Tesla fan-boys destroyed: Part 1 - Low Battery Day

Published: Dec. 28, 2020, 8:54 p.m.

Part one of my response to your most entertaining feedback. Thank you sincerely for hating my recent \u2018Tesla is doomed\u2019 video. Currently hated by 21.2 per cent of you, as I present this package. My near-term hate target is 25 per cent hates...  

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Battery Day - September 22, 2020 - yet another \u2018nothing announcement\u2019 from Electric Jesus. Only EJ could hold a battery day and deploy no actual, existing battery, and get away with it. He announced the mythical 4680 battery - which, let\u2019s not forget, does not actually exist. Perhaps in the future, but not now.   There\u2019s a video about the tabless 4680 battery, promises about chemistry, packaging and thermal performance improvements, and some vague tweet from the messiah (after battery day) that he\u2019s got a few prototypes up and running. (But, let\u2019s face it, his track record with the truth is poor.)   But as for actual production of the 4680 battery \u2026 it doesn\u2019t exist. It\u2019s just another promise at this point. Sounds great - but I\u2019ll wait until I see one mass produced.  In the domain of actual evidence, Musk did not show a physical example of the 4680 battery on the overly prick-teased Battery Day in September. If one actually existed, don\u2019t you think he would have rolled one out and given the world a look? Like, you would expect to see a new battery on Battery Day, would you not?  One thing I really admire about Electric Jesus is he\u2019s never afraid to announce the latest hunt for the Electric Unicorn. One day he might well return with its head on a stick, and doubters like me will have to eat our words. And I\u2019ll be happy to. But this will not happen any time soon.  On battery Day, Mr Musk also promised to mine lithium from clay deposits after securing a 10,000-acre lithium clay mining lease in nearby Nevada. But, unfortunately:   \u201cThere has never been any commercial production of lithium from clay sources.\u201d - Chris Berry  Don\u2019t take my word for this. I don\u2019t know very much about mining. But Chris Berry, president of Mountain House Partners and an analyst who specialises in energy metals exploitation, quoted there from The verge in a feature on Battery Day, and how ultimately disappointing it actually was - he knows a thing or two about lithium mining.  Mr Berry went on to point out that most of the world\u2019s lithium is actually exploited from lithium brine deposits in the so-called \u2018lithium triangle\u2019 of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. And from hard rock deposits here in Shitsville.   Why go to all that trouble, mining lithium so far afield, when you can just suck it out of clay, virtually next door to Gigafactory One? Mr Berry explained:  \u201cWell geez, if it was this easy to find a domestic source of clay-based lithium, and just use everyday materials like water and salt to produce commercial battery-grade quantities [of lithium] at scale, why haven\u2019t we been doing this all along?\u2019\u201d  Pro tip: a typical lithium mine takes about 10 years to get full regulatory approval in \u2018Murica. So, don\u2019t hold your breath for Electric Jesus to go 100 per cent \u2018loaves and fishes\u2019 with vertical integration on lithium battery production. Or if you do, make it a deep one.