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Solid State Battery Technology, a Tesla Gigafactory Killer?
With 2014 coming to an end, automotive battery news has been trickling out and solid state battery technology appears, again.
In early December, Volkswagen acquired a small equity stake in Stanford-based QuantumScape and Daimler recently announced that its lithium production output will be larger in 2015 due to a new battery plant in Kamenz, Germany, said to be ready by mid-2015.
The VW news keeps the the solid state battery thread for 2014 going as scientists point to its reported improved energy density over lithium-ion technology. A solid state battery does not use a liquid electrolyte like a lithium battery does and, in theory, a solid electrolyte can hold more energy. Yes, please.
Getting rid of an electrolyte—no liquid—can also improve battery safety and reduce costs due to less cooling electronics and micro-controllers needed for pack management, thus reducing weight too, according to Harvard Business Review.
What about downsides to this technology? A solid-state battery has electrical contacts or, electrodes, that are applied to a solid electrolyte—similar to a thin-film solar panel process—and if there’s a lack of uniformity in this process, it can cause short circuits. However, this type of manufacturing application has been done in the thin-film solar area and these obstacles should be easy to overcome.
The evolution of battery technology according to Satki3. Source: Satki3
Earlier this year, Scientific American did a profile on Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Sakti3 and their push with solid-state battery technology and move closer to the “god” battery.
Ann Marie Sastry, co-founder and CEO of the company, said, “that the company’s prototype solid-state lithium battery cells have reached a record energy density of 1,143 Watt-hours per liter—more than double the energy density of today’s best lithium-ion batteries.”
However, as Elon Musk said in the most recent Tesla earnings call,
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“Talk is super cheap, the battery industry has to have more BS in it than any industry I’ve ever encountered. It’s insane.”
So is this technology an immediate challenger to Tesla Motors’ Gigafactory strategy? Will this battery technology get ahead of Tesla, due its battery equipment investment at the Gigafactory being close to complete and, thus, no turning back?
No and the reason is battery development takes a lot of time and these recent statements by Sakti3 in the Scientific American article bear this out.
Sakti3 says it’s close to the end of lab work—custom prototype manufacturing line—but then the next step is on to small scale production and this could take a another year or two of testing before you hit mass production.
That rules out GM going with this type of battery for their mass-produced battery electric vehicle for 2016 or 2017. Plus, Sakti3 mentioned its first aim is small-scale electronics and smartphones.
More importantly, JB Straubel and Tesla Motors aren’t looking for the God battery for 2017. Everyone seems to be looking for this right chemistry to scale with at this point. Granted, these are big automakers that could scale quickly as long their company culture is rowing in the same direction.
Tesla has their battery composition set and plan to cut 30 percent or more of costs out of their current battery price, which stands anywhere from $260 to maybe $220 kWh. Take the high end and with the cost savings, the battery pack is at $185 kWh, approximately.
That’s just over $10,000 for a battery pack for a 55kWh battery pack—assumption 30% battery cost reduction translates to battery pack. Also, my assumption above is that a Gen 3 car will be smaller and could get 220 miles with a smaller battery pack.
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The rub for me is that the roadmap is in place for Tesla Motors battery chemistry and this should get them to a mass-market electric vehicle, first. Maybe other automakers are close to a new chemistry, but automotive testing and applications take time.
In the end, I’m all for the god battery sooner rather than later but Tesla Motors just isn’t waiting for it.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
