Bang Bang Maxwell’s Supercapacitor | In Depth

hey everybody I'm Zack and I'm Jesse and you're watching in-depth on now you know [Music] so you think we can sing the Beatles song on the show bang bang Maxwell's super capacitor that should get through YouTube's algorithm I don't think anyone could possibly get they probably know what the heck we're talking about let's let's talk about this yeah so Tesla acquired Maxwell technologies which is a 380 person firm focused on manufacturing dry cell batteries and super capacitors based in San Diego California ok so I had never heard of Maxwell technologies before they either had I so I want to kind of talk about what makes this company different than all the rest of them well first of all they weren't emerging like they weren't a start-up this was a company started in 1965 it listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in 1983 so it's been around for a long time and they have proven revenue so let's look at their financials they had 72 million dollars of revenue in the first nine months of 2018 so they're making pretty good money they had a cash balance of 69 million dollars so basically you're seeing that they're making revenue of about 30 million dollars per quarter they do have a net income loss of 6 million dollars per quarter so they're not able to turn that revenue into a profit I see but that's not necessarily a bad thing for Tesla because Tesla already has the infrastructure so if they can place this technology into that infrastructure that's probably all they need where is max we'll have to actually go out and sell their batteries I see and so Tesla acquired Maxwell for $4.75 a share or about two hundred and eighteen million dollars and let's be clear the deal is not closed yet both boards have to agree to it so let's talk about what Maxwell has been working on what they have they have dry cell batteries and they have super capacitors so let's talk about the dry cell batteries first what does dry cell mean well so right now when Tesla makes a battery there is a look liquid component to it so they put everything wrapped up in that little tootsie roll into the can and then they drip some electrolyte into that can that's the fluid that lets the lithium-ion particles travel right between the cathode and the anode these guys have been able to come up with I sell so there's no liquid involved don't know how they did it don't know exactly what it involves but what I do know is that according to them it allows them to get a density of about 300 watt hours per kilogram now that's just a number that doesn't mean much until you put it in context with what Tesla's doing now so with Tesla's 2170 battery according to Jack Rickard who just took apart in 221 70 and in fact he did it live without draining the battery first he just took a pair of pliers and just took it apart because he's badass so okay he found out that the current 21 70 battery has 247 watt hours per kilogram so if it's true that maxwell right now has 300 watt hours per kilogram we're looking at a 21% increase in what maxwell can do over the current 21 70 and the cool part here is that they think maxwell thinks that they can get their existing technology to over 500 watt hours per kilogram that would be amazing right because that would be twice what the existing 21 70 cells are right and i mean at that point we're almost starting to think about other applications not just cars but airplanes airplanes exactly and not only can they do this extra energy density but they've simplified the manufacturing process and so they claim they can get a 10 to 20% cost reduction versus wet electrodes not only that they say they can extend battery life up to a factor of two so that's the long term life of the battery the number of cycles exactly okay so if all these things are even remotely true that's a great improvement over today's batteries so you can kind of see why Tesla would get excited now many companies have made similar claims we often hear this on earnings calls where someone will say like oh are you looking into the next battery your technology and JB and Elon will say we've we look into it all the time if we actually see something that's real we'll we'll go further and I think they saw something that was real I think that basically I'm guessing JB is probably in charge of this department probably always on top of what's going on and I'll bet he saw what was going on with Maxwell for quite some time right and they decide to acquire so I mean and we have to keep in mind here that it's not just necessarily that you have discovered a technology because that's great oh if you just technology that's great but you can't necessarily put that into a car for a cost that most people can afford right right because I mean if in us in a laboratory environment you are able to get this to work and it's you know oh wow look at these energy densities look at how fast you could charge it all these things that's all great but you have to be able to mass-produce it and so really a lot of these companies need to be bringing you know and that's what they're working on I'm not saying that they're sitting in laboratory toying around for no reason they're developing this technology and they are bringing it towards mass produce ability and bringing the cost down low enough to where you can put it in a car and sell it for $35,000 right so let's look at what Maxwell should be able to help Tesla do number one bring battery costs down so if it's correct and they can bring the cost down by ten to twenty percent that's a big deal and let's show you why that's a big deal so on the last conference call Elon said that the price of the powertrain of their cars is probably around eleven to twelve thousand dollars and he sees it going down to seven thousand dollars in the near future so let's say that Maxwell's technology can reduce the battery cost of that powertrain by fifteen percent so in between the ten and twenty percent we heard and let's say that Tesla produces 300 thousand Model 3s next year do the math and that could be a savings of a half a billion dollars second thing that Maxwell could bring is that Panasonic is right now the partner with Tesla over at the Giga factory to make a lot of their batteries and Maxwell's technology could allow Tesla to build their own batteries in-house basically getting rid of the middleman because let's face it if you said goodbye to Panasonic right now without Maxwell's technology Panasonic would probably sue saying well you're just taking our IP and doing it yourself mmm-hmm but if you buy Maxwell and you start using their IP and you say goodbye to Panasonic then you're saying no we're using this new acquired technology we already know that Panasonic is signing deals with Toyota and we know that they're not making the batteries at the Shanghai Giga Factory so it already does seem like we're kind of saying goodbye to Panasonic that's why I kind of think this is probably the reason why you can't stay a battery manufacturing company forever if your heart ngerous slick at the largest auto company in the world Toyota they didn't get to be the largest by just making Corollas they got to be the largest by verda integrating I see so they weren't just buying components from other places they were creating smaller companies that would be creating your components all in-house so it's all vertically integrated all one company exam that is what Tesla is trying to do and what they've succeeded in doing so far with it with the gigafactory they've gotten their cell costs down so much that almost every other car manufacturer cannot compete right with that cell cost which means that all of their electric cars are either going to have to be more expensive or be sold at a loss yeah I mean if you look at GM with the GM bolt that's basically an LG Chem drive platform right and so is it really a GM car we've talked about this many times before it right they've subbed out most of the powertrain to LG Chem right and GM is losing money every time they sell a bolt right it's not a profit Center for them all right number three this deal did not affect Tesla's bottom line so they spent two hundred eighteen million dollars but that was Tesla stock it was a stock for stock deal in essence they haven't had to bring down you know any of their cash reserves for this they just traded a stock for stock and if it's true that next year they can save let's say five hundred million dollars because of the cost savings then it was an excellent deal so point number four is super capacitors Maxwell develops them what do they do basically they can dump energy quickly and they can also be recharged quickly so one of the things that is great about Tesla's is there super fast acceleration one of the reasons that they can do that is because they have enough power in their packs to be able to dump a ton of energy into the motor in order to accelerate you out if you have a smaller battery pack it limits the amount of acceleration you can do however if you were to put a super capacitor into your car you could dump all of that energy into the motor really really quickly and basically without doing anything to the batteries batteries do not like being discharged quickly and they do not like being charged quickly exactly so a super capacitor is a really great way to deal with a lot of batteries stress inducing driving so fast acceleration and de acceleration so it could actually act as a buffer for regen braking so you could get a lot higher regen braking because you're not trying to charge the battery right so I mean picture this you get your new next-gen roadster you stomp on the accelerator how long is your foot gonna stay on that accelerator maybe like two seconds right so you're gonna go zero to 60 you know when 1.9 seconds and that's gonna use about one kilowatt hour of energy so you could have a one kilowatt hour super capacitor in the Roadster all that energy would get dumped into the motor you go wicked fast and then when you slammed on the brakes at the other end all that energy get a lot of it would get pumped back into the super capacitor meanwhile the battery didn't have to hardly do anything which is great for the battery in terms of its battery life right because as you just said they don't like to pump out all that energy also in terms of heating and cooling the battery you just took a lot of stress off having to cool it fast because you didn't use it this is super important if they can use super capacitors now with electric cars they can do a couple things they can probably reduce the size of the battery pack because keep in mind for the Tesla Roadster it has a six hundred mile range it probably only needed that big a battery because they need to pump that much juice out of the battery to give you that insane speed right so they're not gonna replace the battery pack with super capacitors no and that is the big I mean a lot of people like super capacitors will just get rid of all the batteries know they're gonna work in conjunction with batteries to make electric cars work even better because they don't have the energy density necessary at least at this point right and so our conjecture is that you could use the Maxwell technology super capacitor add it to the semi-truck the Roadster even the Model 3 because you like to go fast in the Model 3 right so just add whatever you need I'm not sure the size I'm just making it up so maybe a 1 kilowatt hour super capacitor they'll figure that out and then that'll take care of all those stresses when you're accelerating and D accelerating so it sort of acts like a buffer so the number 5 thing that Maxwell could bring to Tesla is that we're trying to get batteries that don't contain expensive exotic materials like Cobalt this new dry tech should allow for less expensive rare minerals and easier manufacturing which has always been one of the big arguments you hear from ice lovers right is that oh your battery contains all these awful things like cobalt well hopefully soon they won't all right so point number 6 would be superchargers wait how can Maxwell bring supercharged to Tesla so I mean we talked a little bit about super capacitors okay and how they can be charged and discharged quickly if say you pulled into a supercharger station with your super capacitor fully depleted because you've told that you're going to a station and then the supercharger station has a super capacitor bank that you then plug your car into we could potentially just do a very quick transfer of energy it you know and you could fill your one kilowatt hour super capacitor in a matter of seconds potentially I don't know exactly all the details clearly you're gonna need some kind of beefy cable or at least a very well cooled one but as you pointed out before when you're pumping all that energy quickly through the cable there's less time for it to heat up true so it could be that you know you could just heat up the cable and then it'll just slowly cool down over time after you've you know pumped it in now one kilowatt hour doesn't sound like a lot it would only get you about maybe three or four miles but if you were to pay for an upgrade maybe for your car maybe it's a five kilowatt hour super capacitor you can pull in and within a few seconds have about twenty miles of range in just a few seconds alright stop right there yeah we've got to come up with some really cool names for this because a supercharger now with this technology so what's it gonna be called supercharger with instacharge it sounds too much like a like a MasterCard thing how about blasts fast sure I I guess I mean something would anything would be cool comment below if you can come up with a cool name for super charging this is like Version three super charging is what you're talking about it might be version three supercharged because we heard Elon talk about the fact that version three super charging is going to come at like no capital costs so it's possible that for very little cost you installed these super capacitors and you get a whole new level of charging right I'm not sure how it work because at some point you're going to need to charge the batteries from you know with the super capacitor so once the super capacitor is full then you're going to need to somehow continue charging I think your charge rate would drop significantly or something like that I don't know but it's really cool it is really cool I mean maybe like you said these super caster is a buffer so it could be taking a high charge from the supercharger and giving out less charge to the battery true depending on how big your super capacitor is that could make a difference I mean there are lots and lots of possibilities of exciting things I mean you at your house you could have a super capacitor and then just you know you stop at home plug it in and you get you know another 10 miles of range or you know maybe they put it on a truck and that's sort of like your little gas can of range not that you necessarily need it but you call triple-a they show up they plug in ooh and then you that's a great idea drive on your way to the supercharger yeah I love that there are a lot of different things so let's talk about a time line because this seems to be happening overnight but it's gonna take some time so the first thing is there's got to be a few months here for them to ink the deal right I mean the deal is not done yet the board for Maxwell and the board for Tesla both have to approve it so I'm guessing it's gonna take a few months to finalize the deal on paper then once that's finalized you then have to get your engineers all working right your new Maxwell engineers put into place I know they're gonna move them around move them to the gigafactory or what I got to imagine that's gonna take months right six months at least I think that yeah and I don't think we're gonna see anything significant happening for at least six months after the deal gets signed just because yeah I mean reorganizing engineers and and working towards any sort of engineering goal would take at least six months from signing the deal okay so we're probably talking about early 2020 before we see any new tech emerges is that I think so so I mean I just want to point out here for a second but this is all conjecture we just know that they're thinking of acquiring this company we're not exactly sure why but from what we can see we think that this might be happening so what might be happening is we might see this technology in the the roadster the next generation roads yeah I think that's the that's a perfect testbed for for all the stuff that we're talking about right and then I think it could go to the semi truck and then I think we get into the conversation of are we gonna be refreshing you know the Model S the Model X the model three I think in terms of cost that cost has to come down before they talk about putting it into the regular cars right because I mean for right now the model 3 the cost has consistently been going lower and lower as there have been becoming more efficient in their lines so I don't think that it makes any sense to kind of leapfrog over to something else which is probably going to be more expensive to start out with and then hopefully you know write it down especially when they're trying to come out with the base model 3 but if this super capacitor can do even this thing which is reduced the battery size by even 5 or 10% we could be looking at a huge cost savings and the reason why it could do that like we talked about before is when you are flooring it like if you're a lead foot and you're just normally having your fun day driving around your model 3 then you are putting tremendous strain on the battery right you are just flooring it all the time drawing all that power in regen and regen exactly and that regen is not that effective currently because it can't put all of that regen back into the battery at the same time so you de-accelerating and all that energy is trying to get back into the battery but that's a lot of power at once you have to cool the battery and so forth so with the super capacitor you're probably going to be able to make improvements to the size of the battery meaning you're probably gonna be able to lower the battery pack size and get the same range it's true because I mean especially for winter climbs anyone who's been driving around in cold weather knows that you get less regen braking in the winter if that was a super capacitor you could potentially get more regen breaking even if the car was freezing cold and just in general you could be get having more regen breaking so that means less brake wear it means a longer range for your car with a smaller battery size and so if we get that smaller battery size every percent that you can get the battery smaller is money that you shave off the cost of the car and it's also weight that you shave off the of the glass the car which means that everything else just gets easier as you make cars lighter the you know the brakes don't have to be as beefy the the motor doesn't have to be as beefy so I mean what this could be for would be you know even further down the road you know their Model e their Model T you know whatever they're gonna name it an even cheaper model than the model 3 they could be making a lighter smaller battery same range kind of car I think that would be amazing of course that is super conjecture so I just want lay that out as like these are things that we're thinking about we don't know anything for certain nothing is in stone at this point yeah well thank you so much for watching this in depth and our crazy conjectures about what Maxwell technology might bring to Tesla if you like the show please remember to hit the like button and don't forget to subscribe to it that helps us out a lot and you know what else helps us out a lot is to become a patreon only takes as little as a 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Channel: Now You Know

Views: 479,864

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Keywords: tesla time news, now you know, zac, jesse, news, update, elon musk, model x, model 3, model s, model y, supercharger, NYK, electric cars, EV, technology, science, funny, autopilot, electrek, tesla roadster, SFSF, The Boring Company, model 3 performance, model 3 dual motor, patreon giveaway, Tesla Model 3 Autopilot, BFREE, TSLA, boring company, elon musk twitter, maxwell technologies, maxwell technologies ultracapacitor, supercapacitor, supercapacitor battery, tesla maxwell

Id: H8wdeqS3UlU

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019