than even the silicon that is currently used in the batteries that are made today. You can use a lot more of it.
The anode, yeah, with this silicon and the anode costs $1.20 a kilowatt hour.
Yeah.
How does it work? Start with raw metallurgical silicon, stabilize the surface with an elastic ion-conducting polymer coating that is applied through a very scalable approach. No chemical vapor deposition, no highly engineered high CapEx solutions. Then integrated into the electrode through a robust network formed out of a highly elastic binder. In the end, by leveraging this silicon to its potential, we can increase the range of our vehicles by an additional 20%, just this improvement.
Yeah, it gets cheaper and longer range.
When we take that anode cost reduction, we're looking at another 5% dollar per kilowatt-hour reduction at the battery pack level. There's more. Let's talk about cathodes. What is a battery cathode? Cathodes are like bookshelves where the metal, the nickel, the cobalt, the manganese, or aluminum is like the shelf, and the lithium is the book. Really what sets apart these different metals is how many books of lithium they can fit on the shelves and how sturdy the shelves are. Cobalt is a part-
Yeah, sorry. I was just going to say, it's tough to exactly figure out what the right analogy is to explain cathode and anode, but a bookshelf is probably a pretty good one in the sense that you need a stable structure to contain the ions. You want a structure that does not crumble or get gooey or basically that holds its shape in both the cathode and the anode. As you're moving these ions back and forth, it needs to retain its structure. If it doesn't retain its structure, then you lose cycle life and your battery capacity drops very quickly.
Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. I think people are always talking about, like, "Oh, what's the cathode going to be? Is it NCA?" Whatever. The thing to consider is just fundamentally what the metals are capable of, and that's what we have on the chart here. Dollar per kilowatt-hour cathode of just the metal using just LME, London Metal Exchange prices, versus the energy density of just the cathode. You can see nickel is the cheapest and the highest energy density. That's why increasing nickel is a goal of ours and really everybody's in the battery industry. One of the reasons why cobalt is even used at all is because it is a very stable bookshelf. The challenge with going to pure nickel is stabilizing that bookshelf with only nickel.
That's what we've been working on with our high nickel cathode development, which has zero cobalt in it, leveraging novel coatings and dopants, we can get a 15% reduction in cathode dollar per kilowatt hour.
Yeah. Big deal.
It's not just about nickel.
Yeah, sure. In order to scale, we really need to make sure that we're not constrained by total nickel availability. I actually spoke with the CEOs of the biggest mining companies in the world and said, "Please make more nickel." "This is very important." I think they are going to make more nickel. There's also, I think we need to have a three-tiered approach to batteries. Starting with iron, that's like a medium range, and then nickel manganese as sort of a medium-plus intermediate, and then a high nickel for long-range applications like Cybertruck and the Semi. Something like a Semi truck, it's extremely important to have a high energy density in order to get long range.
Just to give iron a bit more time, although if you look at the watt hours per kilogram at the cathode level of iron, it looks like nickel's twice as good. When you've fully considered at the pack level, everything else taken into account, nickel is about maybe 50% or 60% better than iron. Iron is a little better than it would seem when you look at it at the pack level fully considered. It's not as good as nickel. Nickel's like 50%-60% better. It's actually pretty good. Good for stationary storage and for medium-range applications where energy density is not paramount. Then, as I said, for intermediate, it's a nickel manganese.
It's relatively straightforward to do a cathode that's 2/3 nickel, 1/3 manganese, which would then allow us to make 50% more cell volume with the same amount of nickel.
With very little energy trade-off.
Yeah.
Just enough to have you still want to use 100% nickel for something like a Semi truck, but really not much of a sacrifice at all.
Yeah.
Beyond the metals, because a lot of people spend time talking about the metals, actually, the cathode process itself is a big target. 35% of the cathode dollar per kilowatt hour is just in transferring it into its final form. We see that as a big target, and we decided to take that on. Here's a view of the traditional cathode process. Effectively, if you start at the left and you have the metal from the mine, the first thing that happens is the metal from the mine is changed into an intermediate thing called a metal sulfate, because that's just happened to be what chemists wanted a long time ago.
When you're making the cathode, you have to take this intermediate thing called a metal sulfate, add chemicals, add a whole bunch of water, a whole bunch of stuff happens in the middle, and at the end, you get that little bit of cathode and a whole bunch of wastewater and byproducts.
Yeah. It's insanely complicated. If you're just like, it's a small world journey of, I am a nickel atom, what happens to me? It's crazy. Like you're going around the world three times. There's the moral equivalent of digging the ditch, filling the ditch, and digging the ditch again. It's total madness, basically. These things just grew up as they're just legacy things. It's like how it was done before, and then they connected the dots but really didn't think of the whole thing from a first principle standpoint, saying, "How do we get from the nickel ore in the ground to the finished nickel product for a battery?" We've looked at the entire value chain and said, "How can we make this as simple as possible?
That's what we're proposing here with our process. As you can see, a whole lot less is going on here. We get rid of the intermediate metal water, final product cathode, recirculate the water, no wastewater at all. When you summarize all of that, it's a 66% reduction in CapEx investment, a 76% reduction in process cost, and zero wastewater. Much more scalable solution.
Yeah.
When you think about the fact that now we're actually just directly consuming the raw metal nickel powder, it dramatically simplifies the metal refining part of the whole process. We can eliminate billions in battery-grade nickel intermediate production. It's not needed at all.
Yeah.
We can also use that same process we showed on the previous page to directly consume the metal powder coming out of recycled electric vehicle and grid storage batteries. This process enables both simpler mining and simpler recycling. Now that we have this process, obviously, we're going to go and start building our own cathode facility in North America and leveraging all of the North American resources that exist for nickel and lithium. Just doing that, just localizing our cathode supply chain and production, we can reduce miles traveled by all the materials that end up in the cathode by 80%, which is huge for cost.
Yeah. To be clear, cathode production would be part of the Tesla cell production plant. It would just be basically, raw materials coming from the mine, and from raw materials in the mine out comes a battery.
On that note, the way the lithium ends up in the cell is through the cathode, so then we should obviously onsite lithium conversion as well, which is what we will do using a new process that we're going to pioneer. That's a sulfate-free process. Again, skip the intermediate. 33% reduction in lithium cost, 100% electric facility co-located with the cathode plant.
Yeah. It's important to note that there is a massive amount of lithium on Earth.
Yeah.
Lithium is not like oil. There's a massive amount of it pretty much everywhere. In fact, there's enough lithium in the United States to convert the entire United States fleet to electric. Like all the cars in the United States, like 300 million or something like that, every vehicle in the United States can be converted to electric using only lithium that is available in the United States.
Discovered today.
Yeah, what we already know is existing.
People really haven't even been looking.
Yeah. People haven't been trying because it's just widely available. It is important to say, like, okay, what is the smartest way to take the ore and extract the lithium and do so in an environmentally friendly way? We actually discovered, again, looking at a first principles physics standpoint, instead of just the way it's always been done, is we found that we can actually use table salt, sodium chloride, to basically extract the lithium from the ore. Nobody's done this before. To the best of our knowledge, nobody's done this. All the elements are reusable. It's a very sustainable way of obtaining lithium. We actually got rights to a lithium clay deposit in Nevada.
Over 10,000 acres.
Over 10,000 acres. The nature of the mining is actually, I think, also very environmentally sensitive in that we take a chunk of dirt out of the ground, remove the lithium, and then put the chunk of dirt back where it was. It will look pretty much the same as before. It will not look terrible and yeah, it'll be nice.
Yeah.
So.
Simply mix clay with salt, put it in water, salt comes out with the lithium, done.
Yeah. It's pretty crazy.
We're really excited about this, and there really is enough lithium in Nevada alone to electrify the entire U.S. fleet.
Yeah. That's true, actually, just what's in Nevada. Basically, there's so much damn lithium on Earth, it's crazy. It's one of the most common elements on the planet.
Eventually, as we said at the beginning, when we get to this steady state, 20 TWh per year of production. We will transfer the entire non-renewable fleet of both power plants, home heating and industry heating, and vehicles to electric. At that point, we have an awesome resource in those batteries to recycle to make new batteries. We don't need to do any more mining at that point, and you can see why.
Yeah.
The difference in the value of the material coming back from the vehicle versus the ground, you'd always go to the vehicle. We recycle 100% of our vehicle batteries today. Actually, we are starting our pilot full-scale recycling production at Gigafactory Reno next quarter to continue to develop this process as our recycling returns grow.
To date, it's been done by third parties, but we think we can recycle the batteries more effectively, especially since we're making the same battery as the thing we're recycling. Whereas third-party recyclers have to consider batteries of all kinds.
Yeah. Just to think about what this actually means, the recycling resource is always 10 or greater years delayed because batteries last a really long time. Eventually, it is the way that all resources will be made available, and that's why we're investing in this recycling facility in Nevada.
Yeah. Long-term, new batteries will come from old batteries, once the fleet reaches steady state.
Right. Okay. We just talked about scaling cathode and recycling. All of the benefits that you just saw are added to this benefit of a 12% reduction in dollars per kilowatt hour at the battery pack level. Almost at our halve the cost goal. There's one more section. Take it away, Elon.
Great. There's an architecture that we've been wanting to do at Tesla for a long time, and we finally figured it out. I think it's the way that all-electric cars in the future will ultimately be made. It's the right way to do things. It starts with having a single-piece casting for the front body and the rear body. In order to do this, we commissioned the largest casting machine that has ever been made, and it's currently working just over the road at our Fremont plant. It's pretty sweet. Currently making the entire rear section of the car as a single-piece, high-pressure die-cast aluminum. In order to do this, we actually had to develop our own alloy, because we wanted a high-strength casting alloy that did not require coatings or heat treatment. This is a big deal for castings.
Especially with a large casting, if you heat treat it afterwards, it tends to deform. It does this potato chip thing. It's very hard to keep a large casting to have its shape. In order to achieve this, there was no alloy that existed that could do this, so we developed our own alloy, a special alloy of aluminum that has high strength without heat treat and is very castable. That's a great achievement of our materials team. In fact, in general, we've got a lot of advanced materials coming for Tesla, new alloys and materials that have never existed before. You're basically making the front and rear of the car as a single piece, and that then interfaces to what we call the structural battery, where the battery, for the first time, will have dual use.
The battery will both have the use as an energy device and as structure. This is absolutely the way things are done. In the early days of aircraft, they would carry the fuel tanks as cargo. The fuel tanks actually were quite difficult to carry. They were basically worse than cargo. You had to bolt them down. It was very difficult. Somebody said, "Hey, what if we just make the fuel tank in wing shape?" All modern airplanes, your wing is just a fuel tank in wing shape. This is absolutely the way to do it. The fuel tank serves as dual structure, and it's no longer cargo. It's fundamental to the structure of the aircraft. This was a major breakthrough. We're doing the same for cars. This is really quite profound. Effectively, the non-cell portion of the battery has negative mass.
We save so much mass in the rest of the vehicle, we save more mass in the rest of the vehicle than the non-cell portion of the battery. It's like, well, how do you really minimize the mass of a battery? Make it negative. Make the non-cell portion of the battery pack negative. It also allows us to pack the cells more densely because we do not have intermediate structure in the battery pack. Instead of having these supports and stabilizers and stringers and structural elements in the battery, we now have a lot more space in the battery because the pack itself is structural. What we do essentially, instead of having just a filler that is a flame retardant, which is currently what is in the 3/Y battery packs, we have a filler that is a structural adhesive, as well as flame retardant.
It effectively glues the cells to the top and bottom sheet, and this allows you to do shear transfer between the upper and lower sheet. Just like if you have a Formula One craft or a racing boat and you have carbon fiber face sheets and, say, aluminum honeycomb between them, this gives you incredible stiffness, and it's really the way that any super-fast thing works is you create, basically, a honeycomb sandwich with two face sheets. This is actually even better than what aircraft do, because aircraft do not do this. They can't do this because fuel is liquid. In our case, the batteries are solid, so we can actually use the steel shell case of the battery to transfer shear from the upper and lower face sheet, which makes for an incredibly stiff structure, even stiffer than a regular car.
Yeah.
In fact, if this was in a convertible that had no upper structure, that convertible would be stiffer than a regular car. It's just really major. It improves the mass efficiency of the battery, and then those castings are also quite important because you want to transfer load into the structural battery pack in a very smooth, continuous way, so you don't put arbitrary point loads into the battery. You want to sort of feather the load out from the front and rear into the structural battery. It also allows us to move the cells closer to the center of the car because in the top one, we've got all the supports and stuff. The volumetric efficiency of the structural pack is much better than a non-structural pack, and we actually bring the cells closer to the center.
Because they're closer to the center, it reduces the probability of a side impact potentially contacting the cells, because any kind of side impact has to go further in order to reach the cells. It also improves what's called the polar moment of inertia, which is that you can think of like when there's an ice skater, arms out or arms in. Arms in, you rotate faster. If you can bring things closer to the center, you reduce the polar moment of inertia, and that means the car maneuvers better. It just feels better. You don't know why, but it just feels more agile. It's really cool. This is really major. Like I said, 10% mass reduction in the body of the car, 14% range increase, 370 fewer parts.
I really think that long term, any cars that do not take this architecture will not be competitive.
It's not just at the product level a better product, but in the factory, it's a massive simplification. You saw the part removal. It's casting machines, it's the structural battery pack. We're looking at over 50% reduction in investment per gigawatt hour, 35% reduction in floor space, and we'll continue to improve that as we make the vehicle factory of the future.
Yeah. Major improvements on all fronts from the cell all the way to the vehicle.
In addition to the improvements we just said on enabling additional range and improving the structural performance of the vehicle, it is worth another 7% dollar per kilowatt hour reduction at the battery pack level, bringing our total reductions now to 56% dollars per kilowatt hour.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right, stacking it up, we're not just talking about cost or range, we've got to look at all the facets. Range increase, we're unlocking up to 54% increase in range for our vehicles and energy density for our energy products. 56% reduction in dollars per kilowatt hour at the battery pack level, and a 69% reduction in investment per gigawatt hour, which is the true enabler when we talk back about how do we achieve this scale problem here.
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's pretty nice that investment per gigawatt hour reduction is 69%. Who would've thought?
Yeah. Just happened to have it pan out that way.
Yeah. 0.420%, of course. Yeah, what this enables us to do is achieve a new trajectory in the reduction of cell cost. Now, to be clear, it will take us probably a year to 18 months to start realizing these advantages, and probably to fully realize the advantages, probably it's about three years or thereabouts. If we could do this instantly, we would. I think what this bodes, it just really bodes well for the future and means that the long-term scaling of Tesla and the sustainable energy products that we make will be massively increased. What tends to happen as companies get bigger is things tend to slow down. Well, actually, they're going to speed up.
They have to speed up if we're going to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.
Long term, we want to try to replace about at least 1% of the total vehicle fleet on Earth, which is about 2 billion vehicles. Long term, we want to try to make about 20 million vehicles a year.
I think it's important to point out that when we talked about 3 TWh by 2030, the problem is a 20 TWh problem. Everybody needs to be accelerating their efforts to accomplish these objectives. Doesn't matter where you are in the value chain, there is a ton to do. You need to rethink from first principles how you do it so that you can scale to meet all of our objectives.
Yep.
Elon?
Sure.
What does this mean?
What does this mean for our future products? We're confident that long-term we can design and manufacture a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle. This has always been our dream from the beginning of the company. I even wrote a blog piece about it, because our first car was an expensive sports car, and then a slightly less expensive sedan, and then finally a sort of a, I don't know, mass market premium, like the Model 3 and Model Y. Really, it was always our goal to try to make an affordable electric car. I think probably, like I said, about three years from now, we're confident we can make a very compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that's also fully autonomous.
When you think about the $25,000 price point, you have to consider how much less expensive it is to own an electric vehicle.
Yeah.
Actually, it becomes even more affordable at that $25,000 price point.
Yeah. We have extreme performance and range. We should probably talk about the Model S Plaid. What about that? Yeah. We took the latest Plaid out to Laguna Seca on Sunday. It got 1 minute 30 seconds , and we think probably there's another three seconds or more to take off that time. We're confident the Model S Plaid will achieve the best track time of any production vehicle ever, of any kind, two-door or otherwise. You can order it now, and it's available basically end of next year. Now we'll move to Q&A.
Absolutely.
We'll invite a few people on stage.
Come on up, team.
This is just a small portion of the team. I thought it'd be great to show you some more of the team. When we do Q&A, we can give various people different questions to answer.
Sounds great. Actually, I don't know how we're getting the questions.
Actually, I don't know either.
Is somebody going to read them to us?
Okay, well, you can maybe get out of the car for two seconds and yell it at us. How do we get any questions?
Oh, there are mics. Okay, wait for the mic.
Oh, there are mics. Okay, great.
All right.
Okay, we'll definitely need to give people mics because otherwise there's no way. Sorry? All right, we're going to pass some mics out.
What are you going to name for the $25,000 car?
Oh, we don't have a name for the $25,000 car yet.
It's a great question, though.
Elon, you talked about manufacturing cells in Berlin.
Yes, we will be manufacturing cells in Berlin. Yep.
Thermal management system? For homes.
Oh, you mean like the home HVAC? Yeah, that's a pet project that I'd love to get going on. I don't know. Maybe we'll start working on that next year. I just think there's, man, you could really make a way better home HVAC system that's really quiet and super efficient and, yeah, super energy efficient and also has a way better filter for particles and, yeah, and it works very reliably. We've already developed that for the car. The heat pump in the Model Y is really pretty spectacular. It's tiny. It's efficient. It has to last for 15 years. It's got to work in all kinds of conditions, from the coldest winter to the hottest summer. We've actually already done a massive amount of the work necessary for a really kickass home HVAC. You can also stack them.
If you want to, say, depending upon the size of your house or whatever, how much you need, you can just basically stack them, and, yeah, just have a very compelling, super efficient home HVAC. You can also communicate with the car, and it'll know when you're coming home. It's like, oh, I don't need to keep the house cold all day. I just cool it down because I knew you were coming home. The pack can communicate with the car and just really dial it into when you actually need cooling and heating. It'll be great.
Fun product.
Yeah.
Who's next?
Hello. Hey, guys. Eli here, from Tesla Owners Club, My Tesla Adventure. Just quick question. I'm a huge fan of car camping in my Tesla with my DreamCase, like my all-time favorite activity. Is it going to be possible to get climate control to the back of the Cybertruck? That would be the ultimate camping machine if we can get all-night climate control.
We'll try to do that. Yeah.
Thank you.
I agree, that would be really cool. Yeah.
All right, who's next?
Hello.
Yeah.
Long time fan. Elon, great guy. Just a question, what does the ICE industry look like in the future?
Well, I don't think there will be an ICE industry long term. Yeah. Well, I guess there might be a few things that are a curious thing. There's still some steam engines made somewhere, but they're just basically quirky collector's items. That will be the future of the internal combustion engine car.
Hi, Elon, to your left here in the white Model Y. Ryan McCaffrey from the Ride the Lightning Tesla podcast. Curious about Cybertruck. It was interesting to see where you had it in on the battery technology front. I'm sort of curious what you see for it in the production front. Is its volume? Trucks are so popular in America. Do you see its volume equaling the 3 or the Y in the future? Also, were you able to get Teslas able to legally be sold in Texas as part of the Giga Texas deal?
Well, it's hard to say what the volume exactly would be for the Cybertruck. The orders are gigantic. We have, I don't know, well over half a million orders. I think maybe 600,000. It's a lot. Basically, we stopped counting. I think there's probably room for, I don't know, at least a unit volume of 250,000-300,000 a year, maybe more. Now we are designing the Cybertruck to meet the American spec, because if you try to design a car to meet the global, the super set of all global requirements, basically, you can't make the Cybertruck. It's impossible. It really is designed for the American market, but this is the biggest market. Our North American market is the biggest market for pickup trucks by far or large pickup trucks.
Then I think we'll probably make an international version of a Cybertruck that'll be kind of smaller, kind of like a Tight Wolverine package. It'll still be cooler, but it'll be smaller because you just can't make a giant truck like that for most markets. Yeah, but it's going to be great. I don't know. I think probably we'll be able to sell directly in Texas. We do pretty well right now, but it is a bit weird not being able to actually conclude a transaction in Texas, but it's got to be a click on a server based in California. Weirdly, we can do leasing in Texas, but not selling. Hopefully, that'll get cleared up in the future.
Elon, great job with everything that you're doing. Ross Gerber from Gerber Kawasaki. Your team's amazing. What I'm most curious about, these innovations are incredible, but on my drive up here, fully on Autopilot for 400 mi, the entire state is brown, and this is ultimately about climate. Has there been some analysis done if all these things are achieved, what will its direct impact be on climate?
Well, I think it will have a very significant impact because it will stop the CO2 PPM from growing as it is every year. I should say, I try to view the whole climate thing as a science question as much as possible. Science, you always question your hypothesis. Is it true? Is it not true? Assign a probability to a given hypothesis. I should say that my original interest in electric vehicles predates the climate issue. Just when I was in high school, I thought, man, if we don't figure out electric cars, the whole economy is going to collapse when we run out of oil. It's like, we better figure out electric cars and sustainable energy, or civilization's going to crumble. It was only later that the significance of the climate risk became apparent.
We're also able, using fracking and other types of technology, to access a lot more fossil fuels than previously thought, which is helpful for lowering the cost of gasoline, but it's pretty bad for the total tonnage of CO2 that you could put in the atmosphere. It's now greatly beyond what people previously thought. As we were just going through this presentation, it is a absolutely monumental task to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. The entire global economy is still more than 99% dependent on, or roughly 99% dependent on fossil fuels. Although electric cars get a lot of press right now, and there's still very few, as a percentage of the total global fleet, it's practically nothing. I would say, yes, less than 1% of the global fleet is electric right now. There's 2 billion cars and trucks and whatnot in use.
There's a massive amount of work ahead, just insane, hard to comprehend how much work is ahead to get the new vehicle production to be sustainable, to massively increase the amount of stationary storage, which is critical because renewable energy is intermittent. Wind and solar is intermittent. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow, and obviously, sun doesn't shine at night. You've got to have batteries, a massive number of batteries.
Yeah. It's hard to measure in direct impact, but it's an experiment that we shouldn't be performing, and the sooner we can.
Yeah.
End the experiment, the sooner we can move on in a fully sustainable way that is actually lower cost.
Yeah.
The thing that people haven't fully internalized is once we do get to the $25,000 car, the ownership cost of that car is incredibly lower than the prior car. Then on the solar side and wind, with the cost of solar and wind coming down, and with batteries coming down with them, the actual cost of energy on the grid is going down. We're sort of moving towards a sustainable lower cost future. There's not really a sacrifice.
Yeah. It's true. It is a false dichotomy to say that it's either prosperity or sustainability. This is often used by oil and gas to say, "Oh, well, do you want people to lose their jobs? Do you want lower people's standards of living? Do you want to make all these economic sacrifices, really, in order to have sustainability?" The reality, as Drew was saying, is that sustainable energy is going to be lower cost, not higher cost, than fossil fuels.
Elon, quick question for you. Right here in front. First, thanks for having everyone, as telling a friend, the one company to go work for that's going to have the biggest structural impact over the next 10 years of scale, it's probably Tesla. Kudos to everyone at Tesla for what they've done to this point and going forward. The two questions for you, as you've looked at the auto and the storage markets, I know you've talked about it at 50/50 long-term, but it seems like a lot of the battery cost curve achievements that you've presented today really make some of these storage opportunities much more feasible over the next five years. I guess the first part of the question is, does your calculus upon learning and improving these things change on that 50/50 mix, or is there a role where storage becomes bigger?
The second part of the question, with all these huge grand visions, who's going to be with Tesla from a corporate perspective, accomplishing these things? Obviously, Tesla can't do it alone, but when you look at some of the traditional auto industry or power, et cetera, I don't see a lot of other Teslas.
Well, actually, there's a lot of companies in China that I think are doing great work with electric vehicles and also with stationary storage. Although we don't see that much in the U.S. yet, I think probably we will in the future. I don't know. Obviously, we're doing everything we can to encourage other companies to move to sustainable transport, also make stationary storage batteries. We made our patents freely available. We really try to tell these companies, "Hey, you really need to do this, or you won't exist in the future." They don't believe it. We've talked until we're blue in the face. What are we supposed to do? We really are hopeful that other companies will also do what we're doing, that will make the sustainable future come sooner.
From a fundamental market size perspective, we did the first ground-up work to show the size of the market in terawatt-hours, and they are roughly 50/50, 10 TWh for transportation, 10 TWh for the grid. Part of that is because.
Yeah.
The grid batteries, because when you're making a power plant, you're making a large investment, our 25-year assets are greater. If the grid batteries were 10-year things, the grid market would be bigger. Because it's a longer duration asset, they're roughly the same size.
Thinking long-term, is there any other segments that this new battery will be able to disrupt or electrify, beyond just the initial Model 2 or cheaper sedan, like a boat, Boring Company Loop, plane, boat?
Where are you, Gali? Are you there?
What's up? Right here.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I'm just like a hand on the microphone.
It's like ventriloquism here. It's like we just get the sound out of the speaker, and you can't tell where the heck it's coming from.
Any hints, or is the Model 2 such a big deal because it decreases the cost of transportation that that is really the disruption, or should we get hyped that this new cost curve opens up different vehicle categories like a high passenger density bus, Boring Loop, boat, plane?
There are batteries in limited production right now that do exceed 400 Wh/kg , which I think is about the number you need for a decent range, medium-range aircraft. I think our batteries will, over time, start to approach the 400 Wh/kg range as well. Yeah, I think over time, we'll see all modes of transport, with the ironic exception of rockets, transition to sustainability or to electric, basically. On the rocket front, what we're planning to do is, about 80% of Starship is liquid oxygen, and we're actually already running a power line to be able to use wind power to create the liquid oxygen. We're making some decent progress on sustainability on the rocket front, but there's just no way to have an electric rocket.
It's important for the future of life and consciousness that we become a multi-planet species, so got to keep doing that.
Hi, Elon.
Hello.
Josh Phillips here, retail investor. I have a question in regards to the lithium and nickel industries and the likely price spikes and shortages of high-grade materials the EV industry is likely to see if they don't act fast to address future supply. Tesla have clearly made the right moves that are necessary. There's a real worry that the potential supply issues and price spikes will create a drag on the rest of the EV industry and therefore a drag on global EV adoption. What advice would you give to the EV and mining industries to quickly solve these looming hurdles? For a sustainable energy future, the spice must flow. Thank you.
Yeah, indeed. The spice must flow. The new spice. I don't know. I'm not sure. I guess we can try to basically overdo it in cell production and perhaps supply cells to others. We do see the fundamental constraint as total cell production. That's why we're putting so much effort into making cells, and trying to reinvent every aspect of cell production from mining the ore to a complete battery pack, because it's the fundamental constraint. We're not getting into the cell business just for the hell of it's because it's the fundamental constraint. It's the thing that is the limiting factor for rapid growth. We could certainly try to overdo it on cell production and perhaps sell cells to others. Although we are going at absolute top speed, so it's not like we're holding it back.
I think just making really efficient cars that have lower drag coefficient, low rolling resistance, efficient powertrains, that's what we've done in order to make iron phosphate still have a good range. The iron phosphate's lower energy density solution, but while there are some limitations on the total amount of nickel produced every year, there's really no limit on the iron. There's so much iron it's ridiculous. You can really scale up iron phosphate at a raw materials basis more than you can nickel. Yeah.
Just to point out, when we were walking through this presentation, we intentionally separated all the different aspects. The benefits of structural battery apply to an iron-based cathode in the same way they apply to a nickel-based cathode.
Yeah.
You get longer range iron-based vehicles, and also the silicon benefit can apply to the iron-based vehicles as well. We can do a lot to extend the range of an iron-based vehicle, which is why it's a key part of the roadmap going forward. I invited Turner up here to talk about what the mining industry can do.
Diversification on the cathode side is obviously massive, and EVs are all about efficiency. For the EV industry, for the vehicle industry, we need to see powertrain efficiency really increase at all other companies matching Tesla powertrain efficiency so that everyone can have that diversified cathode approach, where LFP is used in medium range and even really make a 300-mi vehicle with LFP. Really the goal that we were trying to present here was a model for strategic vertical integration that a lot of different people can do. What we need to see is vertical integration that shortens the process path from mine to cathode. What we're doing here is novel, and we're trying to push the industry in that direction. We're presenting a model here that anyone can follow.
Yeah. In fact, if there's anything that you guys want to comment on, feel free to step forward and say something.
I think the key is to be smart about your chemistry choices.
Yeah.
Your materials choices.
Speak louder.
Yeah. If you're smart about your materials choices, the spice will continue to flow.
Yeah.
You don't need to use the same kind everywhere. It's about strategically planning it out. For miners, I think we are incentivizing them quite a bit to ramp up their production.
Yeah. Actually, we had good calls. They're all motivated. I think that they've been sort of sitting back being like, "Are you gonna grow like crazy?" We're like, "Yeah, we're gonna grow like crazy." I think this indicates we're gonna grow like crazy, and that's what the miners want to hear, and then they'll go make the investments.
Hello, Elon. This is Ben Limpic. I'm a musician. I was wondering, does Tesla have any future plans to make partnerships with music companies like it has done with Tencent Games or things like that, for you guys to actually expand your services for artists and other types of creative people to get involved in producing content that can be part of the Tesla ecosystem, or so other people that do creative things can get involved with you guys?
We haven't really thought about that much, but I suppose it's probably something we should think about. We will be providing Tidal on Teslas. We're providing more music sources that people can choose from and just generally trying to improve the entertainment experience in the cars. I think actually, as we go to a more autonomous future, the importance of entertainment and productivity will become greater and greater. To the degree that if you're just basically sitting in your car, the car is fully autonomous and driving somewhere, the car is essentially your chauffeur. The things that become important are, okay, well, let's have good entertainment and if you want to do some productivity stuff, then that actually starts to become much more important because you're no longer spending your attention driving the car. It will be extremely important in the future.
Should we do some of the Say.com questions?
Yeah.
Okay. Should we do the second one?
Yeah. The first one, I think we already answered. If we're able to make enough cells, which we'll try to do, we will supply other companies. It's definitely not an intentional effort to keep the cells to ourselves. If we can make enough for other companies, we will supply them. We're trying to do the right thing for advancing the sustainable energy, whatever that is. Vehicle to grid, we get asked that a lot. I think one of the things that's important to note is vehicle to grid, unless you have a power cut off, you need to cut off your main supply to the grid. Otherwise, if you lose power in your house, you'll basically just backflow energy to the grid. Just having a reversal in the power flow does not actually keep the lights on.
You need a whole separate system to cut off power to the grid. I think there's also the case that people really want the freedom to be able to drive and to charge at their house. It's obviously very problematic if you get to morning and your car, instead of being charged, it discharged into the house, then you're sort of, okay, now I can either drive or use the battery to power my house. I think it's actually going to be better for people's freedom of action to have a Powerwall and a car separate. Everything works. You basically combine that with solar, either solar retrofit or solar glass roof, local battery storage, so you basically become your own utility, the car can be charged also with solar. I think that's the stuff that works.
That said, we can certainly do vehicle to grid. I think we could basically enable that with software in Europe or something, right?
Yeah. Future generations of power electronics, we will be able to do this more or less everywhere from an energy market participation perspective. Yeah, from a backing up the house, and it just so happens that the way the North American connectors are on all the cars in North America, it doesn't matter whether it's the Tesla connector or the connector that the other vehicles have, doesn't actually support powering your home. It's unfortunate. You'd need additional hardware to do that. Yeah, in the future, all versions of our vehicles will be able to at least do bidirectional power flow for the purposes of energy market participation. Even for that, it's important to remember that your car isn't plugged in 24/7 , so it's kind of an unpredictable resource for the grid. It'll have a value, but it's not the same as a stationary battery pack.
Yeah. Honestly, vehicle to grid sounds good, but I think actually has a much lower utility than people think. I think very few people would actually use vehicle to grid. With the original Roadster, we had vehicle to grid capabilities. Nobody used it.
Yeah. How do we find the engineers to do everything we're saying?
How do we find the engineers to do all these things? Well, I guess we recruit a lot of engineers from all parts of the world. I think Tesla has a good reputation for doing exciting engineering. That tends to attract a lot of the top engineers in the world, because they know that their efforts at Tesla will really serve the greater good. We're super hardcore about engineering. Tesla is first and foremost an engineering company. It's like hardcore engineering is what we do. The sheer amount of hardcore engineering done at Tesla is insane. If you look at, say, there's various surveys done of engineering schools, where do you want to go? What's your top choices? Actually the top two choices last few years have been Tesla and SpaceX. Sometimes it's Tesla first, sometimes SpaceX first, but those are the two top ones.
Yeah, if you are motivated to solve some of these problems, which are the hardest problems in the world to solve, that really fundamentally enable the future we all need, please reach out.
Yeah.
Help us work on these problems.
Absolutely. Like you said, the battle is far from over. Less than 1% of the global automotive fleet has been converted to electric. Even maybe less than 0.1% of stationary storage has been done. Stationary storage has barely begun. Converting the global vehicle fleet to electric has barely begun. There's still a massive amount of engineering work to be done at Tesla and other companies to accelerate this transition to sustainability.
Hey, can you guys hear me?
Yeah.
This is Jordan from ARK Asset Management. You've talked about the importance of the factory, you've mentioned the ground-up design process and a lot of the new things that you're going to be doing or started to do in Shanghai, Berlin, and Austin. Can you just maybe help us understand and quantify how financially meaningful all of those improvements will be? Given what you're trying to accomplish as a company, is it fair to assume that the vast majority of improvement will be given back to the customer in the form of lower prices?
Yeah. I think certainly we will try to give back as much as possible to the customers. It's not like Tesla's profitability is crazy high. Our average profitability for the last four quarters was maybe 1%. Just to be clear, it's not like we're minting money. Our valuation makes it seem like we are, but we're not. We do want to try to make the price as competitive as we can without losing money. If you keep losing money, you'll just die. This thing called profit is just like we need to bring in more money than we spend, otherwise we're dead.
Affordability is key to how we scale.
Yeah.
Right? The demand goes nonlinear as you reduce the price of the car.
Yeah. It's important to sort of separate the difference between affordability and value for money, or desirability of the product. For a lot of people, they want to buy a Tesla, they simply don't have enough money. We could make the car infinitely desirable, but if somebody does not have enough money, they can't buy it. Sometimes, people forget this. People have to have enough money to buy the car, just making a car super desirable but expensive does not mean they can afford it. It's absolutely important, critical that we make cars that people can actually afford. Yeah.
Oh, over here.
Go through some of these things? Just scroll down or something. Oh.
When do you expect Tesla vehicles to beat ICE vehicles on initial purchase price? I think a way to answer that question is, in the classes of vehicles we sell today, we're already doing that.
Yeah. We're already pretty close. Factoring in total cost of ownership, and the fact that electric vehicles require much less servicing, and are way cheaper to run. When you look at total cost of ownership. You can always just lease a car, so if you just lease a car or get a loan for a car, you've got your monthly payment and then your cost for either gasoline or electricity, and your cost of servicing. The fully considered cost of an electric car is much less than a gasoline car of the same nominal purchase price. That said, in maybe on the order of three years, when we can do a lower cost, like a $25,000 car, I think that will be basically on par, maybe slightly better than a comparable gasoline car. I think maybe it's on the order of three years-ish.
How have the technology advancements and increased vertical integration of battery manufacturing influenced your ability to improve the environmental and social impact of the supply chain? Yeah.
I think we sort of have said that already.
Yeah.
Do we have some ability to scroll through this? Just scroll away.
We covered recycling.
Yeah. Let's just scroll until we've got stuff that we haven't covered.
Oh, we've definitely covered that topic.
Yeah. A lot of these things we've already answered, I think.
Covered that. That one.
I think we literally just answered that.
Yeah. Oh, I saw a cathode durability question. Let's go to that one. Go down. Good technical question. Keep going. "How are you going to address the cathode durability and cost environmental impact trifecta? Is this something you're going to leave the upstream and supply chain to solve?" No, I think we tried to answer that directly. We really are looking at not just what happens in the cathode facility, but currently outside the cathode facility that should really be inside, and removing processes that shouldn't have been there in the first place, and the use of reagents that are just costly and not necessary, and removing a bunch of wastewater from the process.
Guys, is there anything you want to add to maybe we could go through everyone and maybe say what you're doing and say a few words? I don't know.
Sure. I just want to reiterate the fact that this is a massive problem.
Massive problem.
It seems like Tesla's on its way and ahead. We need everybody's help, because it's everybody's planet, and we're not going to get to 20 TWh by ourselves.
Yeah.
Please think about this carefully, as this affects everybody. Let's get on it.
Yeah. Obviously, if you care about solving sustainability, and doing hardcore engineering, definitely come work at Tesla.
Yeah. We went through a couple of the manufacturing improvements. It kind of looks easy when you put together a nice slide deck, the challenges are like this, it's super challenging. When you take materials out of the process, when you integrate processes together, you have to do a lot of things at once, and that's this immense engineering challenge. To appreciate that, to get through this, we need the best engineers we've got. We've got this awesome team. I just want to shout out also to all of our team watching. You guys are awesome. You absolutely kicked ass putting this together. Yeah.
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you, Tesla team. Totally agree.
Well done.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Rodney?
Yeah. Rodney Westmoreland, managing the construction here at Tesla. What I would like to say is, one, shout out to the team. The team has been working effortlessly, a very, very tough project here for 24 hours a day, it seems like around the clock to have this complete. The thing that sets us apart from a lot of other construction here, we have a construction company here. The thing that sets us apart is that we're integrated in the manufacturing process. Every detail that comes from Drew's mouth is directly implemented into the system that we're building. That way, what would typically take three or four months to create a specification. Our design team is working right with the manufacturing team to allow us to speed that process up tremendously.
It's definitely a important part of the vertically integrated approach is to be able to design the factory around the equipment, in fact, together with the equipment, so that you can build the factory at lower cost and more quickly.
I'm Scott. I focus on cell design. I think it's hard to put into words how inspiring this is. I've been at this a long time with Tesla.
Yeah.
I really hope.
Since when, Scott?
Since 2005.
Yes.
With many of you. Thank you. Yeah, a year before Drew, but who's keeping track? I'm really stoked at what the team's been able to accomplish over the last short period of time, about a year. It's been really an incredible transformation. Hopefully, what we've shown you inspires you to join us or join somebody else in the effort. I couldn't think of a greater, more intelligent, more hardworking team to be working on with this problem.
Hi, Peter. I lead the manufacturing improvement team, and I guess the point that I would like to make is manufacturing improvements is like the accelerator. You think about the execution that Rodney talked about in terms of how fast we've been able to put together this factory, which is amazing and something that's been really incredible to be a part of. That's not enough. What we need to do is improve the manufacturing technology. That's the real accelerator, and that's what we're really focused on. Elon talks about it all the time, that really going and improving that system is what will enable us to get to the scale and the cost that we need. The other point that I would make is on the recruiting side. It doesn't matter if you know about batteries.
If you come from any industry, you can do something fantastic in the work that we're doing. We talk to people from industries that you wouldn't imagine. I talked to a guy who makes golf balls, and he has stuff which is really impactful for what we're doing. If you're in any industry and you want to be impactful here, come join us. It'd be great.
Hi, excuse me. Hi, I'm Tony. I've been working in lithium and cathode materials for almost 23 years now, and this is the most growth I've seen in a company. I've been here a little over a year and a half. We're hiring amazing people that are allowing us to leverage technology that most of the industry is struggling to achieve. To answer the question, how are we going to do this, we are really advancing the materials manufacturing for cathodes and for lithium beyond what has been accomplished in the previous 20 years.
It's exciting.
Yeah. My name's Turner. Work closely with the team, have worked a lot with everyone here. On the cathode and upstream materials side, it's really important that everyone understand that this growth is coming. This growth is real. We are going to make all of these batteries, and everyone needs to grow with us. The entire supply chain needs to grow with us. If you have an idea that simplifies anything in the supply chain, come talk to us, come work with us, and let's do it.
Any existing specification is wrong.
That's always true.
Manufacturing method is wrong. Process, equipment, it's wrong. It's just a question of how wrong.
Yes.
Quote, Elon Musk.
Yes. Exactly. We're wrong. Just a question of how wrong. Try to be less wrong.
Tell us how we're wrong and how we could do it better so that we can accelerate and improve as fast as possible.
All right. Well, I guess thank you everyone for coming. Hope you liked the presentation. Very exciting future ahead. We're gonna work our damnedest to transition the world to sustainable energy as quickly as possible. Your support and help is key to that success. Thanks again. Super appreciated, and look forward to the next event. Thank you.
Thank you.