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Electric car maker Tesla Inc. plans to introduce a new low-cost, long-lasting battery in its Model 3 sedan in China later this year or early next year, which it 39; hope, will align the cost of electric vehicles on petrol models and Allow EV batteries to have a second and third life on the power grid.
For months, Tesla CEO Elon Musk harassed investors and rivals, vowing to reveal significant advances in battery technology during a "Battery Day" in late May.
New low-cost batteries designed to last a million kilometers and allow Teslas Electric to sell profitably at the same price or less than a gasoline-powered vehicle are only part of the agenda Musk people told Reuters. familiar with the plans.
With a global fleet of more than one million electric vehicles capable of connecting and sharing electricity with the grid, Tesla’s goal is to achieve the status of an electric company, competing with traditional energy suppliers such as Pacific Gas & Electric and Tokyo Electric Power, said these sources.
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The new low-cost batteries that will be used in Tesla electric cars are designed to last one million kilometers of use.
The new "million mile" battery at the heart of Tesla's strategy has been developed jointly with the Chinese company Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) and deploys the technology developed by Tesla in collaboration with a team of recruited academic battery experts by Musk, Three people familiar with the effort said.
Eventually, improved versions of the battery, with higher energy density and storage capacity and even lower costs, will be introduced in other Tesla vehicles in other markets, including understood in North America, sources said.
Tesla's plan to launch the new battery first in China and its broader strategy of repositioning the company had not been previously reported. Tesla declined to comment.
Tesla's new batteries will build on innovations such as low cobalt and cobalt-free battery chemistry, and the use of chemical additives, materials and coatings that will reduce stress internal and will allow batteries to store more energy for longer periods of time, they said. the sources.
Tesla also plans to implement new, highly automated high-speed battery manufacturing processes designed to reduce labor costs and increase production in massive "terafactories" of approximately 30 times the size of the gigantic "gigafactory" of Nevada. , a strategy wired at the end of April to analysts. by musk.
Tesla is working on the recycling and recovery of expensive metals such as nickel, cobalt and lithium, through its subsidiary Redwood Materials, as well as on new "second life" applications of electric vehicle batteries in storage systems. network, like the one Tesla built in South Australia in 2017. The automaker has also said it wants to provide electricity to consumers and businesses, but did not provide details.
Reuters reported exclusively in February that Tesla was in advanced talks to use CATL lithium iron phosphate batteries, which do not use cobalt, the most expensive metal in EV batteries.
CATL has also developed a simpler and less expensive way to pack cells in the battery, called cell-to-pack, which eliminates the intermediate step of grouping cells. Tesla should use the technology to help reduce the weight and cost of the battery.
CATL also plans to supply Tesla in China next year with an improved long-life nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) battery, the cathode of which is 50% nickel and only 20 % cobalt.
Tesla now jointly produces Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminum (NCA) batteries with Panasonic at a "factory" in Nevada and purchases NMC batteries from LG Chem in China. Panasonic declined to comment.
Together, advances in battery technology, the strategy of expanding EV battery usage modes and large-scale manufacturing automation all have the same goal: to rework the financial calculations that you've done so far. Buying an electric car more expensive for most consumers than sticking to carbon-emitting internal combustion vehicles.
"We really have to make sure that we get a very steep ramp in battery production and continue to improve the cost per kilowatt hour of batteries; that is very basic and extremely difficult," Musk told investors in January. "We have to take battery production to crazy levels that people can't even understand today."
Tesla has reported operating profit for three consecutive quarters, which has led to almost doubling its stock price this year. Still, Musk's ambitious expansion plans hinge on increasing profit margins and sales volume.
Many of the technical advances made by Tesla and CATL in chemistry and battery design have come from a small research laboratory at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The laboratory has been led since 1996 by Jeff Dahn, a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and networked storage.
Dahn and his team began an exclusive five-year research partnership with Tesla in mid-2016, but the relationship dates back to at least 2012.
Among the critical contributions of the Dahn laboratory: chemical additives and nano-designed materials to make lithium-ion batteries more solid and more resistant to bruising, such as rapid charging, thus prolonging their service life.
The cost of CATL's cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate batteries has dropped below $ 80 per kilowatt hour, with the cost of battery cells falling below $ 60 / kWh, sources said. . CATL low cobalt NMC batteries cost close to $ 100 / kWh.
Auto industry leaders have said that $ 100 / kWh for batteries is the level at which electric vehicles reach rough parity with their competitors for internal combustion.
Battery expert Shirley Meng, professor at the University of California at San Diego, said NMC cells can cost as little as $ 80 / kWh once recycling and recovering key materials such as cobalt and nickel. Iron phosphate batteries, which are safer than NMC, could find a second life in fixed grid storage systems, reducing the initial cost of these batteries for buyers of electric vehicles.
In comparison, the new low-cobalt batteries developed jointly by General Motors Co and LG Chem should not reach these cost levels before 2025, according to a source close to the work of the companies.
GM declined to comment on its cost targets. Earlier this year, he only said that he planned to "bring battery cell costs below $ 100 / kWh" without specifying a schedule.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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