Tesla has acquired Hibar Systems, a Canadian manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles, laptops and other applications. The acquisition strengthens suspicions that Tesla will enter battery cell production itself, in order to be less dependent on other manufacturers.
It is not entirely clear when the American car manufacturer Hibar Systems acquired it. Canadian news site Electric Autonomy discovered that the Canadian company has been registered as a subsidiary of Tesla since October 2. In the previous update of the company register, dating from July, this was not yet the case. The Hibar website itself was largely taken offline on September 16 and since then only shows an information page with address details.
At the time of the acquisition, Hibar was developing an efficient production system for lithium-ion batteries intended for the mass storage of electricity. It is not Tesla’s first acquisition in this industry. In February of this year, the carmaker already bought Maxwell, a company in California that is working on a new generation of lithium-ion electrodes. CEO Elon Musk said at a shareholders’ meeting in June that this acquisition will have a major effect on the cost and scale of cell production.
Tesla also recently signed a five-year deal with Jeff Dahn, a Canadian physicist at Dalhousie University who is renowned worldwide for his research on lithium-ion batteries. Analysts also see an indication here that Tesla wants to make battery cells itself in the long term, in order to scale up production to higher levels and become less dependent on other battery manufacturers.
Photo: Hibar Systems