Welcome back to The Electric!

Coming on Tuesday: The electric vehicle race often looks like a competition among companies fighting to be first to the same technologies. That’s why I’m excited to host Mujeeb Ijaz, founder of Our Next Energy, as my next guest on Live Chat With The Electric. One of the sharpest minds in the field today, Ijaz has captured attention for his reimagination of the battery, featuring two cathodes rather than one, and what he calls the most efficient pack in the industry. Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET. Subscribers can register here. And let me know if you’d like to invite a guest.

Tuesday also marks 18 months since Tesla Battery Day, the milestone event when the battery and EV industries evolved from aspiration to commercial reality. Today, I take stock of the aftermath of Battery Day and the remaining steep challenges faced by competitors in the EV race.

In September 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the stage in a parking lot outside the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory. For two hours, as Tesla owners hooted and honked from electric vehicles arrayed before him like drive-in movie patrons, Musk outlined a wholesale reconfiguration of how batteries and EVs are made—changes he said could cut the price of his vehicles to as low as $25,000. Within a year and a half, he said, the first evidence of this top-to-bottom transformation would be plain to see. And in three years, the makeover would be complete.

Eighteen months later, you can discern the outlines of what Musk promised on Battery Day, as Tesla dubbed the event. One innovation had nothing to do with batteries: a highly engineered new type of chassis, consisting of colossal aluminum castings, one in the front of the vehicle and one in the rear, to replace a pricier mishmash of thousands of parts and welds. It’s headed for large-volume production next year. So too is the splashy new battery that Musk unveiled, a fist-size cylindrical cell called the 4680 that he did not attempt to patent, leaving the format open for others to copy and manufacture. And he outlined a shift in the battery compositions Tesla will use to include lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, which is usually significantly cheaper than more popular nickel-based chemistries. In all, Musk figured he could cut the cost of his batteries to around $62 per kilowatt hour, down 56% from the industry average of $140 at the time. Musk seems unlikely to reach that milestone by next year, his self-set deadline. But he will probably get there later this decade, and ahead of rivals.