Not yet, you are right. But Quantum Scape Is building a plant, bought a lot of equipment, and spent tons of money on it. They have already hired around 600 employees, and leased for 10 years 3-4 buildings in San Jose, CA. I do not follow them, and my data could be a little bit old. But I know for sure that they are the only ones who tested 16 layers of Solid-State Battery and provided all data. Many companies claimed they had made the same progress, but no one provided open data and gave it to a third party for independent testing.
Solid state batteries has been coming next year’s technology for 10+ years.
Yes, you are right, but would you hire 600 employees and lease four buildings in San Jose? Buy tons of needed equipment and sign contracts with 3-4 carmakers in the list of top 10 in the world? And starting to build a joint venture with VW???
Well, Nikola did exactly what you said with just some renderings and rolling a “prototype” down the hill so……….maybe just another scam? They’ve been promising promises for how many years and haven’t made a single producible batteries? Not calling them a fraud(yet) but until their technology can reach scaled production at reasonable prices it’s still vaporware no matter how good the prototype specs are. MAJORITY of all startups in Silicon Valley fail!
CT isn’t a 3d rendering with multiple prototypes moving on their own power, not rolled down hill. Tesla already reached 1 million units EV annualized production rate last year so……how does that compare to the “competition”? We all know why CT is delayed but even with global logistical challenge Tess is the only manufacture that grew at tremendous rate. Sure, we don’t have our CT yet but it’s far from vaporware. If you do believe CT is vaporware then just cancel your order and rest of us will appreciated the bump in the Queue.
Companies are able to produce solid state cells, just not in the volumes you need and at the prices you need for EVs. Might be useful for a lot of other things. A small fast charging battery 1kWh battery likely has lots of uses. But if it costs $200/ kWh to produce them and they can’t get that price down, it’s going to be quite difficult to make competitive EVs. It might be interesting for luxury or high performance vehicles though.
Tesla just confirmed that the cost to build out the 4680 factory is 1/5th the cost to build out a comparable factory and uses a fraction of the space. They have also reduced the labor, energy, and much of the waste associated with producing batteries at volume. Tesla needs huge numbers of batteries right now and they know how to produce them at scale.
Vaporware, generally refers to a highly anticipated launch which is late or misses multiple deadlines. The Cybertruck is really the only truck which fits vaguely into that category. Ram hasn’t missed any deadlines.
When I first heard the term it was referring to video game projects like Duke Nukem Forever which was 12 years behind schedule but eventually did ship. The origins of the term are in software and It’s almost always referred to projects which were years behind schedule. Cybertruck is not vaporware. Just that it was the only truck out there in that general ballpark.
What do you think is realistic for Ram? Do they have to take 500 miles off the table to deliver a truck in 2024?
