Minutes of 20220322 Musk's Speech at Berlin Factory【CITIC New Energy Automobile Group】

2022.3.22 Tesla Germany Berlin Gigafactory

Description: Musk's speech to employees at a Factory in Germany

Key information:

1, Musk judged that the main challenge last year and this year is the shortage of chips; and the bottleneck next year and the next two or three years will be how many batteries can be produced per year, and the speed of mining and refining of battery materials

2, Tesla is preparing two new colors, complex dark red and liquid silver, involving multi-layer spray paint design and process

3. Musk reiterated once again that the iron phosphate-based cathode will be used on the standard endurance model, and for the first time, the manganese-based positive electrode is noteworthy; long-endurance models continue to use nickel-based cathodes

4. FSD Beta may enter Europe later this year to begin testing, depending on regulatory approvals

Transcript:

(In German) Today we delivered the first car to the customer, the construction of the factory began two years ago, today is the festival of the factory, thank you very much for the hard work done. You can all see how excited our customers are when they receive the car. I think this is very meaningful for the Berlin Gigafactory, for the future of Brandenburg, and it is worth remembering. Every car we build is a step towards a sustainable future. Think about this factory and the cars we make, and we give people hope for the future. It's important to have reason to be excited about the future because people are often frustrated or sad about the future because they feel like the future won't be good. What we're doing here, every car we make, every batch of batteries makes the future better. So what you've done, really important, makes a difference. I'm working on the third part of the master plan, a big part of it is to continue to scale up, in order for us to really impact the world in a positive way, we get a lot of media attention, we get a lot of attention, but if we say that the car we build has a share of the world's cars, there are 200 million cars in the world, and we make less than 1%, or even less than 0.5%, so if we want to really impact the future in a positive way, we have to build a lot of cars, That's why we call him gigafactory, it's very big. We started with the Production ModelY and we're going to build more exciting models here, so I think this overall will be a hub of excellence for sustainable energy and will really help the world, and I look forward to doing that with you guys, thanks again for everything. If you have any questions?

Q: (The sound is too small to hear clearly)

A: I am very grateful to the Supercharg team for making long-distance travel possible, the work done by the Supercharging team is impressive, let us applaud them. In addition to the work we do here, we are also inspiring the industry to incentivize the entire industry to move toward electrification. It's fair to say that without Tesla, without the work done by the Tesla team, the whole industry wouldn't have moved so quickly, in the direction of electrification, so that's why we open-sourced our patents and offered our patents to other automakers for free, because it's the right thing to do, and as far as I know, no company has ever done this before. Tesla has always tried to do the right thing, and we want to be a company that you can trust wholeheartedly. In order to do that, we have to be a company that does the right thing. Other questions?

Q: When does Tesla go to South America or other markets?

A: We definitely want to go around the world, and the challenge we face now is that our orders far exceed our capacity, and all the time people ask, why not go to other markets? Why not do different versions of the product? When will Tesla's semi-truck and Cybertronck, and roadster, come out? But the problem we face is that orders far exceed capacity. So we have to keep our capacity past the current order rate, and then it's reasonable to expand to other markets and launch more products, and if we just add complexity and don't increase production, then we're not actually doing more. Because how well we can do is a function of how many cars we can produce, so as long as we can increase production and meet our existing market demand, then we will expand to other markets and add more products, last year chip supply faced a lot of challenges, and then this year there will still be some chip shortages, and next year, we may face the challenge of total battery production, if we look backwards for two or three years, how many GWh batteries can be produced each year will become a bottleneck, and then further into the supply chain, That is, how fast is the extraction and refining of battery materials? Of course we're going to do it in an ethical and environmentally friendly way, so in the long run, it's just how many TWh batteries can be produced each year, and our rough calculation is that at least 300 TWh of battery production is needed to make the world transition to a sustainable energy economy, which is basically a lot of batteries, so we want to do as much as we can, and we're actually the best for us, with an average annual growth of 70-80%, and maybe even faster in the future. So that's the answer, why didn't we go to more markets and release more products.

Q: What are you most proud of?

A: Speaking of the thing I'm most proud of, it's what the Tesla team has done to expand at the rate it is now and make products that people love, and you can think about how many of the products you buy are something you really like, so few. It would be nice if people made more products to love, Tesla is one of the few, companies that make the products you love, and bring people joy every day, which is great. If you look at our growth rate, Tesla is the fastest growing, large manufacturing company in history, and I think the second fastest is Ford, when it came to making the ModelT in 100 years. We're actually growing faster than Ford's ModelT, which is crazy

Q: In terms of color, what colors can the original manufacturer provide?

A: Color has always been a challenge because when you think about color, you not only have to be able to make it, but you also have to think about, responsible for 2 years of maintenance, so guys, what kind of service team do we have to build to manage these colors. Therefore care must be taken to provide the number of colors. But we're obviously going to make some special colors here, it's not just the color itself, it's also about the paint layer, to get a three-dimensional look, so we're going to make a very special red that maybe a lot of people have seen, and it involves 13 layers of spray paint, and it takes so many layers to bring a three-dimensional look. It makes a difference, making the colors appear deep and rich. We're also going to introduce a silver that involves 8 layers of paint, and it's going to still be very special, a bit like liquid silver, similar to the complex crimson red that was before, so we're getting ready to do this soon. In a few months, we're going to make intricate crimson and aqua silver, they're really cool, they're the best colors, and I think it's going to be the best paint for the production car, not the kind that the demo car does, and we're still adjusting the paint shop, because 13 layers of painting means a 13-layer process, and it's hard to modify the paint shafts, and it has to be designed from the start.

Q: Graphene?

A: I don't think we'll use graphene, but we'll use graphite, graphite is very rich, basically just carbon, a specific form of carbon, I think when it comes to battery materials, for long-endurance models, or will use nickel-based positive electrode, positive pole is really an important part, they all contain lithium, and lithium only accounts for 2% of the battery, so nickel-based will still be used for long-endurance models, just like the current, standard endurance models, will use iron phosphate-based, and I think manganese will also be more noteworthy, there is a certain potential. If we look at hyperscale applications, for example, we need tens of millions of tons, which may eventually reach hundreds of millions of tons, so for a very large-scale application of battery materials, it must be ordinary materials. If it's not ordinary materials, there is no way to scale up. So when it comes to graphene, everyone likes graphene, but this thing, maybe sometime in the future we will use it, but graphene is difficult to make, but even graphene is made of carbon. In any case, one of the basic principles of mass production of batteries, how to be able to manufacture tens of millions of tons on a large scale, is ethical and environmentally beneficial, I am very confident about the large-scale use of iron phosphate-based and manganese-based cathodes around the world, and nickel-based cathodes are only used for long-endurance models.

Q: FSD Beta in Europe?

A: For the FSD Beta to enter Europe, at the moment FSD Beta is doing well in the Us, and later we will expand to Canada, and I think we are ready to show it to the regulators in the EU. I don't know, maybe in two or three months. But we still need to do a lot of work to deal with the special situation in Europe, because if you drive in Europe, in fact, the roads in various countries are quite different, although they are all eu unions, but the road rules, the signs on the road are completely different, and then if you have different languages, it is still very difficult to achieve full autonomous driving in Europe. It's a lot more complicated than the U.S. or Canada, there's a lot of difficulty, and the path is different, but maybe later this year, beta testing in Europe can begin, depending on regulatory approval. This is slightly different from the situation in the United States, where it is legal by default and illegal in Europe. So we have to get approval beforehand. In the United States, you can do it more or less according to your own cognition.

Q: What's the next goal?

A: This year, we will truly achieve large-scale production and build as many cars as possible. Completed the development of Cyberteruck this year and puts it into production next year. There are enough battery packs to start production of tesla semi-trucks, hoping to complete the engineering of the new Roadster sports car. Then there are some future projects that are also very important. There's also the energy storage project, a new version of Tesla rooftop solar, powerwall3, and there's a lot to do. So we have a very exciting product roadmap, maybe answer a question or two more?

A: In the best case, I think it should be ten years, which may be more radical, but it is not impossible, that is, in 1 year, to produce 20 million vehicles per year, which is a good number, because there are 200 million vehicles in use in the world, so 20 million will account for one percent of the existing vehicles in the world.