Popular Tesla now from China?

Speculation about some NZ-market versions of the popular Model 3 sedan moving to Shanghai production appears cemented.

INCREASING conjecture by New Zealand Tesla-rati about the make’s plant in China taking over production of the best-selling variants of Model 3 sedans bound for this market seems to be confirmed.

Speculation about this switch occurring has been rife for some time, arising even before the factory near Shanghai began operation last year. 

Now brand supporters here have picked up on changes being made to the company’s online configurator that cement this thought, for Australia as well as NZ.

It’s not all versions, however.

Fans writing on the EV Owners’ NZ Facebook page seem to be in agreement with Australia media reports that suggest the 2021 Standard Range Plus and Long Range will now be made in China.

The flagship Performance model will continue to source from the production facility in Fremont, California, that has provisioned all NZ-market Model 3s until now.

Telsa itself has yet to offer official comment on this. The brand famously axed its publics relations division last year.

An Australian daily website, CarAdvice, says it was made aware of the change through being a Tesla delivery tracking service, VedaPrime.

It and NZ Tesla fans cited the tip-off for the production location switch as coming from a range of minor updates and changes now being provisioned on the configurator.

One particular red herring: The introduction of revised front door trims, which feature new extensions of the dashboard trim inlays, including in white – a feature unique to Shanghai-based Model 3 production.

Both models are also now available with a white interior – an option previously exclusive to the range-topping Model 3 Performance.

The Model 3 Standard Range Plus can also now be optioned with the 19-inch 'Sport' alloy wheels previously exclusive to the Long Range, CarAdvice says.

Chinese production also ushers in an increase in the driving range, to a total of 508km – just three months after it was upgraded from 460km to 490km, as part of a 2021 upgrade.

Tesla followers here have suggested on the EV Owners NZ forum that those figures are not to be considered as absolute gospel, citing that the cars tend to deliver less than these ranges in daily use.

They point out that the ranges are estimated mated by using the NEDC measure, a now outdated driving cycle measure.  NZ no longer identifies NEDC, preferring instead the WLTP guidance that is now used in Europe.

CarAdvice also says a listing in the Australian government's Road Vehicle Certification System – a official database listing all vehicles certified for compliance with Australian Design Rules – also confirms the production switch for the two entry grades.

Chinese-built variants now wearing vehicle identification numbers starting with LRW – the World Manufacturer Identifier assigned to Tesla's Shanghai factory, with the L signifying Chinese production.

It’s understood the intention behind the production switch is to reduce wait times for European and Asia-Pacific-market customers. It could also deliver improvement in assembly quality; last year several automotive magazines compared US and China-built cars and judged the latter to be superior in many aspects, but notably insulation, paint quality and panel fit. US-made Teslas are often lambasted for assembly faults and shortcomings.

The Model 3 was New Zealand’s best-selling fully electric car in 2020.

Tesla update turns horn sounds into farts

It uses the external speaker to project noise at other motorists and pedestrians

TESLA cars have been able to create fart sounds inside the cabin for some time – now they can share that ‘talent’ with the wider public.

The facility to fart at other drivers and pedestrians as its horn arrives with providing a new ‘Boombox’ feature that can broadcast custom audio.

 If the sound of the expulsion of intestinal gas doesn’t captivate, it can also make lots of other sounds - a baaing goat, applause, ‘La Cucaracha’ and a number of others; even someone speaking posh.

The facility to broadcast alternate noises in lieu of normal honking sounds car horns usually make rolled out with a number of other updates as part of Tesla’s firmware 2020.48.26 update, though it’ll only work if the speakers are fitted, which occurs during assembly.  

US media have reported that Tesla cars manufactured after September 1, 2019, have the speaker built in. 

The sound menu is basically endless, because in addition to the pre-loaded standard sounds, Tesla allows you to upload up to five custom sounds into the system.

The broadcast mechanism is an enhanced version of the external speaker mounted toward the front of the car that is normally used to emit a humming sound to alert pedestrians that a vehicle is nearby.

Most EVs emits a low frequency sound at low speeds, but Tesla is the first automaker to apply extracurricular noises to this piece, reports America’s Autoblog website.

It says  Tesla began to install these speakers on its cars at some point in 2019, so you’ll need a newer Tesla to take advantage of this update. 

The site says Tesla owners will be able to activate their noises of choice by simply pressing the horn once they set it up in the car’s infotainment system.

It understands rhe cars make these noises via the horn press when the vehicle is at a standstill, but will sound the traditional horn when moving, for safety’s sake. After all, as Autoblog notes, “farting at a semi-truck moving into your lane on the highway probably won’t do much of anything.”

However, anybody on the side of the road or walking along near a stopped Tesla will be subject to whatever whimsy the driver decides to cook up.

Autoblog notes that America’s federal and state regulations surrounding horn use in passenger cars are “shockingly light” for a safety feature.

“There’s no federal requirement for a horn or horn sound, though the placement of the horn button is regulated — it must be designated with a clear symbol/marking if it’s not activated by pressing the steering wheel.”

Also included in the latest updates are improvements to the driving visualizer, cabin preconditioning when unplugged, Supercharger display enhancements and new games. The new games include The Battle of Polytopia, Cat Quest and Solitaire.

Gigafactory ‘perfect’ for Tiwai

An Auckland visionary believes Southland’s smelter site is a Musk-see.

Tesla’s first gigafactory in Sparks, Utah.

AN electric vehicle infrastructure entrepreneur reckons his push to have the Tiwai Point smelter re-energised as a Tesla ‘gigafactory’ is worth taking to Government and the American car brand.

 Nigel Broomhall says the response so far to a Facebook campaign launching immediately after the smelter’s closure was announced has fuelled an ambition initially proposed to spark discussion.

Experience in the electricity and electric vehicle sectors - ventures ChargeSmart and Invisible Urban Charging being undertaken with benefit of 18 years with Meridian Energy – has left Broomhill confident his concept will work.

“It’s the ideal spot for something new. The perfect location.”

A pile of responses to his pitch, not just directly to Facebook but also on a number of prominent EV owner sites has been largely supportive.

New Zealand is well-positioned for being a leader in Green energy creation, the Manapouri hydroelectric infrastructure that primarily feeds the smelter creates more than enough electricity for this new venture and the cost efficiencies are right, he argues.

Plus, while an alternate pitch for Tiwai – to turn it into plant producing hydrogen, another key fuel for future transport needs – also has merit, repurposing it as one of the giant battery-making facilities Tesla is creating around the world makes even better sense. 

It’s big-thinking on a scale beyond anything imagined when the smelter and power scheme were created.

As the name suggests, a gigafactory is massive – the first, in Nevada, the United States, is the biggest building in the world at 1.76 million metres and with an annualised rate of around 20 GWh, claims the highest volume production of lithium ion batteries in the world. (See this tour of the factory produced by CNBC).

Since then Tesla has begun sister plants in Shanghai, China – supporting a factory making Tesla Model 3 cars for that country - and, more recently, in Germany. 

On the outskirts of Berlin, the latter is also set to mirror the operation in Sparks, Utah, in making battery cells and battery packs in association with Panasonic, plus Tesla vehicle drivetrains, and the company’s two storage products, the Powerwall and Powerpack.

It’s this latest undertaking which has also provided the basis for a costings exercise that, Broomhill argues, shows why a NZ factory would be all the more beneficial for the international giant.

The core appeals are that an infrastructure exists and that it would deliver even better employment opportunity in a region set to be hit hard, with 1200 direct - and perhaps 1400 indirect – job losses when NZ Aluminium Smelters (NZAS) closes next August.

The ingredient of a power supply delivering 570 mega Watts and all the electricity transmission hardware, a commercial deep water port designed to manage raw materials and a high-trained manufacturing workforce would be appealing to Tesla, he feels, and very good for our economy.

 “Even though the plant would be in Southland, having a technology leader like Tesla in NZ would have a huge ripple effect across the NZ technology industry. This would attract more technology players and grow our tech industry rapidly,” he argues.

The potential economic value of around $11 billion is estimated on published data for the German factory, which has been a $6.9 billion investment that has delivered 8000 jobs but is also based on Tesla having to wear electricity supply rates seven and a half times those Tiwai enjoys.

“The biggest opportunity we’ve got is price. Germany’s electricity price is horrendous, they are up around 35-37 cents per kilowatt hour whereas in comparison Tiwai is, according to recent articles, down around 5c (as a wholesale rate).”

Pundits have already identified that closing Tiwai will free up a swathe of hydro electricity and potentially lower national prices, but getting what the smelter takes now – and that’s 13 percent of the national grid’s capacity – to the rest of NZ won’t be cheap. It demands a $100 million upgrade (the Clutha Upper Waitaki Lines project), cited to take at least three more years.

Broomhall’s approach really negates the need for any of that, though he suggests Tesla’s operation would likely be more efficient and perhaps only need no more than half the power going into Tiwai now. 

In saying that, he concedes there’s one aspect of the Utah facility that would be challenging to emulate in Southland. The Sparks plant is designed to be a zero-energy facility, consuming no fossil fuels and using electric sources to power the back-up emergency generators. So the entirety of the roof is covered in a solar array and any power not consumed during the day is stored in powerpacks for use when needed.

Nigel Broomhall says his Tiwai Point idea might be a long shot, but he’s used to “throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.”

Broomhall says that probably wouldn’t be achievable at Tiwai Point. “The solar gain is not huge down there but you wouldn’t need to do it because they have that massive direct feed from Manapouri. So there’s no need for renewables.”

Given a gigafactory’s output is critical to vehicle production, why not push for a Tesla car plant? 

As an ardent EV fan, he’d love to see the make’s vehicles made here, but says that probably would be a leap too far. 

“If they wanted to do cars, that would be fantastic, as it requires a lot more workers.” 

Getting a gigafactory going would depend on how quickly NZAS could scale down and clean up their site, but regardless of that it would be expedient to at least gauge Tesla’s interest.

Tesla’s gigafactory plan is surrounded in conjecture, but in 2018 Elon Musk talked about the need for 10 to 20 such facilities for Tesla to achieve planned products and volume. He also said then that the world would need 100 gigafactories to make enough electric cars and batteries for global demand.

The next step? “If the Facebook page we've created gets to 10,000-plus likes, we'll build a business-funded team and pitch Tesla. We'll co-ordinate across the electricity industry, local and central Government.”

Tesla sees need for numerous gigafactories to feed to emergent demand for electric cars.

Tesla, Dyson fuel EV conjecture

Recent reports remind that the electric car batteries we have now are just an intermediary.

is the China-market model 3 set to debut a breaktrhough battery?

WITH electric cars, it all comes down to the battery – and with batteries, it all comes down to what’s next.

In which case, intriguing news from two quarters. First and most recently, there’s James Dyson. In opening up more fully about the promise about the Dyson car we’ll never see, the British magnate leaves impression that while it was doomed on cost, the cancelled seven-seater known only by its codename, N526, was at least showing huge potential in respect to operability. The promise of offering double the range of a Tesla Model X reminds of the potential from solid state battery technology that the car world is aiming to implement.

Speaking of those ‘T’ cars … the other figure of the moment is, of course, Mr Loony Tunes himself.

Accepting that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that not everything Elon Musk says can be trusted as fact, there’s still good reason to take genuine interest what he seems set to have to say on occasion of the ‘Battery Day’ that was supposed to occur today but has now been deferred to some time in June, and might now be staged over several days … and in Texas, rather than California. Welcome to Elon’s world, right?

Much like the “Autonomy Day” that happened last year, Tesla is planning to give presentations to investors, which are livestreamed, about its latest development in powertrain and battery technology. 

What’s getting pundits excited is the realisation of something Musk has long teased rivals and investors about – a low-cost, long-life battery.

Such a device is now said to be developed to the point where it is intended to insert into Tesla’s staple Model 3 sedan, albeit initially just in the cars coming out of the brand’s new plant near Shanghai whose function is to purely build stock for sale in China.

There is emergent evidence to suggest the new battery might be the breakthrough to bringing the cost of EVs in line with petrol cars, and allow EV batteries to have second and third lives in the electric power grid.

Tesla has made clear in the past of its desire to deliver batteries designed to achieve outcomes well beyond the capabilities of today’s types. That conceivably would easily outlast the usable life of a car then, having done so, enter a second-life as a powerwall home installation or integrated into a larger commercial undertaking, to fulfil Tesla's goal to achieve the status of a power company.

Recent reports say this has been jointly developed with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology and deploys technology developed by Tesla in collaboration with a team of academic battery experts recruited by Musk. 

The batteries differ to today’s types by relying on innovations such as low-cobalt and cobalt-free battery chemistries, and the use of chemical additives, materials and coatings that will reduce internal stress and enable batteries to store more energy for longer periods.

According to reports, Tesla also plans to implement new high-speed, heavily automated battery manufacturing processes designed to reduce labour costs and increase production in massive “terafactories” about 30 times the size of the company’s sprawling Nevada “gigafactory” — a strategy telegraphed in late April to analysts by Musk.

Tesla is working on recycling and recovery of such expensive metals as nickel, cobalt and lithium, through its Redwood Materials affiliate, as well as new “second life” applications of EV batteries in grid storage systems, such as the one Tesla built in South Australia in 2017.

Reuters news agency reported exclusively in February that Tesla was in advanced talks to use CATL’s lithium iron phosphate batteries, which use no cobalt, the most expensive metal in EV batteries and also the most controversial ingredient, due to the associations with child labour being used in cobalt mining in the Congo, a primary source.

CATL also has developed a simpler and less expensive way of packaging battery cells, called cell-to-pack, that eliminates the middle step of bundling cells. Tesla is expected to use the technology to help reduce battery weight and cost.

the model 3 is already positioned as tesla’s core volume model.

Reports say CATL also plans to supply Tesla in China next year with an improved long-life nickel-manganese-cobalt battery whose cathode is 50 percent nickel and only 20 percent cobalt.

Tesla now jointly produces nickel-cobalt-aluminum batteries with Panasonic at a “gigafactory” in Nevada, and buys NMC batteries from LG Chem in China. Panasonic has declined to comment.

Taken together, the advances in battery technology, the strategy of expanding the ways in which EV batteries can be used and the manufacturing automation on a huge scale all aim at the same target: Reworking the financial arithmetic that until now has made buying an electric car more expensive for most consumers than sticking with carbon-emitting internal combustion vehicles. 

The cost of CATL's cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate battery packs has fallen below $US80 per kilowatt-hour, with the cost of the battery cells dropping below $US60/kWh, the sources said. CATL’s low-cobalt NMC battery packs are close to $US100/kWh.

The car industry cites that $100/kWh for battery packs is the level at which electric vehicles reach rough parity with internal combustion competitors. 

It was an inability to achieve anything like this that caused Dyson to axe his project. Indeed, in an interview with Britain’s ‘The Times’ newspaper, he was pretty frank about how the only figures that looked good for his car related to performance and range –  the same sort of get-up-and-go of a performance combustion engine SUV of similar size and almost 1000kms on a single charge.

Sounds tasty? Perhaps not so much given the car would have cost well over $300,000, Dyson has admitted. Hence why, after putting around $150 million into the gig – which he could afford (all this information comes from an interview he gave on occasion of topping Britain’s rich list, with an estimated value of $NZ3.2 billion) – he pulled the plug last October, by which stage they’d reached the point of having a running prototype – still unseen - plus styling concepts of the finished interior and Range Rover-ish exterior, both of which were shown off to media.

The whole point of the Dyson car was, of course, to show the potential of the proprietary solid state battery tech that is core to the inventor’s homeware products. The challenge of transferring this to an automotive product was huge, but the tests had been promising.

That range was a huge wow. Website Autoblog says that, assuming that the ultimate figure was based on Europe’s WLTP standards, it would have been an impressive jump from Tesla’s Model S’ 610km and almost doubling the long-range Model X’s 510 km (the latter also a seven-seater). 

There’s more. Current lithium ion batteries lose oomph more quickly when stressed  - which is what high speed driving does – and also operate most effectively in a narrow ambient temperature band; range drops off especially when it get icey outside.

Comment from Dyson suggests his car wasn’t so affected. He told ’The Times’ the model sustained great performance “even on a freezing February night, on the naughty side of 70mph (110kmh) on the motorway, with the heater on and the radio at full blast.”

Even though his batteries are more compact than current lithium ion cells, the weight issue wasn’t resolved: The car had an alloy body, yet still weighed 2.6 tons. Yet it could clock 0-100kmh in 4.8 seconds (about half a second more than the long-range Model X), with its top speed apparently reaching 200kmh (50kmh shy of the Model X’s). This is all coming from the twin 200kW electric motors rated with 400kW and 650Nm of torque.

Even though the Dyson car is no more, its spirit lives on. The founder said the 500-strong team are already working on various other projects, and that he is open to the idea of letting car makers tap into his company’s batteries, He’s not adverse to taking a second look at making cars again some day. But only if it becomes commercially viable. 

The Times ran this image of james dyson and his stillborn electric car