The dry-coating technique used to produce the bigger cells in Tesla's 4680 battery is new and unproven, so the company is having trouble scaling up manufacturing for big cost savings.
The good news is that by using bigger cells and a new process to dry-coat electrodes, Tesla could halve the cost of abattery, saving more than 8% of the car's U.S. starting price, battery experts with ties to the company said.
Among the 12 battery experts Reuters spoke with, nine have close ties to Tesla and three of the nine have examined Tesla's new and old battery technology inside and out through teardowns.The sources predict that Tesla will find it difficult to fully implement the new dry-coating manufacturing process before the end of this year, and perhaps not until 2023.
According to the experts, Tesla has only been able to cut the Model Y's battery cost by between $2,000 and $3,000 so far, about half the savings Tesla had planned for the 4680 battery, which it unveiled two years ago. Tesla acquired the know-how in 2019 when it paid over $200 million for Maxwell Technologies, a company in San Diego making ultracapacitors, which store energy for devices that need quick bursts of electricity, such as camera flashes.
Because of its simplicity, the process allows Tesla to cut capital spending by a third and slash both the footprint of a factory and its energy consumption to a 10th of what would be needed for the wet process, Tesla has said.Maxwell developed its dry-coat process for ultracapacitors, but the challenge with coating electrodes for EV batteries is that they are much larger and thicker, which makes it hard to coat them with consistent quality at mass-production speeds.
The rising cost of battery materials and energy pose a risk to those forecasts, however, and Tesla has not yet been able to significantly improve the new battery's energy density or the amount of power it packs, as Musk has promised.
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