Tesla founder Elon Musk has said he aimed to get self driving Teslas ready by the end of 2022 and hoped they could be in wide release in the United States and possibly in Europe, depending on regulatory approval, Reuters reported.
Separately, the news agency said Musk’s ambitious expansion plan – an “audacious” goal of selling 20 million electric vehicles in 2030, a 13-fold increase over the estimated 1.5 million vehicles it hoped to sell this year – would come at an unprecedented cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, following its analysis of Tesla‘s financial disclosures and forecasts for global electric vehicle demand, EV battery and battery mineral production.
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“I’d equate this with the Manhattan Project in World War Two,” manufacturing expert Michael Tracy of The Agile Group, told Reuters, referring to the US effort to build an atomic bomb.
Reuters said Musk’s vision posed “staggering challenges” to the 19 year old Texas-based automaker, not least of which was securing enough batteries and critical raw materials such as lithium and nickel to supply 20 million vehicles.
Tesla had been a disruptor, but this next phase of growth, if achieved, would go beyond disruption to fundamentally remake the global auto industry as well as the mining and trade of battery materials, the report said.
Tesla would need to build seven or eight more “gigafactories” – an average of one every year or so – take share from every competitor and emerge as a company the size of Volkswagen and Toyota combined. It would also need about 30 times as much battery capacity to supply all of its vehicle factories.
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By GlobalDataThe price tag would be steep: Tesla could spend an estimated $400 billion or more over the next eight years to build new vehicle assembly and battery plants around the globe, and another $200 billion or more to build or buy the batteries, including the cost of the raw materials, Reuters said.
It noted Canada, Indonesia, India and other governments were already lobbying to win Tesla’s next investment in EV production, an announcement Musk had said could come by the end of the year.
Producing 20 million vehicles a year would require Tesla to expand both its own battery making capacity, and the capacity of its battery partners and the raw materials producers that supply them.
“Long-term, we’re expecting to make on the order of 3,000 gigawatt hours or 3 terawatt hours per year,” Musk told investors in July. “I think we’ve got a good chance of achieving this actually before 2030, but I’m highly confident that we could do it by 2030.”
Tesla’s current battery production capacity is 100 gigawatt-hours, Reuters noted.
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which tracks the global EV battery industry, expected Tesla would require two million tons of lithium, 1.3 million tons of nickel, 0.2 million tons of cobalt and 3.5 million tons of graphite to support production in 2030 of 3.0 terawatt-hours of battery production.
That is four times as much lithium and nickel, twice as much cobalt and seven times as much graphite as the entire EV industry expects to consume in 2022, the news agency said.
Benchmark described the 2030 targets as “highly ambitious.”
Tesla did not respond to a detailed Reuters request for comment.
The automaker, which rarely discloses its supplier relationships, began signing offtake agreements with miners and refiners more than a decade ago, according to former Tesla executives interviewed by Reuters, and currently has deals with more than 20 global materials suppliers.
The raw material capacity needed to support Tesla’s planned production in 2030 does not exist today, experts have told Reuters.
Musk’s sales target also depends on factors beyond Tesla’s control.
Rival automakers are fielding more electric vehicles to compete with Tesla’s high-volume Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs.
In China, home-grown startups such as XPeng, Nio and Li Auto trail Tesla in sales volume but are growing rapidly.
China’s BYD, which sells inexpensive electric and hybrid vehicles, is challenging Tesla globally, while Ford and Rivian have beaten Tesla to market with electric pickup trucks, a significant emerging segment in North America.
The Agile Group’s Tracy was sceptical of Musk’s ability to develop a global manufacturing juggernaut over the next eight years with nearly double the production capacity of Toyota, currently the world’s largest automaker by volume.
“That would be an extraordinary achievement, considering it’s taken Toyota decades to build that capability,” he told Reuters.
