Hi all,
I know I've been mum in the forums lately and there are much more pressing things that everyone would like me to comment on... alas I *still* cannot. So in the meantime, I'll chime in here because I can.
I love all the effort to dig in and try to understand what we did and didn't do, and it is a nearly impossible task to get it all right from the outside in... so it's not surprising that the speculation is pretty far off. Maybe the two biggest misunderstandings are:
1) ownership of architecture vs design vs development vs manufacturing vs supply vs assembly, and especially in the understanding of what it takes to reliably and repeatably manufacture any of these systems.
2) the use of conventional (therefore relatively cheap, available, and of known properties) materials implemented very cleverly
Everyone thinks they're going to find some magic goo inside... some alien unobtanium that enables things never thought possible. That's the stuff that dies in laboratories. Good engineering finds clever and elegant ways to do things better with less material, less processes, and at a lower cost. It is hundreds of small ideas and careful implementation of tech that produces a reliable, robust, (relatively) affordable commercial product. I know that's not sexy, but we were never in the business of producing shiny prototypes that ran for an hour for the cameras and never made it to customers.
With that said...
The patent office wasn't as liberal with us as with some others, so we chose to maintain much of our technology as trade secret - especially the industrialized processes that enable us to build our pack. As I wrote Mark in an email, do not confuse very elegant engineering with simplicity or a lack of engineering. The battery pack is quite unique and very very difficult to replicate. There are several reasons why we have (had?) the highest energy density in transportation, all while maintaining anti-propogation resistance at and above automotive standards. If you try to pack high energy (3 Ah+) 18650 cells into a pack as closely as we have, and you don't do the things we did, you will have a very very dangerous pack. We were the first to be able to achieve permanent interconnects that allowed us to orient all of the cells in the same direction. We were the first to thermally couple to the base of the cell. These things are not trivial - many had given up on the approaches that we were able to implement repeatably and reliably. We had to build our own battery manufacturing plant in Brisbane to make the Redshift pack possible. Even though this ultimately is Alta's biggest competitive advantage, if I third party had been capable of building it, we would not have made that multi-year and multi-million dollar investment.
I'll address the others below, in line.
The reason I couldn't keep my mouth shut is we actually DID take the clean sheet approach, where nearly every other company in the space was more of a systems integrator. There is literally not a single sub-system from the rear axle to the headstock that wasn't a ground-up Alta design and development. Yes, we use third party components (e.g. chips, pumps, springs), but that is so very far from using third party subsystems (e.g. controllers, motors). There is not a line of code on the bike that wasn't written or rewritten by an Alta engineer.
Thanks for letting me vent. I look forward to talking about more important things sometime soon. Believe me, the wait is as excruciating for me as it is for all of you, and I'm really sorry that all of our customers, dealers, vendors have to go through this with us.
