Same here. There's a lot of asphalt between now and when they announce (hopefully) that they can build their batteries at scale.
Saw a couple of articles on both expected life expectancy for the batter, "Driving habits vary considerably by age and gender. Here in the US the peak annual average among demographic groups is about 19,000 miles per year, which works out to 16 years’s worth of driving.
According to Kelley Blue Book, the average length of car ownership is currently 8.4 years. So, if the figure of 311,000 miles pans out, it’s likely that a US driver would get tired of their car and sell it long before the battery wears down."
And some details about manufacturing locations: "The QuantumScape solid state battery was tested at the PowerCo labs in Salzgitter, Germany, where the company is also hatching plans for a series of six vertically integrated, soup-to-nuts battery manufacturing centers, from raw materials on through to recycling.
“Each factory will be operated 100 percent on electricity from regenerative sources and will be designed for future closed-loop recycling,” PowerCo explains, with a particular emphasis on recycling end-of-life batteries. The overall plan also involves large-scale stationary energy storage systems, so presumably the recycle angle would apply to that angle, too.
Salzgitter will be the home of PowerCo’s first cell factory, to be followed by another in Valencia and three others at European locations to be named later, with six planned in all. The Salzgitter factory alone will be capable of providing enough batteries for 500,000 EVs per year when fully built out.
The company also dropped a hint about plans for the US, stating that “PowerCo is also already exploring the possibility of further gigafactories in North America.”
Bullish
