Will OpenPPG be using the new Tesla 4680 cells announced at battery day at some point? Can you please go over the potential improvements that will trickle down to us in the future?
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Sadly Tesla didn’t really cover their improvements in gravimetric energy density as that doesn’t effect them as much. But based on their volumetric benefits I would guess we could see something over a 30% increase in gravimetric density and flight time.
The biggest Tesla has really made is in production costs. If they can pull this off and if it can make its way to Open ppg, we could see the price of the sp140 battery go down by 30%+ or almost $1k
Ya i watched the live stream.
Big take always for me and how it will effect OpenPPG.
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Cost- Lower cost I think they were figuring a 56% decrees in cost, which is really one of the bigger things talked about. What that means for us is, lower unit cost, and even with the smaller 10% increases in energy density that comes with the larger form factor cells. Having an extra battery that can be swapped out if youre still wanting another hour of flying will be half the cost. This also means a lower unit cost allowing more people to get into paramotoring.
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Power output- This is big for our sort of applications, cars and utility energy storage not so much. This is pretty epic because we need to save all the weight we can, and we cant afford the extra weight of a water cooling system for the cells, like they have in cars. This means we can make lighter battery packs, and be harder on them, fly more powerful setups if we want. But mostly we can make battery packs that have fewer cells and not be worried about the loading on the cells. Also less heat means longer cycle life. This is big for high demand environments like paramotors but also, e-dirt bikes, electric aircraft.
But this info applied to the SP140 i would expect to see a $500 decrease in the unit cost (currently it costs about $1500 to make the 4kwh pack, cells are about 80% of the cost). Then with a redesign of the pack with the 4680 cells, for the same weight a 0.4kw increase in capacity. So about 6 mins longer flight time. That’s not a ton but keep in mind that’s with a big cut in cost.
The biggest thing I think we need is the cost, and I would rather have the lower cost then energy density, because cost is whats keeping a lot of people from getting into paramotoring. It isn’t weight, or flight time, its is cost 100%. The announcement was better than I thought. There was a lot of hype and I think some people were a bit too optimistic and thought they were gonna release some kind of li-air battery or something (lol), but it exceeded my personals expectations.
This is all cool and all but a few things that put a damper on my excitement. One -Tesla really doesn’t have plan to sell their cells to other companies anytime soon (they need them for themselves). Then number two, we are probably looking at about 3-5 years before these prices and cell are available to us.
But the future for ePPG is pretty exciting, and there are a lot of other cells available and improvements we can make, and we don’t have to sit around and wait for Tesla to increases their production.
TLDR- SP140 cost decrease of roughly $500, more powerful unit, ~2lbs less unit weight, 3 years out though.
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Sorry not sure why I said $1000. I meant to say $500. Oops. The 3.8kw pack I am planning on building will cost I little bit over $1300 just in cells so there is no way you could save $1000…