Tesla Says It's Got Better Batteries As It Chases 20 Million Vehicles Per Year
Tesla's Battery Day was today, in which CEO Elon Musk said the company has the technology or will soon have the technology for a 56 percent reduction in how much it costs them to make batteries. This is all part of Tesla's plan to someday make a $25,000 car.
Musk didn't give any details about the car, and his presentation was largely a technical exercise as the details of how they achieve that reduction were explained. There were also lots of slides.
Below is one of the final ones, which shows Tesla's collective improvements, which will be rolled out in the next year or two. Tesla currently gets its batteries from Panasonic but the new ones will be made in-house.
Did Musk make a 69 joke? You bet he did!
Here's a few other slides I managed to take screenshots of:
And here's The Verge explaining some of the advances more articulately than I could:
Musk said Tesla achieved this breakthrough by removing the tab, a part of the battery that forms a connection between the cell and what it is powering. These new tabless cells, which Tesla is calling 4860 cells, will make the company's EV batteries five times more energy-dense, six times more powerful, and enable a 16 percent range increase for Tesla's vehicles.
Long-term, Tesla says it wants to make 20 million vehicles a year, roughly 50 times as many cars as it currently does, and about double what the biggest automakers make yearly today. A $25,000 Tesla would go a long way towards that goal, since I think for many would-be buyers the biggest hold up for Tesla is still the price.
That said, it doesn't sound like Tesla is particularly close, with Musk saying during a question-and-answer period that they didn't have a name for the car yet, though a few questioners called it the Model 2.