Have you ever had one of those moments where, mid-debate, you suddenly realise you’ve lost the argument? If you’re anything like me, you’ll buy your editor another drink and pretend it was a draw. If you’re Elon Musk, however, and you’re standing in a factory debating the merits of your battery tech with the founder of the biggest EV battery maker in the world, I imagine it’s a bit more toe-curling.
Musk appears to have found himself in just such a situation back in April, when he visited Robin Zeng at the CATL facility in Beijing (via Reuters). According to Zeng, he told Musk that his bet on the cylindrical battery found in the Cybertruck, the 4680, “is going to fail and never be successful.”
“We had a very big debate, and I showed him,” Zeng said. “He was silent. He doesn’t know how to make a battery. It’s about electrochemistry. He’s good for the chips, the software, the hardware, the mechanical things.”
Zeng didn’t stop there, either. According to the company founder, he then moved on to question Musk’s approach to product timelines.
“His problem is overpromising,” Zeng said. “I talked to him. Maybe something needs five years. But he says two years. I definitely asked him why. He told me he wanted to push people.
“He probably himself thinks it needs five years, but if you believe him when he says two years, you will be in big trouble. The direction is right.”
Don’t hold back, Zeng, tell us what you really think. Still, there are some compliments dotted in among all that critique. After all, no one’s top dog at everything, and it sounds like Mr Zeng here took Elon to task in the way a good mentor might—balancing useful knowledge with direct critique, even if it does come out a little blunt in his own retelling.
And Robin Zeng knows a thing or two about batteries and company management, that’s for sure. CATL, short for Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited., is estimated to be the worlds biggest manufacturer of batteries, including automotive efforts that power electric cars from Volkswagen, BMW, and, err, Tesla.
Reports from this summer suggested that Musk might be prepared to give up on the Tesla 4680 battery cell by the end of the year. The original design brief was to create a battery that enabled Telsa to achieve a higher volume of electric vehicle production for a lower cost.
However, insider sources have said that the battery has multiple issues, and Tesla engineers were given a strict deadline to fix it.
More recent reports suggest that production had doubled between June and September of this year, so those issues might be behind the EV manufacturer now. Still, it seems like Mr Zeng remains unimpressed, so time will tell as to whether the 4680 battery becomes one of Musk’s great achievements, or as Zeng thinks, a product destined for failure.
In the meantime, could one of these great minds do something about gaming handheld battery life? My Steam Deck is a wonderful thing, but if I could buy a handheld with more than a couple of hours worth of demanding runtime, my life would be complete. Please and thank you, and all that.
