Tesla Motors Releasing Its Patents to Auto Industry (Going Open Source)

[eShirl]

22. It's about Elon Musk's battery factory, I think

http://qz.com/182440/elon-musks-massive-bet-on-batteries-is-riding-on-two-big-ifs/

With a plan to build the world’s largest lithium-ion battery factory, Elon Musk continues his long bet against all the incumbents around him: rival car companies, battery-makers and the scientific establishment. The wager is based on two big assumptions: that no one else will make a meaningful breakthrough in battery science and render the $5 billion factory obsolete; and that sales of his Tesla autos will rise more than 22-fold by 2020.
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The risks are substantial that one or both of the assumptions will prove invalid. It is especially difficult to imagine the sale of about 500,000 Teslas annually starting just six years from now; he sold just 22,000 Tesla S’s in 2013, and there are only 180,000 electric vehicles of all types on the road around the world.
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But if he is right, he will again show up the auto industry, not to mention the oil majors and energy experts, most of whom forecast that a full-fledged electric car industry won’t materialize until the 2030s or even later.
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A successful “giga-factory,” as Musk has christened it, would catapult US lithium-ion battery production from its current minuscule scale into a commanding global position. At once, the US would manufacture as many lithium-ion batteries as the rest of the world—current powerhouses China, Japan and South Korea—combined. “He would swallow up all of Asia in one fell swoop. He would create a new pole of lithium-ion battery manufacturing,” Kevin Gallagher, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, told Quartz. (Here is a pdf of Musk’s slide deck.)