AA Carbon battery!Tesla avoids dependence on suppliers and develops batteries independently

According to five current and former employees of Tesla, the company is developing its own power batteries for electric vehicles to avoid over-reliance on external suppliers, and Tesla hopes to reduce the cost of batteries and vehicles through this move. cost and selling price, and self-produced batteries will also be more in line with Tesla CEO Musk’s

According to five current and former employees of Tesla, the company is developing its own power batteries for electric vehicles to avoid over-reliance on external suppliers, and Tesla hopes to reduce the cost of batteries and vehicles through this move. The cost and selling price, and self-produced batteries will also be more in line with the "vertical integration" plan proposed by Tesla CEO Musk.

Since 2014, Tesla has reached a cooperation with Japan's Panasonic, but in May 2019, Musk said that insufficient battery supply limited the production capacity of Tesla's electric vehicles, although Tesla and Panasonic invested The equipment can meet the annual battery production capacity of 35GWh, but as of May this year, the annual battery production is still limited to 23GWh.

In fact, at the 2019 Tesla Shareholders Meeting, Musk said that Tesla has mastered new battery technology. In terms of cost control and energy density improvement, the new batteries are more powerful than those currently used on the Model 3. The 21700 battery will make progress, and even with the expansion of the battery business, Tesla is willing to directly undertake the mining of raw material minerals.

According to people familiar with the matter, Tesla’s battery research and development team is designing and producing prototypes of lithium-ion battery cells and equipment that can mass-produce these batteries. The battery laboratory is only a few meters away from Tesla’s Fremont factory in California. It's only a few minutes' drive away, and Tesla has previously posted multiple engineer recruitment information, including battery cell design, battery cell production, and battery cell manufacturing engineer positions.

However, according to Tesla employees familiar with battery supplier negotiations, even if Tesla has the ability to produce its own batteries, the company may not necessarily terminate cooperation with external suppliers in the short term, because the first batch of batteries produced by the Shanghai factory Tesla Model 3 is likely to use batteries from Panasonic and LG.