What do you think of the Megacasting? They have moved to an architecture where they have one big casting in the front, one in the back and those are linked with a battery pack that has structure from the actual cells themselves. The machines are costume orders from IDRA in Italy, there seems to be somewhat of a bottleneck in how fast they can be made, each one is massive project. Would be hard for other manufacture to replicate that process anytime soon.

Other then BYD (and some research groups) nobody has attempted to make cells structural to the car yet. And BYD basically uses prismatic LFP cells that make it easier.

Unfortunately they have not yet managed to do the improvements to the wiring and moving to 48V. Elon basically wants to use Ethernet and PoE for everything in the car. This seems a lot harder to do then anybody outside the automotive industry understands.

Their cells and how they are produced is also quite amazing. They literally went back to 0 and rethought battery production from the ground up. The fans are trying to reproduce the process from the public video and available information (from Berlin application for example). It really seems like they simplified a lot, specially really small and difficult welding process that need to be done at high speed. They went so far as producing all their own manufacturing equipment as well, they bought companies like Hibar and have Grohmann engineering build these machines in Germany (new factory being built there as well). Will be hard for others to compete with battery production lines that can spit out 4-5x as many larger cells as a comparable 2170 line.

I know Toyota is working on its own solid state batteries, and you likely can't say more then is publicly available. Toyota seems to have made no effort to produce its own 'traditional' cells so far. I'm not sure if they plan to produce their solids themselves. And I will be very interested to see when an actual mass volume 100k+ a year car gets produced with them. I would be surprised if it was before 2028 or so. At that point 'traditional' cells will have made huge advances, it will be interested to see what advantage they will have at that point. I am eagerly waiting for more information from Toyota.

PS: The latest 'fun' thing Tesla seems to do (in Berlin), is to put the seats on top of the battery first and then drop the car frame on-top of it. Where the battery is the floor of the vehicle. Its almost like the old body-on-frame. I think the kind of stumbled into that because they wanted to eliminate the redundant layer in the floor and realized that the frame now has a hole in the bottom. I assume they will then manually insert the floor carpets in final assembly.

You ask good questions that I mostly can't answer!

I agree with your points on megacasting. Other companies can replicate it but it will take time. Just as important as the megacasting will be changes to other assembly procedures that accompany that shift, which may increase lead time till those companies can start production.

I agree that Tesla has done some really smart things with batteries and would add that "the battery industry", such as it is, runs on software that's feels like it was made in the 90s. I imagine Tesla has a more mature software stack and I think this gives them more of an advantage than is generally realized by the industry.

Since you mention battery timelines, it may interest you that Toyota has a group explicitly attempting to speed up development[0].

[0] https://medium.com/toyotaresearch/accelerated-materials-desi...

Do you expect Toyota and others to adopt these innovations?