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Ask HN: What did you think of the Tesla Battery Day?

12 points by temporalparts ↗ HN
Hey HN community,

To my surprise, I don't see a successful thread [0] about Tesla and would really like to hear from this community on what y'all think about what was presented today by Tesla. I really enjoy reading the insights and feedback of this community.

Sincerely, temporalparts

[0] Only a bunch of threads by people with only 2 or 3 points. Maybe I'm wrong and there is not interest in the community to talk about this.

9 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] thread
ryan93
Its interesting you pointed out the lack of threads on the subject. I wanted to read a thread about it also.
adventured
It's because nothing of great interest happened. Battery Day is about Musk attempting to lay claim to batteries in terms of attention, in the style of eg Alibaba Singles Day. Maybe future battery days will interesting, that's not what this one was about, this one was an initial attention land grab. The EV industry will grow rapidly and the focus of attention will splinter off from Tesla in the coming years. Tesla will be a comparatively smaller minority part of the industry, rather than its present large center. Musk knows that, so he's going to try to claim as much central real-estate as possible before that happens. Events like Battery Day are simply meant to keep the attention on Tesla, to capture mindshare.
throw51319
Yeah, I am thinking this is because there's no way for Tesla to really lock people into their system - unlike big tech.

Other manufacturers have the mechanical tech, the software tech may not be as differentiating, and the battery tech will leak out.

nickik
This is such a crazy way of thinking about Elon. What would this gain him exactly? Attention doesn't make money, attention doesn't help growth. And doing that now because attention would go away in a couple years makes zero sense.

Musk literally always does the same thing, he comes out, talks about a bunch of things he wants to do and then goes and does them as well as he can. He has done that for 20 years and yet still people come out with the 'Elon is doing 4D mega brain level marketing' every single time. Even when he is wrong he goes out and does it anyway until he is forced to correct course.

Elon in fact does believe that by 2030 he will sell 20 million cars, and he most certainty is not content with being a 'smaller minority part of the industry'. Did he stop when he managed to get Falcon 1 to orbit and make a nice buissness out of that? No, he went on to the next bigger thing. The same thing for the Falcon 9 transition to Starship.

What makes much more sense is that they wanted to show of the level of technology they have an recruit more people to this effort. They also want to light a fire under the competition ass and show the people how the ICE age is ending. Literally the exact same thing they did with the Gigafactory in Nevada, when people said 'oh he wants to create the biggest battery factory in the world, that is pure hype and marketing' and now they have the biggest battery factory in the world.

doopy-loopy2
Main take-away: Tesla confirmed it is no longer just a car company.
xbmcuser
It will be interesting to see if they reach the price for batteries they are aiming for. I think the batteries being that cheap will have more effect on ROI of powerwall/batteries for home solar than on cars. As the battery in cars though expensive they are not majority of the cost anymore. Where as they are for powerwall so a $7000+ powerwall could go down to around $4000.
davidgould
It is odd. It thought the presentation was compelling and audacious, they really do mean to change the world, and presented a detailed and plausible plan to do that.

And yet, no serious discussion on HN except for some halfhearted dismisals. It's almost as if no-one understood it.