Elon Musk tracking all advanced battery developments and sees nothing in the near term that would disrupt the Gigafactory of batteries

Tesla Motors and Elon Musk track about 60 different advanced battery development efforts around the world. Some of the efforts to develop improved batteries and hold some long-term promise. they rate all of them from one to five, where five is Tesla should be doing business with them and one is complete BS.”

Elon Musk said there were no four or fives, but there were some threes, based on that rating system.

There is a slight chance that there could be some super secret laboratory somewhere where a new battery technology is being developed that Tesla doesn’t know about. But he said it’s unlikely because Tesla is the biggest consumer of lithium-ion in the consumer world, so it would make the most sense for them to license to Tesla.

With the Gigafactory, Tesla aims to use the economy of scale to bring down the price of its technology, and thus of its vehicles.

“Certainly incremental improvements to the battery pack range are important, but the thing that is really is reducing the cost per kilowatt hour…the fundamental focus is the cost per unit of energy. So that is what the Gigafactory is about. It’s taking economy of scale as far as we can possibly imagine, to a very extreme level,” Musk said.

Video of Elon Musk talking with Ron Baron

Elon Musk sits with Ron Baron from Baron Capital Management at the Baron Investment Conference.

Overview:
00:00. Introduction
03:50. Early days, motivation & oil industry FUD campaign
11:25. Birth and rise of Tesla
16:20. Huge Tesla factory
19:25. Tesla ambition – millions of cars
20:33. Gigafactory Government fundings
24:19. Gigafactory media incident
25:22. Battery technology outlook & costs
33:00. Tesla safety
40:13. SpaceX reusable rockets
44:15. Lyft vs. Uber
Question and Answer
46:20. Model 3 driving experience
48:50. Charging locations