I don't think it justifies their valuation, but Tesla owns is market share. If I buy one of their 85kWh batteries it has an unlimited warranty. That's all a consumer cares about - I know what my cost is and a reputable company stands behind it.
It's like buying LEDs. The payback in lower utility costs is less than one year and the one's I bought are all warrantied to last 36 months, or be replaced - yet the average useful life of these LEDs are 15 years, so the potential upside is huge.
If my battery goes out in my laptop I can allegedly save money buying an off-brand compatible, but that market is small because there's a lot of perceived risk and the saving in total money is not much.
A lot of technologies are promising, but as you develop them you discover problems and fix them and become more familiar with positives and negatives of that technology.
As Samsung has demonstrated, bringing these technologies to the market have a lot of ways to go wrong. The fault in Samsung's batteries were caused by an inner battery case which was off-spec by a millimeter from one of their many suppliers. As a result the liner which prevented a sliver of redeposited lithium from from shorting out the battery didn't fit. But 99.9% of consumers don't find this interesting. They knew that a Samsung phone could blow-up and catch and fire unexpectedly at any time.
Factories are now highly automated and easily reconfigured. Tesla could change to a completely different battery technology and they'll produce it to fit their cars and power storage units - and those will be Tesla batteries with better specs. Customers will care about the price, the warranty and the better specifications. For the customer the technology is story which could be interesting, but that's not what they're after. For a customer the story can just as easily be big tail fins are the new style.
As the for lithium batteries grow, Tesla and others may still need to keep the lithium battery plants producing even as their new cars and other products use a different battery technology.
I don't know that much about Tesla, but I do know that companies like Google and Amazon are so far ahead of their competition that they can afford to make tremendous mistakes which don't work out because their "old-technology" is so far better than their competitors "new technology" they have time to stumble, as Amazon Web Services did last week with an outage.
Governments like the US made companies like Oracle, the database firm. NSA contracts built Oracle, not the Fortune 500 who used these technologies later. Like Oracle Google and Amazon have also become big government contractors which gives them scale and a huge budget for bleeding edge technology.
Unless the management has fallen asleep, never underestimate the power of market share. |
