Latest news with #JBStraubel
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
High-ranking Tesla executive departs after decade-long run at the company: 'It's hard to put into words'
Another longtime high-ranking Tesla employee has left the company. Mark Westfall, who led a team of 50 engineers working on energy products, announced in April that he had left Tesla, Electrek reported. He worked on such projects as Supercharger, Powerwall, and Megapack. Westfall had worked at the electric vehicle pioneer for 10 years. "It's hard to put into words what Tesla has meant to me," Westfall wrote on LinkedIn. "I never imagined the places this job would take me, or the impact I would be able to have." According to Electrek, Westfall left to become director of engineering at Redwood Materials, which itself has many ties to Tesla. The company buys scrap materials from Tesla's battery-manufacturing process, which it then recycles to create new battery materials. Tesla co-founder and board member JB Straubel founded Redwood, and several of its executives are former Tesla employees. Westfall became the latest high-ranking employee to leave Tesla so far in 2025. It has also said goodbye to the head of its Indian market, a vice president of software engineering, the technical program manager for its Cortex supercomputer, and two of its top automotive designers. This mass departure of talent comes at a time when Tesla's business has been slipping. The company's 2025 first-quarter sales numbers are down globally, and its net income dropped 71% from Q1 2024. Overall, however, EV sales continue to grow as more people discover the environmental and economic benefits of switching to an EV. Although some models cost more up front than their gas-powered counterparts, EVs typically have much lower maintenance costs and don't require regular, costly fill-ups. The ownership costs can come down even more when an owner pairs their EV with solar panels, which allow EV drivers to rely less on public charging stations and avoid reliance on the grid for recharging at home. Those interested in solar can save up to $10,000 on installation costs by using EnergySage's free service to compare local, vetted installers. What do you think of Tesla and Elon Musk? Elon is the man Love the company; hate the CEO I'm not a fan of either I don't have an opinion Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Insider
22-04-2025
- Automotive
- Business Insider
EV battery maker Northvolt failed after blowing through $15 billion. This US rival thinks it won't suffer the same fate.
When Northvolt went bankrupt, it sent shockwaves through the cleantech industry. Backed by big names such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, the Swedish startup had set out to revolutionize electric vehicle battery production — not just recycling them, but making new ones, too. Redwood Materials, a US rival run by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, is trying to tackle the same problem without succumbing to overambition. To do that, it focuses on upstream materials, maintains strategic partnerships, and avoids direct competition with customers. Why Northvolt failed Northvolt's vision was as audacious as it was complex. With $15 billion in funding, the company planned to handle everything in-house: sourcing raw materials, recycling batteries into black mass (a powder rich in nickel, lithium, cobalt, and manganese), refining that material via hydrometallurgy, and then producing battery cells at a massive scale. With that scope came massive risk. Building and scaling cell manufacturing — especially outside Asia — is notoriously difficult. Northvolt struggled to ramp up operations at its Arctic Circle facility and increasingly relied on Chinese equipment, which slowed production and created bottlenecks. Costs ballooned, debts mounted, and the company ultimately couldn't keep up. "Northvolt went a little too fast," said an investor who has backed startups in this industry. "They tried to commercialize before perfecting the process at scale." This person asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. Northvolt did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Redwood wants to be 'Switzerland' Redwood Materials, by contrast, focuses on what it sees as the most valuable — and underinvested — piece of the EV battery supply chain: cathode active materials. CAM accounts for roughly 60% of a battery's value and 15% of the cost of an electric vehicle, according to Redwood. There's no large-scale CAM production in North America, and that's the gap Redwood wants to fill. "We're not making battery cells. That's never been part of the plan," said Cal Lankton, Redwood's chief commercial officer. "We don't want to compete with our customers." Instead, Redwood recycles EV battery production scrap and old batteries into usable metals and refines them into CAM, which it sells to cell manufacturers such as Panasonic and Toyota. This strategy keeps the company neutral while generating revenue from multiple points in the supply chain. "As JB would say, we can be Switzerland," Lankton told me when I met him recently at Redwood's campus in Nevada's high desert. Unlike Northvolt, which produced its own batteries and used its recycled material internally, Redwood aims to sell its refined materials to a broad range of customers, reducing dependency on any one player and avoiding direct competition with partners that make batteries. "What Northvolt set out to build is incredibly impressive — the scope, the aspiration of what they tried to do," Lankton said. "I don't want to come across at all as denigrating what happened." However, he said that by trying to make batteries itself, Northvolt added extra layers of risk, complexity, and expense. "You're competing with your customers. So you would only produce CAM for your own consumption, which was Northvolt's plan, right?" Lankton added. "So if any piece in there falls apart, the whole thing breaks." Step-by-step Redwood has also been more measured in its scaling. While Northvolt attempted to go from lab to commercial production in one giant leap, Redwood moves step-by-step — refining materials, building CAM capacity, and only taking on new challenges when it's ready. For example, Lankton said that while Redwood initially intended to hold onto intermediate recycled materials until its CAM operations ramped up, the company made a tactical pivot: sell the intermediate products now, generate revenue, and prove its capabilities. "A dollar today for a company in our position is much more valuable than a dollar to use in the future," Lankton said. "Let's convert that inventory into cash. Let's demonstrate our capability to our investors, to our customers, to the market." Redwood also used to make copper foil, a main ingredient in batteries. When Chinese companies began churning this out in massive quantities, prices plummeted, so Redwood halted that part of its business. "We're not dogmatic," Lankton said. "We're not going to take a business plan and just do it until we think it works and run ourselves into the ground." Lessons from Northvolt Northvolt's bankruptcy isn't just a cautionary tale — it's a live case study. The company's downfall underscores the perils of over-integration, overreach, and underestimating the difficulty of battery cell manufacturing. Redwood Materials is learning and taking a different tack by positioning itself not as a battery maker, but as an enabler of the EV battery supply chain. "I think that's one of the strengths of Redwood, and I again, not to put too fine a point on it, something that Northvolt kind of struggled with, which is finding those pivot points when the original plan perhaps is getting more expensive or further out in the future," Lankton said.
