Battery Day -- The WSJ -- September 23, 2020

Tesla: EVs are still a luxury, Elon Musk. This is probably one of the best articles on status of EVs today. Link over at The WSJ. And, yes, it's still a battery issue. Battery Day for Elon Musk.

• plans to be world's largest auto maker by .....
• Volkswagen AG: here, hold my beer
• if Elon Musk delivers 20 million vehicles annually that will be twice what Volkswagen AG sold last year (2019) (all vehicles)
• this will be fun to watch
• might get to a $25,000 vehicle in "three years or so"
• operative phrase: "or so"
• no precise timeline or budget figure provided
• after the presentation, TSLA fell more than 6%, but then recovered a bit

The presentation, according to The WSJ:

It is the kind of shoot-for-the moon goal that has previously excited investors to make Tesla the world’s most-valuable car company despite selling just 367,500 vehicles last year.

 More:

Mr. Musk has a long history of making grandiose claims, some of which have been conveniently forgotten, including promises around robot vehicles and missed production goals. But he gained traction and credibility after opening a new factory in China and posting four consecutive quarters of profit after several years of struggle as he worked to deliver the Model 3. [Profitability mostly due to selling regulatory environmental credits.]

The compact car represented his long-pursued bet that the company could build and sell an electric car for $35,000 to usher in a new age of electric vehicles. But the Model 3 is still too expensive to be considered an everyman’s vehicle. It was briefly priced at $35,000, though on average sold for about $50,000 last year.

And here's the problem: “One of the things that troubles me the most is that we don’t yet have a truly affordable car, and that is something that we will make in the future,” Mr. Musk said Tuesday. “But in order to do that, we’ve got to get the cost of batteries down.” 

Actually that's only one of many, many problems.

But time to move on.

One helpful metric before we leave:

While Mr. Musk didn’t detail the exact cost per kilowatt-hour of battery cells, his projected savings of 56% to be fully realized in around three years would suggest a price far below the $100 per kWh threshold generally accepted for electric cars to reach price parity with gas-powered vehicles. Tesla’s cost of cells for the Model 3 are around $100 per kWh, according to estimates by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

More on batteries here, also from The WSJ.