GRA
Well-known member
No, my argument was that VW and other brands have taken the steps necessary to ensure access to batteries; you were arguing that they wouldn't have that because they didn't own Gigafactories. Whether or not batteries are a core competency that you should bring in house is debatable, at least now when we're at least one, probably two and maybe 3 generations of battery tech away from having full replacement for ICE* battery packs. Doing all the R&D and building the production lines for a rapidly obsolescing tech may make a company stick with it long past its sell-by date; that may be why Nissan stuck with AESC for so long. Having suppliers make the investments in new tech may well be the way to go for now, if not forever. Or not, but either can work.SageBrush said:I have no idea, but of one thing I am certain: this is not an investment, which was your attempted argument.So what? You don't think VW is a big enough customer to have financial leverage?
And absent direct investment at Tesla levels, I doubt they will ever be cost competitive.
So what you're acknowledging is that they blew through yet another voluntary schedule (this one for just 8 months in the future) by 5 months and counting, despite considerably increasing the average number of stalls at each SC site (getting the permits and contracts, then the people and equipment on site is the major time waster. Building more stalls is relatively trivial once there). Per supercharge.info, there were 8,352 stalls worldwide on 12/30, so that's at least an improvement compared to their usual ~70% actual vs. announced achievement rate, but again largely due to installing more stalls at each site. At the end of last year they were claiming that they'd get to 15k by the end of this year. Let's see if they make that, or blow yet another schedule. Personally, I'm more interested in expansion of the SC network rather than capacity increases, but both are necessary.SageBrush said:My last comment about your Eeyore routine wrt to Tesla SuperChargers: in 4/2017 Tesla wrote a news note saying that 5200 Superchargers were installed and they intended to reach 10,000 by the end of the year to support Model 3. As of ~ now, there are 9,955 and expansion is progressing even more rapidly than last year.
*Full replacement for ICEs = comparable price/range/weight/volume/longevity/durability/recharge rate.