
The great electric car race is just beginning - Strom
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/08/business/electric-cars-audi-volkswagen-tesla/
======
Strom
The article contains predictions that VW will go from 26k electric cars sold
in 2018 to 1.4m in 2025, while the current sales leader Tesla will only manage
to go from 200k to 400k. There's a bunch of rhetoric in the article from car
manufacturers that they will easily win because they've been building cars for
a century. Statements like _we were not in the production hell, and we are
still not, and we will not get into any kind of production hell_ from an Audi
executive. However there's very little talk about the most likely bottleneck
they will face, which is battery production. There's a brief note that
_automakers are snapping up every battery they can find_ but no discussion of
any potential problems they might encounter in snapping up enough to sell
millions of electric cars per year. The much repeated 100 year experience
certainly doesn't apply to battery production. Not only that, but even the
battery manufacturing companies don't have experience in producing batteries
in such quantities. It's still very much uncharted territory.

