Good morning! It’s Thursday, December 21, 2023, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.
1st Gear: Tesla 4680 Battery Holds Up The Cybertruck
Tesla recently delivered the first handful of Cybertrucks, but it is still a ways away from full-scale mass production. CEO Elon Musk said it would probably hit an annual production rate of 250,000 vehicles at some point in 2025 (so you can safely bet 2050.) However, one of the main reasons Tesla has had trouble scaling production is its 4680 battery packs used in the Cybertruck with its new dry-coasting technology.
Right now, Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas is only churning out 4680 battery cells at a rate that’ll power about 24,000 Cybertrucks per year. That’s only about a 10th of where they should be, if Musk’s 250,000 units per year estimate is to be believed. From Reuters:
Being able to ramp up battery output massively by dry-coating electrodes – rather than using the slower, more costly wet-coating – was a key factor behind Tesla’s forecasts in 2020 that it would more than halve battery costs, cut investment significantly, and create smaller, greener factories.
The nine people, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said Tesla had yet to crack dry-coating at the industrial scale needed to make 4680 batteries fast enough to hit its production targets.
The people said dry-coating the anode in the 4680 cells was not problematic but Tesla was struggling with the same technique for the cathode – the most expensive component in a battery.
Dry-coating anodes and cathodes is proven in the laboratory, as well as for smaller energy storage devices such as super capacitors, and even some small batteries, according to Yuan Gao, a battery technology consultant.
“But no one has done it so far for large EV batteries at a mass scale and at a high enough speed. Tesla is the first one to try to commercialize this,” said Gao, who has worked in the industry for three decades.
“The challenge is that not only does Tesla have to scale it up and speed up the process, it also must develop its own equipment and tools. It’s daunting to say the least,” he said.
Reuters reports that three separate sources told the outlet the 4680 batteries in the Cybertruck include an estimated 1,360 individual cells.
That means Tesla would need to make 340 million cells a year, or almost a million a day, to supply 250,000 of the electric pickups, which are entering a hot market with rivals such as Ford’s F-150 Lightning, Rivian’s R1T and an electric Hummer from General Motors.
At the moment, Tesla’s Austin factory takes about 16 weeks to make 10 million 4680 cells, according to Reuters calculations based on figures from Tesla, verified by the three sources.
That translates to 32.5 million cells a year, or enough for just under 24,000 pickups – and that’s only for the Cybertruck.
Tesla also wants to use 4680 batteries to power other vehicles, most notably the $25,000 small car the company is scrambling to launch by the mid-2020s.
Tesla has some limited production capacity for 4680 cells in Fremont, California but its plant there is mainly for pilot production. Panasonic, one of Tesla’s long-standing battery suppliers, is planning to build at least two plants in the United States but has only just broken ground on the first.
Two of the nine people familiar with the matter believe Tesla’s progress with scaling up 4680 production will likely gain steam, especially once it achieves stability with the production know-how on one production line.
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Tesla’s battery tsar Drew Baglino said in October that the company was now producing 4680 cells on two production lines in Austin and plans to install a total of eight lines there in two phases, with the last four due to be running in late 2024.
Still, one of the two people said replicating established know-how from one production line to the next is no cakewalk.
The source said only about 5% of cells made on profitable production lines are ditched but scrap rates could shoot up to 30%-50% and hover there for several months as each new line gets going.
Sources told Reuters that Tesla was struggling to mix the cathode materials which include lithium, manganese and nickel, with a binder and stick them to a metallic foil to produce a cathode without using any moisture. It apparently worked in small amounts, but the whole thing fell apart when Tesla tried to scale it up because heat melted the binder.
“If you melt the glue, pretty soon everything will become one big chunk of gooey mess,” one of the sources told Reuters.
These are words to live by.
2nd Gear: Frontal Crash Prevention Systems Struggle
Frontal crash prevention systems, like forward-collision warning and automatic emergency braking, are proving to not be very elective at stopping crashes with large trucks and motorcycles. If you think about it, those two types of vehicles are pretty much on the extreme ends of how big vehicles on the road are.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety looked at more than 160,000 crashes and found that front crash prevention systems reduced rear-end collisions with medium- or heavy-duty trucks by 38 percent. Motorcycles faired slightly better at 41 percent. However, both are significantly lower than the 53 percent reduction in rear-end crashes that involved other passenger vehicles. From Automotive News:
Researchers used police-reported crash data for 2016-20 model-year passenger vehicles with and without automatic emergency braking and forward-collision warning systems. The crash data was from 2017-21 and covered 18 states.
Medium- and heavy-duty trucks, such as delivery trucks and tractor-trailers, were defined as having gross vehicle weight ratings of more than 10,000 pounds and generally excluded pickups and other light trucks, according to the study.
“These reductions are impressive for all vehicle types, but the safety benefits could be even larger if front crash prevention systems were as good at mitigating and preventing crashes with big trucks and motorcycles as they are with cars,” Jessica Cicchino, IIHS’ vice president of research, said in a statement Thursday.
If improved, those systems could prevent an additional 5,500 crashes a year with medium- or heavy-duty trucks and another 500 crashes with motorcycles, the institute said.
“Motorcycles and large trucks present unique risks,” Cicchino said. “Along with being hard for other drivers to see, motorcycles don’t have a steel frame surrounding and protecting the rider the way cars do. At the other end of the spectrum, large trucks are so massive that when a passenger car hits one, it’s more likely to be fatal to the people inside the passenger vehicle. The height of large trucks can also result in dangerous underride crashes.”
To further address the technology’s effectiveness, IIHS is conducting new vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention evaluations at higher speeds. The institute is increasing the speed to 35 to 45 mph after finding that the earlier test — conducted at both 12 and 25 mph — represented only a small percentage of the rear-end crashes the systems are designed to mitigate.
The IIHS study and test comes as all 20 participating automakers met a voluntary commitment to equip at least 95 percent of their light-duty cars and trucks with automatic emergency braking systems. We love to see it.
The last handful of automakers — General Motors, JLR, Maserati, Porsche and Kia — recently met the deadline set in the agreement.
Other automakers, including Ford, Stellantis, Tesla and Toyota, fulfilled the commitment in previous years.
NHTSA in May released a proposal to mandate automatic emergency braking, including pedestrian detection, on all new light-duty vehicles. The agency also set minimum performance standards, calling for systems that can prevent or mitigate frontal crashes at higher speeds and work effectively in the dark.
If the proposal is adopted, nearly all U.S. passenger cars and trucks would be required to have crash-avoidance technology that meets a number of performance standards three years after the rule is finalized. The regulation’s full set of requirements would take effect the following year.
While I suppose any improvement to crash safety is an improvement, I feel like we’ve got some room to do better if this tech is sort of leaving motorcycles and bigger vehicles in the lurch.
3rd Gear: Don’t Run A Forklift Into A Battery Pack
General Motors says it believes an accident with a forklift is what started that fire at its Factory Zero plant earlier this week. From the Detroit Free Press:
“Our initial investigation indicates a forklift accidentally punctured a container with battery materials causing the fire,” said GM spokeswoman Tara Kuhnen. “The investigation continues.”
Both the automaker and the Detroit Fire Department said earlier they are continuing to investigate the cause of the fire that occurred in a shipping dock area and involved lithium ion batteries.
GM resumed production of electric vehicles at Factory Zero on Wednesday morning after a fire filled much of the plant with heavy smoke the evening prior, prompting an evacuation of the building and a work halt.
Kuhnen said that “most departments are operational again at the plant, including vehicle assembly. All others will be notified by their leadership when to return. Safety remains our overriding priority.”
Kuhnen said employees who work the first shift resumed their jobs at the standard time of 6 a.m. Wednesday.
In the late afternoon of December 19, the Detroit Fire Department was called for a three-alarm fire at the factory. It brought out 18 fire trucks and 60 firefighters. The FD was reportedly able to extinguish the fire and evacuate the building with no injuries. Not too shabby, fellas.
This is the second fire at the plant in recent months. According to documents the Free Press obtained under the state Freedom of Information Act, the Detroit Fire Department said in an Oct. 25 report there was “an autonomous electric car fire” inside the factory that water sprinklers helped extinguish. The report stated the ventilation system was not operating correctly and did not allow smoke to exit the building in a timely manner. The car fire consisted of a “battery fire, toxins and smoke was in the air.”
Kuhnen said: “Our investigation into the incident on October 25th indicates all safety systems operated correctly. We learned that the cause was a non-battery related component that has since been corrected.”
I believe if you have a third factory fire in the same fiscal year, it’s actually free. Fingers crossed GM doesn’t have to find out.
4th Gear: Toyota Recalls 1.1 Million Vehicles
Toyota is recalling about 1.1 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles around the world because of malfunctioning sensors that could prevent the airbags from deploying in a crash. This is less than ideal. From Automotive News:
The affected Toyota models are the 2020-21 Avalon and Avalon Hybrid; 2020-22 Camry and Camry Hybrid; 2020-21 Corolla; 2020-21 Highlander and Highlander Hybrid; 2020-21 RAV4 and RAV4 Hybrid and 2021 Sienna Hybrid.
Lexus models affected by the recall are the 2021 ES 250; 2020-22 ES 300h; and 2020-21 ES 350, RX 350 and RX 450h.
“The subject vehicles have Occupant Classification System … sensors in the front passenger seat that could have been improperly manufactured, causing a short circuit,” Toyota said in a news release. “This would not allow the airbag system to properly classify the occupant’s weight, and the airbag may not deploy as designed in certain crashes, increasing the risk of injury.”
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To fix the defect, dealers will inspect the sensors and replace them as necessary.
Vehicle owners will be notified in February.
A spokesperson for Toyota declined to comment on whether there had been any injuries, accidents or deaths related to the issue, according to AutoNews.