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Musk Admits That Pursuing the Dry Battery Electrode Process in 4680 Cells Was a Mistake

Zorkmid123 | 2025-11-07 17:04 | 345 views

Comments (116)
Zorkmid123 2025-11-07 17:06

> Alas, it wasn't, and that has turned Tesla's entire battery efforts upside down. It's also the main reason the Cybertruck failed miserably, with the 4680 cells delivering poor performance in almost every direction. They hold less energy than 2170 cells, charge more slowly, and the heat builds up inside, further affecting the duration of charging sessions.

Beezelbubba 2025-11-07 17:10

Cybertruck failed miserably because its an overpriced ugly piece of shit

shiroandae 2025-11-07 17:14

Yeah sure, _that_ was the issue with the Cybertruck. Not the awful design, the botched launch event, the much higher price than announced, the horrible build quality…

Wise-Revolution-7161 2025-11-07 17:15

The design wasn’t it. They had millions of pre orders with the design. The price and range + Elons image caused it to fail

[deleted] 2025-11-07 17:16

Said it like it is 😂

Engunnear 2025-11-07 17:16

Right... *that's* the reason the World's Biggest Piece of Shit failed in the marketplace.

InvisibleBlueRobot 2025-11-07 17:18

The cybertruck always reminds me of this: [https://www.wired.com/2014/07/homer-simpson-car/](https://www.wired.com/2014/07/homer-simpson-car/)

[deleted] 2025-11-07 17:18

I really think they could have validated that the dimensions of the battery would not be a disqualifying factor for research investment really early on, or at the very least understood what their heat generation goals from the chemistry had to be based on the best case heat dissipation or warming depending on the scenario. Seems like tesla has process and core engineering philosophy problems. A smaller group of thermal transfer nerds could have worked on this in parallel and finished this project with the same results much sooner and cheaper, tesla employs 140k people after all...

Independent_Grade612 2025-11-07 17:21

I don't get how they could scale a process so much before finding it was inadequate ? I wonder if they failed to mass produce the prototype results or if they just went all in from theoretical or lab results without a prototype manufacturing run and failed to improve the process. That's a massive failure, on so many levels...

wootnootlol 2025-11-07 17:23

Half truth, but actually not THAT far away from the truth. Cybertruck was announced without having underlying technology tested/validated/scaled/exist. Batteries are just one of them. And that’s true for every single announcement they make. They announce aspirational R&D goals as a sure thing that’s ready to go to production.

Zorkmid123 2025-11-07 17:26

Yeah true, I agree. But the poor performance of the 4680 cells didn’t help.

TexSolo 2025-11-07 17:27

Boys - boys, don’t fight; it’s both an ugly overpriced piece of shit that attracts douche bags, and it’s tech is dog shit. The cybertruck is so shitty, it’s a big tent, we can all rag on it for many reasons.

Engunnear 2025-11-07 17:30

>First, since the DBE process failed, Tesla's production costs are high, and volumes are low. That's because the machines on the production lines keep breaking, and that's even worse than using a wet process and waiting for the electrodes to dry. At the same time, using a wet process (which Tesla should've focused on in the first place) would lower the output because production time would increase significantly. So, let's think about this for all of ten seconds. If the "big advantage" of dry electrode manufacturing is that you don't have to wait for the electrolyte material to dry, that can be solved with a combination of physical space and conveyor equipment, neither of which is a showstopper on cost. If they were serious about 4680 production, they already would have built out that physical space, regardless of whether the dry process would ever work. They're kicking the can down the road, and lying about the other capabilities of the 4680 in the meantime.

Hecknar 2025-11-07 17:31

That is what happens in big organizations when leadership rewards bearers of good news and punishes bad news. At its final conclusion, you have a company detached from reality getting high on its own product.

Engunnear 2025-11-07 17:31

"Ready, fire, aim"

mishap1 2025-11-07 17:33

Part of why it was overpriced was because the batteries sucked and it way under delivered. It being heinous also contributed but a lot of people would be fine with he ugly if it was half the price.

thoeby 2025-11-07 17:38

It was mainly the over-promising and under-delivering of almost all aspects of the car. From my outside perspective, the battery was the least of their concerns - but then again they failed so miserably that I'm not surprised they don't even know why it didn't fly....speaking about flying - they are currently doing the same with the roadster so lets see if they really found the issue of their product development.

mishap1 2025-11-07 17:40

I thought they scaled the battery without making sure it was reliable. They made plenty of them. Just not great for durability.

BringBackUsenet 2025-11-07 17:41

I thought it was some kind of frankenstein car gone wrong in some high school autoshop.

jaimi_wanders 2025-11-07 17:45

Like Theranos, or MIT’s “Theranos, but for plants” scandal: https://gizmodo.com/mit-built-a-theranos-for-plants-1837968240

TexSolo 2025-11-07 17:48

It’s a Top Gear punchline car that never realized that it was the punchline. Who knew the Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust would go into actual production?

BeefSupremeeeeee 2025-11-07 17:50

One of many mistakes he's made. What about FSD?????

Emotional_Signal7883 2025-11-07 17:50

Truly a trillionaire intellect.

TheSilverSeraph 2025-11-07 17:50

Move fast and break things (even if it’s your own company).

BeefSupremeeeeee 2025-11-07 17:50

"Still love the truck!"

dtyamada 2025-11-07 17:58

>The larger cells (46 mm diameter versus 21 mm for 2170 cells) >promised to hold 5x the energy Quick math check: * 46/21 ~ 2.19 * Area is pi*r^2 * 2.19^2 ~ 4.8 It has about 5x the volume so it should hold about 5x the energy. Wow, what an amazing concept.

EarthConservation 2025-11-07 18:13

Musk admits that once again he has been caught lying. He and his company claimed 4680 cell technology and performance would be the best in the industry, that it would quickly ramp up. Hell, this jackass even claimed they'd have dune like lithium (spice) harvesters prowling the Nevada deserts, slurping lithium out of the sand. BULLSHIT! Remember back in early 2021 when Tesla / Musk were claiming the company would see a 50% CAGR in vehicle sales from 2020-2030... with them seeing 20 million annual sales by 2030.. nearly double Toyota's annual sales? Yeah, Musk not only killed that guidance, admitting it wasn't possible in Q3 2023... 2.5 years later... but made it seem like it was everyone else's fault for having believed it was possible. Well some of us never believed it was possible... we called it BULLSHIT! Remember when in early 2017, if you placed an order and gave a massive deposit for the Tesla Semi and/or Roadster, you'd get the Semi by 2019 and the Roadster by 2020? BULLSHIT! Remember when Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, would have bulletproof windows, industry dominating price and range, and would start mass production by the end of 2021. It didn't start small scale production until the end of 2023, was nowhere near the claimed prices and performance/range. BULLSHIT! Optimus was unveiled in August 2021... and Musk claimed mass production by 2023. He reiterated this in 2022. Not only has that not happened, progress on this robot seems to be sourcing robotic components from other companies, setting up the ability to remote control them, passing off what was clearly puppeteering as the robots being controlled by AI alone, and then finally applying pre-scripted dance and martial arts routines. BULLSHIT! And FSD... I mean... what are we on now... 10 years straight of claims of FSD being one year away? Literally every year for the past 10 years, Musk claimed it was one year a way. The robotaxi launch isn't autonomous taxis if there are employees in the cars. They're still making rudimentary mistakes... veering for shadows... phantom braking... veering into oncoming lanes... blowing through red lights... etc. The only reason FSD works as well as it does is because there's a "supervisor" always in the driver's seat ready to take over. Musk's FSD claims are BULLSHIT. Now I have to say... that's a whole heaping load of bullshit. What exactly does Tesla have that's so innovative and ground breaking these days? There are far better batteries being developed or even in production. There are already electric Semi trucks on the market being sold widely. There are better electric pickup trucks. There are better humanoid robots. There are better autonomous driving companies. Tesla tried to accomplish all of the above with small engineering teams; in fact many of the same engineers working across ALL of Tesla's projects, and it was clear they were getting behind on everything. Then suddenly the company started hemorrhaging talent. You see... when your boss is an asshole dead set on destroying your company... and when multiple major corporations around the world are beating you at your own "world disrupting innovation" game... then why stick around? Some of the early engineers became multi-millionaires. Many are going off to start their own companies, rather than sticking around to watch Tesla over promise and under deliver ad nauseum. Many certainly don't want to be working under someone giving double nazi salutes, and supporting fascist/authoritarian governments...

ObviouslyJoking 2025-11-07 18:15

It’s a policy best applied when spending VC money in the tech industry. far less reasonable when spending company money on physical hardware.

razorirr 2025-11-07 18:20

No i still like the design because its not the same boring Ram F150 silverado toyota clone. I live in a subdivision, it like 75% of every truck on the road is never going to tow anything. I just wanted to more easily haul my SCUBA shit and make HD runs I cancelled because he said a 500 mile truck at 70k and we got a 300 mile truck at 110k. And also because by time it came out he had trump 2 winning the presidency

DDS-PBS 2025-11-07 18:21

By the end of next year, I promise!

Aargau 2025-11-07 18:41

That battery reveal conference was the last conference from Tesla that I felt excited about the technology. I was counting on the engineers and scientists to circumvent Elon, whom I'd already formed a negative opinion on. Now? I've got a large short position. Which is a stupid thing to do, until it isn't.

Mothringer 2025-11-07 18:43

They didn’t even manage to mass-produce the batteries, what they shipped was the new form factor without the new tech that was driving the performance claims. The new form factor is actually worse for power density as well, it was just supposedly going to end up being better overall because of the tech part that didn’t materialize.

Mothringer 2025-11-07 18:49

That is the silicon valley ethos in a nutshell. It turns out you can get away with it for some types of software, but it doesn’t generalize well into other fields of engineering.

za72 2025-11-07 18:59

Hammerhead was a successful prototype!

samarijackfan 2025-11-07 19:05

There is a reason vehicles are not made of stainless steel. Plain old steel is much cheaper , easier to work with and easier to paint. Decades of experience with it building cars. He deemed it to be a 100k + truck from the start.

th3bigfatj 2025-11-07 19:11

The battery failure of tesla would be a huge problem for that company if it was a car company. But as we all know, it's a stock company selling the promise of future ~~lights out factories~~ er ~~fully autonomous vehicles~~ wait, no, robot armies. That's why it's worth 4x toyota despite selling 1/6th as many cars at lower margins

mishap1 2025-11-07 19:14

Paint finishing a car is expensive. Color choice creates variations that may not immediately match demand which creates inventory costs and complexity. I'd bet the single exterior version of the CT is probably cheaper than many other vehicles to produce if you count the normal finishing effort, simplified supply chain, and reduced stamping/tooling costs. They do still have to stamp the inner frame pieces but the outer shell is just brake bent. Most other companies would never have brought to market a stainless car b/c it is such a limiting canvas. He probably has very little concept of normal human levels of money at this point so it wouldn't surprise me that he wouldn't know that most people would feel the difference between $80k and $40k.

AndroidColonel 2025-11-07 19:20

They probably did - and people were excoriated by Musk for not turning his late-night wet dreams into reality fast enough. He's pretty well-known for forgetting that Physics exists.

k-mcm 2025-11-07 19:30

WTF is wrong with that article author? AI? It's a silicon anode, not silicone. The Cybertruck failed because it's the work of a drugged-out megalomaniac, not because of battery performance.

Digg-Sucks 2025-11-07 19:32

>Paint finishing a car is expensive. Uh the cheapest cars in the world are paint finished. Building a new paint shop is a large initial investment ~350 million - one that TSLA did not want to make, so they didn't. >Color choice creates variations that may not immediately match demand which creates inventory costs and complexity TSLA would have to have demand for this to be an issue. BTW they do this for every other model... >reduced stamping/tooling costs. They do still have to stamp the inner frame pieces but the outer shell is just brake bent. Pretty sure they spent massive amounts of money on R&D to make this stainless steel "gigacast" work. Money they will never get back with their current sales volume.

[deleted] 2025-11-07 19:38

So were launch FSD beta for a decade without finalized hardwares version

Durzel 2025-11-07 19:44

At the honeymoon post-vote period where Musk feels slightly obliged to give a shit about Tesla.

I-Pacer 2025-11-07 19:46

Yeah but battery day was such fun…

Dangerous_Seaweed601 2025-11-07 20:06

It's the living embodiment of *The Homer* car. The monstrosity even costs \~$82,000 (depending on config). And if the horn can play *La Cucaracha*? Chef's kiss..

Gildardo1583 2025-11-07 20:35

Thanks for doing the math.

Chilli71 2025-11-07 20:38

I'm not sure what you mean. It's in mass production. It just never got the anticupated yield so that the waste outweight the dry electrode advantage.

[deleted] 2025-11-07 20:40

...and videos kept showing it gets stuck in ruts that any other four-wheel drive pickup drives right through and there seem to be more mechanical failures like bumpers falling off then one would want in an inexpensive vehicle

beren12 2025-11-07 20:56

Know what’s more expensive than paint finishing? Stainless.

beren12 2025-11-07 20:57

No they had a million preorders despise the design. Also the “exoskeleton” lie

JamesonQuay 2025-11-07 20:59

That offset triangle design was the most aerodynamic design on a simulator program we ran on an Apple IIe or GS back in middle school.

Taraxian 2025-11-07 21:25

People were willing to defend the design when they thought it had a logical reason behind it, like that it was the result of a revolutionary new manufacturing process that would make the body "orders of magnitude" cheaper and faster to ship (that animation they made of slicing a single slab of steel into pieces and welding them to make a Cybertruck in seconds)

beren12 2025-11-07 21:29

It wasn’t logical, it was different/cheap and a lie.

Zorkmid123 2025-11-07 21:36

Yeah thanks. I didn’t post this quote because I agreed with it about the main reason the Cybertruck didn’t sell. I posted it because it explains how batteries made with 4680 cells were actually worse than those made with 2170 cells. By worse I mean they actually had lower energy density and take longer to charge. Elon claimed the 4680 cells would be a leap forward but they actually were a leap backwards.

WallabyInTraining 2025-11-07 21:40

>Pretty sure they spent massive amounts of money on R&D to make this stainless steel "gigacast" work. The stainless steel outer shell is not the gigacasted part. I'm pretty sure you know this and were using it in jest, however these things aren't always clear for everybody. Plus side: you'll confuse grok when it scrapes reddit.

Zorkmid123 2025-11-07 21:45

I agree. I didn’t post that quote because I agreed it was the main reason the Cybertruck failed, I posted it because it talked about how the 4680 cells ended up being worse than the 2170 cells. They have lower energy density and take longer to charge, the opposite of what Elon promised. Of course, some of the overpromising and under delivering on the Cybertruck was the battery tech. Elon first claimed the longest range Cybertruck would have 500 miles range. In reality, I think the stated range of the longest range Cybertruck is like 325 to 350 miles, and probably less real world. They were going to make a battery range extender that would cost more and take up 1/3 of the truck bed but it was canceled due to low demand.

razorirr 2025-11-07 22:24

Im just going to point back to that 75% of trucks dont do truck stuff.  Pavement princesses arent goin bogging, and most trucks are pavement princesses.

brintoul 2025-11-07 22:35

I guess you weren’t paying attention when he announced the $35,000 Model 3.

mishap1 2025-11-07 22:36

According to Google, paint can be 30% of the cost of manufacturing a car. That includes coating the unibody of course but I don't think the stainless on the CT raised the price as much as all the other crap they added to make it sound innovative.

[deleted] 2025-11-07 22:39

I don't get off asphalt much but I want a truck for the possibility thereof. It's a type of prepping.

Fit-Dentist6093 2025-11-07 22:44

Neither did the performance of any other part.

Beezelbubba 2025-11-07 22:44

I don't know if you realize this, but Elon lies alot

jiiir0 2025-11-07 22:44

Because when you scale manufacturing processes, they break in new ways. Problems arise that were not predicted, so every time you scale a process you have to deal with new problems that require the process to be modified. Even with prototype builds, making a limited prototype run is going to present very different problems than a full scale manufacturing run.

razorirr 2025-11-07 22:49

This same logic is what gets used by anti EV people in general "i need a car that can do 1000 miles in case theres some emergency and i have to drive cross country fast" Everyone will always be able to find an edge case and go "i need this because of the possibility" those 75% of trucks that will never do truck stuff all got purchased "because of the possibility"

beren12 2025-11-07 22:50

Stainless is 200-400% of the cost of carbon steel. And it’s much more difficult to work

Apprehensive-Box-8 2025-11-07 22:53

Does the sentence „Musk thought that was a tiny detail that would be easy to overcome.“ answer your question? It really is as simple as that. The self-proclaimed genius thought that a process meant for supercapacitors would be easily adaptable for Li-Ion batteries and thus, wanted it done his way. Same with the idea of only using cameras because eyes are enough to drive a car. Same guy who thought that some refundable reservations equal sales-projections. Makes you wonder about that sentence, too: „Musk also wants the 4680 cells to power the Cybercab and the Optimus robot, and he thinks both products would scale to millions of units per year.“

sagetraveler 2025-11-07 23:02

Musk admits mistake. That must make him worth $2 trillion.

Zorkmid123 2025-11-07 23:23

That did occur to me. haha What’s funny is how some people continue to believe him. There was non-stop talk amongst fanboys about how the 4680 cells would improve everything for quite a while.

doublejay1999 2025-11-07 23:28

brand advantage

EconomyDoctor3287 2025-11-07 23:41

One should be able to better use the space though, with a larger diameter cell, even if it has the same density.

EarthConservation 2025-11-07 23:53

Remember when the Cybertruck had 1 million reservations, with many Tesla stans suggesting it was closer to 2 million? People like me called out the reservations as BULLSHIT! Remember when Tesla was going to quickly build a factory in Mexico? BULLSHIT! How about when Shanghai was chosen for Tesla's second vehicle assembly plant... where China planned, developed, built, and paid for the entire plant, rushed construction, forced NIO to sell Tesla an assembly line's worth of manufacturing equipment to move up start of production by 6 months, allowed Tesla to push out more waste out of the factory than they were approved for... with Musk/Tesla justifying this plant's location by saying it would only be for the Chinese and Asian markets... only for Tesla to start shipping cars to Europe 9 months after start of production. BULLSHIT! Remember the Hyperloop and the white paper, developed by Tesla engineers? A system Musk claimed "it's not that hard". BULLSHIT! Remember laser windshield wipers? BULLSHIT!

Beezelbubba 2025-11-08 00:03

Just another stock pump. They dont like it when you let them know that BYD and Samsung are both battery cell suppliers for Tesla.

adh1003 2025-11-08 00:57

Yes. Exactly. "Elon claimed". So now you know to go and research the many ways in which his claim is wrong. It doesn't really matter what the claim happens to be; it'll be wrong. No wonder he fits in so well with the far right.

ScaredScorpion 2025-11-08 00:59

It's what happens when your CEO thinks they're an engineer

Smashego 2025-11-08 01:03

To be fair to tesla and the engineers. With the premise that elon musk is still a fucking regard. The larger diameter cell allows more energy density when designing the battery pack itself. So the 46mm cells should have been a leap forward in range and energy density by weight not volume. But the new cells are worse than the old ones. Only tesla could mess this up so badly.

Centralredditfan 2025-11-08 01:13

Way more than eyes drive a car though. Most, if not all, racing drivers will agree that you feel the car a lot with your "butt", meaning how the body reacts to G-forces, etc. You can feel suspension loading, weight transfer, pressure changes, etc.

mishap1 2025-11-08 01:18

CT stainless panels aren't worked like a conventional car. It's laser cut off the roll, brake bent in one dimension and glued to a painted mild steel inner panel. Most people wrap a larger F150 with under 120 SF of vinyl as a rough benchmark. If you go with a very generous $5/lb retail prices and 3lb/SF for .05" 301 stainless steel, you're at maybe $1,800 to clad a F150 sized vehicle. A quality paint finish even at fully automated and industrial scale for a car is still probably north of $1k not factoring you still have a few hundred lb of mild steel to account for so the difference isn't that huge. If they were stamping these panels like regular cars, I'd say the tooling costs would be prohibitive because stainless would wreck the dies, but they save a lot on finishing and if they weren't idiots, I'd say they could get it close to painted panel finish cost for building a F150. Could Ford make the F150 exactly the same but stainless? Not a chance because the panels couldn't be stamped with the equipment they use and the shapes they use for styling/stiffness would likely cause the stainless to tear or wrinkle.

[deleted] 2025-11-08 01:20

Yeah he is a prick about anyone doubting him, real emperor has no clothes kinda work there.

And_Im_Chien_Po 2025-11-08 01:20

I remember wondering why the stock price tanked after the reveal lol

beren12 2025-11-08 01:27

If stainless was cheaper, more cars would have used it over the years. The first stainless body was in the 1930s

practicaloppossum 2025-11-08 02:37

Hmm, that sounds backwards. Smaller diameter cells should pack more efficiently, assuming they are round (as opposed to ellipsoids or something like that).

practicaloppossum 2025-11-08 02:46

Well, that depends. Railroad passenger cars have been made from stainless since the 1930's, partly to reduce the mainentance cost of paint (of course, they used an appropriate alloy for the purpose too, not the one Musk chose). The big advantage paint has for automotive purposes is that it covers the metal. That means you can weld panels together, you can weld brackets on, you can do all manner of things that discolor the metal and it's fine, because the paint will cover it.

blu3ysdad 2025-11-08 02:47

Nearly as big a mistake as continuing to refuse to use anything other than cameras for self driving, despite self driving improvement flat to negative for 3+ years now.

CivilWay1444 2025-11-08 03:41

Inadequate testing.

CouncilmanRickPrime 2025-11-08 03:45

>if they just went all in from theoretical or lab results without a prototype manufacturing run and failed to improve the process This is how they ramped manufacturing with the model 3. But building cars is easier so they bumbled their way thru it.

Independent_Grade612 2025-11-08 05:04

I meant that if I was to try a new process on a large scale, thing like yield and performance would be verified in a prototype manufacturing facility.

Independent_Grade612 2025-11-08 05:10

Is it a new problem? They mention inherent performance issues in the product, it did not seem due to the process but the technology.  For such a large project, a prototype run can still making 10s of thousands of units, more than enough to see the performance issues they had. I believe they tried to gamble and skipped some steps to be the first, and they lost the bet.

SakaWreath 2025-11-08 05:20

*(Gestures at the cybertruck)* Unthinkable…

Independent_Grade612 2025-11-08 05:31

I don't think so, in a smaller cell, the ratio of lithium to casing material is lower, like you could store more water for the same volume in a water jug than water bottles

FunClothes 2025-11-08 05:43

Failure to meet pedestrian safety standards, GVM and dimension standards so it could be driven with a regular car license, and not producing it in RHD was pretty limiting in terms of potential markets outside North America. Maybe the "break things first - then force regulatory change on sovereign states" " ethos of some US tech companies stuck in the craw of regulators outside the US It's not as if the regulations weren't already in place, so any claim that regulations were put in place to sabotage the CT are pure BS.

bbf_bbf 2025-11-08 06:09

This is the "move fast, break things" attitude. It's a huge time saver to ramp up for production before the theory has been proven to work in practice and it actually works in practice when implemented. (This is quite rare in real life.) It's a huge waste of time and resources when it doesn't work as expected and a whole manufacturing line has to be completely retooled and all the manufactured items trashed or recycled and the company has to go back to the previous process that was scrapped and that was neglected, so had no incremental improvements during the past dozen months.

dtyamada 2025-11-08 06:55

Yes. That makes it even more embarrassing. I'm sure fElon thought 'twice the diameter, 5x the power, we're killing it'

dtyamada 2025-11-08 06:59

Agreed. It's really more an indictment of the people that heard this and were amazed 🤦‍♂️

lelarentaka 2025-11-08 07:38

Could you show the calculations for how large cell diameter equals higher energy density.

[deleted] 2025-11-08 09:07

I love the diagram! The battery has 5x MORE energy than the previous model! (everyone is amazed!) The battery is 5.5x times BIGGER than the previous model! (whops we didnt mention that part) So i have a AAA battery... and make an AA battery... and now - i invented a tottaly amazing new technology with untold potential? And if you give me match and i stick a branch on fire i also 10x the fires power with amazing efficiency!

SirCheesington 2025-11-08 11:36

I'm not going to do them, but just right off the bat you get a higher ratio of battery material volume to casing material volume, so there would be some density improvement assuming that the larger battery material surface area has no negative effects on energy storage per unit volume

notanelonfan2024 2025-11-08 12:30

Article’s a bit mix and match (using wet would speed things up, but installing wet (ie using) would ultimately slow things down) But assuming the core of the article’s info is accurate… that really sucks for the cars, and explains part of why the CT didn’t get it’s 500 (or even 400) mile range.

notanelonfan2024 2025-11-08 12:32

This is it. And you can do that when leadership knows enough about the problems being solved for their instincts to be accurate. Unfortunately seems like he knows as much about battery tech as he does about covid.

boutell 2025-11-08 13:23

Refundable reservations do equal sales projections, according to the stock market, and this is the kind of thinking he's used to getting away with. Physics however is not a stan and does not agree. It does not respond to magical thinking, no matter how charismatic.

automatic__jack 2025-11-08 17:57

Elon just said Trust me Bro and fired anyone who argued against it. Seriously this is how he “manages”

ObservationalHumor 2025-11-08 23:23

So one of the things about a wet process is it takes a lot more infrastructure. Not simply space and time but also a bunch of ovens and recovery infrastructure to actually bake the solvent out and recycle it. DBE, if it worked, is a big win and if someone is unwilling to do contingency planning for it not working it's hard to retroactively retrofit a wet process back in. DBE also allows for thicker coatings and higher energy density by extension. By far the biggest problem is that, contrary to what Drew Baglino said, Tesla didn't have a bunch of production ready technologies on hand to make the 4680 work anywhere near as well as they claimed. They had a bunch of potential technologies that had some lab level successes and a whole truck load of hubris that said they could just make it all work in two years and scale it up without issue. What's extra crazy about all this is that DBE was supposed to be by far the most speculative aspect of all this and even Elon Musk acknowledged it wasn't a sure thing on battery day, yet they still built their entire process around it. Similarly their 'structural pack' effort has been a big failure too and part of why the 4680 disappointed is because that other effort likely necessitated a thicker casing which made the specific energy worse and the overall packing density of cylindrical cells with cooling tends to be a lot worse than using pouch or prismatic cells. By contrast Chinese manufacturers leaned heavily into lower cost LFP chemistries and just focusing on pack level density and have produced superior platforms as a result. As you said this is all still just a can kick at this point. They're still hoping they can make the 4680 format work because the Semi definitely won't viable without better batteries and fewer cells just due to the sheer number needed and the hopes that they can actually be charged quickly on the road. That's half the win with the 4680, just being bigger so wiring up and assembling the pack itself is simpler. But again even from that angle stuff like the BYD Blade format has already surpassed it years ago at this point.

mistersausage 2025-11-09 00:06

but you have a lot more void space because bigger cylinders leave more space when packed then small cylinders

SirCheesington 2025-11-09 00:19

there's a lot of other factors that go into the impact of void space here - you need cooling channels in a big battery, and depending on how the cooling solution is designed void space may be a net improvement.

Isogash 2025-11-09 02:23

This is exactly it. In non-critical subscription software products you really *can* just steamroll your way to a shit MVP, and then scale and fix the issues later. In fact, it makes sense to do that. It works because when you find an issue, you can fix it for everyone everywhere all at once; fixing things is a free action. Your product often will improve better with real users doing your testing for you, and since its a service they will benefit from those accumulated improvements. What you can't do is apply the same process to basically any other industry. In other industries, you can't just update a product once you've already manufactured it. You can't upgrade a service that's already been provided. If you fuck something up badly, you have to recall and either refund or replace, which is *extremely* expensive. As soon as the product is even remotely dangerous or critical too, you need an almost impeccable safety record or your reputation will plummet: nobody wants to buy from a manufacturer that often makes faulty products. The level of groundwork required to make good products is high, and where "measure twice, cut once" really shines through in overall cost and success. Having said that, personally I think SV wasn't even propped up by the "build it fast" approach, but instead simply by throwing a lot of money at talented engineers who just build the software more or less correctly regardless of what management thought. You can't really do that in other industries unless you know the industry really well.

wwj 2025-11-09 03:01

I think you missed this from the higher comment: >So the 46mm cells should have been a leap forward in range and energy density by weight not volume. They would theoretically be better for weight at the expense of volume.

[deleted] 2025-11-09 13:24

It’s crazy, if they would have built an affordable small sized truck like a Ford Maverick with a massive range, it would have been their best selling vehicle.

Engunnear 2025-11-09 20:05

Then the person who wrote the article is either ignorant of cell manufacturing, or they’re just regurgitating Tesla’s lies.

ObservationalHumor 2025-11-10 02:22

It's got to ignorance because the reduction of the solvent heating and recovery process was a massive part of Tesla's pitch on battery day. I hate to defend Musk or Tesla but this wasn't something they were keeping secret or trying to downplay when the DBE process ran into issues. Musk has a weird obsession with floorspace and putting the initial lines are Fremont instead of say Nevada was a big mistake because it likely necessitated relying on DBE as a core part of the process. Tesla has always been a company that simply does not do contingency planning, blue skies everything during planning and at best retroactively cobbles something that sort of works together long after the fact. We've seen it with the Alien Dreadnought, the CT, the Solar Roof and the 4680 is just among friends and family on that list. I'd wager the whole 'unboxed' process will be more of the same too if they ever get around to trying it.

CANDUattitude 2025-11-10 11:08

There's a balance. Jumping to MP can be a good idea if you have the spare cash/capacity and heavily value the TTM but you also need to have some other checks to manage exposure like parallel efforts & fallbacks. A lot of companies operate this way including Apple but they tend to limit the early launches to smaller markets and lower volume products.

Isogash 2025-11-10 12:01

Apple is pretty good at not fucking up the hardware and the software can be improved remotely.

CANDUattitude 2025-11-10 13:46

The retina Intel macbooks had garbo thermals because Intel kept missing their promised TDP but by then it was too late to retool. Butterfly keyboard was also a small disaster, failure to adequetly dogfood a major change or test in all relevant enviroments.

Isogash 2025-11-10 13:53

Honestly, these are relatively minor issues when compared to everything that goes right that you don't really notice. I'm talking about delivering something that is fundamentally not fit for purpose, not that is totally free of issues.

OCedHrt 2025-11-10 19:32

The problem is infrastructure costs in China is cheaper so it's scalable to push the cost out to infrastructure and make the disposable device (the trucks) cheaper.

whatisthisnowwhat1 2025-11-11 20:12

>What exactly does Tesla have that's so innovative and ground breaking these days A ceo with a bunch of dod satellites

EarthConservation 2025-11-11 21:03

Funny enough, Musk is really never questioned about where he came up with the idea for Starlink. Like most of his ideas, it sounds like he stole the idea from someone who was already working on it, who at one point, briefly collaborated with Musk while looking for folks in the industry to partner with. That guy signed contracts with other companies to launch the venture, and days later, Musk announced Starlink and rushed to build out his own satellite factories. Seems that because of SpaceX's ties with the federal government, and Musk's massive levels of government and private funding, he was able to rapidly run his project at a far larger scale at a far faster rate than the person he seems to have stolen the idea from.

Just_Stretch5492 2026-02-02 18:26

3 months later aged like milk

HuskyRiding 2026-02-22 14:20

By now a lot of us admit that he is our mistake.

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