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Nice company. Basically two guys who worked on Tesla Nevada and were like 'we could do this in Europe'. I saw some of their earliest talk and I was like this is
by nickik 5y ago
Nice company. Basically two guys who worked on Tesla Nevada and were like 'we could do this in Europe'. I saw some of their earliest talk and I was like this is a brilliant move for them, the European were really slow on the uptake with EV and supply chain localization.
This gave them a really nice head start to be able to get all the funding.
They seem to be doing some interesting stuff with vertically integrating cathode, but I haven't found to much information about that.
- tpmx 5y agoWith the quite high factory worker manpower cost here in Sweden I was (maybe still am) a bit skeptical against this commodity play. There are many examples in the past where commodity manufacturing projects have eventually failed badly against Asian competitors with dramatically lower employee costs. (Heck, even specifically in the battery space.) As I understand it, in the short term the primary motivation is providing battery volumes at a steady/guaranteed rate to their European car industry investors since there currently is a lack of stable global supply. Hard to argue against this. In the longer term, I'm guessing Northvolt is gambling that co2-neutral manufacturing of batteries will become an important enough differentiator - either by customer choice or EU legislation - that they'll be able to sell their batteries at what might end up being a relatively high premium.
- mongol 5y agoI think it should be seen in context of automotive manufacturing supply chains, just in time delivery and all that. There are still much automotive manufacturing in Europe and transporting a vital part of an electric car all the way from Asia might not make sense from a supply chain perspective?
- tpmx 5y agoI don't think they'll keep using European-built batteries when Chinese-built batteries are readily available at a noticably lower price, perhaps 5 years from now unless there are e.g. tax penalties in place for owning a car with a battery made with co2-polluting power. Consumers will go for the car that's 10% cheaper.
- nickik 5y agoThis really does not hold up anymore. The idea that China is magically much cheaper despite the very long transport route is simply no longer the case. Labor cost of the type of labor you need is already not that different from Europe. Energy can be more expensive. And the supply chain for so many batteries becomes a real issue. Historically we have seen Tesla move from Japan produced Panasonic cells to Nevada produced cells. And this is pretty much universally considered a fantastic move by Tesla. It is already the case that pretty much all large battery makers, including LG, SK from Korea, CATL from China, Tesla from the US and multiple new European producers all have announced gigantic investments to build cell plants in Europe. Tesla is basically moving to a model where the battery factory and the car factory are basically in the same building or next to each other as localization is actually a huge cost driver. See this map for the amount of localization being done: https://battery-news.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Uebersicht-Batteriezellfertigung-Europa_270421_Gesamt.jpg https://battery-news.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Uebersich...
- alkonaut 5y agoIf manpower is a visible cost (vs power, transports, raw materials) you probably aren’t doing battery manufacturing right. Automated high power manufacturing should be very competitive close to cheap hydro power and cheap ports near auto factories.
- tpmx 5y agoHalf a year ago they were projecting having 3k employees in 2025.