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Tesla got a lead in the EV race and now other manufacturers are pulling out all the stops to catch up. Tesla, for its part, isn’t slowing down either, and if its larger 4680 battery cells are mass-produced, the brand could move forward even further. Experts cited in a new report suggest that if that were to happen, it could save the brand more than $5,500 on every single Model Y it sells. That’s more than eight percent of the crossover’s starting price in the US.
Elon Musk and Tesla introduced the 4680 battery cell two years ago and the brand has been working hard to scale up production ever since. The cell is superior in many ways to the 2170 battery that Tesla is also currently using. For starters, it’s much bigger, and in this context size does matter.
Increasing the physical size of the battery allows Tesla to use much less per battery pack. Specifically, there are about 4,400 cells in the current Model Y. Using the 4680 battery pack would reduce that number to just 830 total cells. In addition to using fewer parts, the new 4680 battery requires only two welds per cell, as opposed to the 2170 which requires four. The savings between 17,600 total welds versus just 1,660 per vehicle will be significant, but it’s not the only reason for the change.
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The 4680 battery cell also uses a dry coating process which is not only much more environmentally friendly compared to the wet coating process used for most batteries, but it is also much less labor intensive. Tesla says that once mass production is reached, it expects capital expenditures to be cut by a third and factory footprint and energy consumption to drop to one-tenth of what is needed for wet paint.
According to a dozen experts close to the situation, the conclusion seems to be that mass-produced dry-coated batteries are coming, but not as soon as Musk would like. According to the experts, producing at scale is the biggest problem Tesla currently faces.
“They can produce in small volumes, but when they started producing high volumes, Tesla ended up with a lot of rejections, too much,” one of the sources with ties to Tesla told Reuters. Despite this, there seems to be an expectation that Tesla will fix the problem by the end of this year or sometime in 2023. That’s (almost) in line with Musk’s August statement that the company would produce high volumes of the 4680 cell by the end of this year.
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