Jason Badeaux

ARK believes that the companies owning the autonomous technology stack and successful electric vehicle platforms will capitalize disproportionately on the economic benefits.

Dahn and his team solved this with a single crystal NMC 532 cathode. This has much higher levels of manganese (30%) and cobalt (20%), which makes it more efficient. Also, rather than being loads of crystals squashed together, they have been formed into one cohesive crystal, which means there are very few falts for degradation to take hold, which... See more

Autonomous electric ride-hail vehicles should benefit from much higher utilization rates than human-driven cars, not to mention lower labor and insurance costs. ARK estimates that, at scale, an autonomous electric taxi platform could price rides profitably at $0.25 per mile. As a result, autonomous rides could cost less than personal car... See more

Complexity science, also called complex systems science, studies how a large collection of components – locally interacting with each other at small scales – can spontaneously self-organize to exhibit non-trivial global structures and behaviors at larger scales, often without external intervention, central authorities or leaders. The properties of... See more

Since 2017, Tesla’s capital expenditure per incremental unit of capacity has improved from ~$84,000, when the Model 3 was ramping, to ~$7,700. While these improvements indicate that Tesla could continue to increase margins, the more important takeaway is that capital no longer is a bottleneck limiting its growth. Instead, Tesla should be able to... See more

An example of Tesla’s manufacturing innovation is its use of giant mechanical presses that can save substantial manufacturing time by forging single car bodies and individual car panels alongside its near-fully automated production with little human handling from beginning to end. Tesla’s different approach to auto manufacturing starts with single... See more

Adjusted for inflation, the cost of owning and operating a new vehicle hasn’t budged since the Model T rolled off the first assembly line in 1934: $0.70 per mile.

There’s no mass market for LDES yet — nothing like the hundreds of gigawatts we may eventually need — but there are several localized markets, adding up to several gigawatts of needed capacity, which is more than enough to keep Form busy from 2025 forward.

Tesla’s vision is simply batteries everywhere, for everything, all the time. And that means Tesla is going to need to produce a lot of batteries.