Tesla is likely to produce its own battery cells
Tesla looks set to become a battery cell manufacturer itself. This move has been rumored for some time and now seems to be confirmed by job openings in which the company is asking people for positions such as cell technician.
The website Elektrek has seen the vacancies on the Tesla website. For example, in the US, there is a vacancy for a cell technician where the applicant must contribute to anode development and must have experience in the chemistry of lithium-ion cells and the use of battery test equipment. The person for this vacancy must also conduct experiments and analyzes within the product development team. There are more vacancies of this kind that seem to indicate a step by Tesla to start producing battery cells itself.
There have been indications and rumors for some time about Tesla’s desire to produce battery cells itself, which would be partly prompted by the current scaling limitations in battery production. Musk said in June at a shareholders’ meeting in Mountain View, California, that Tesla is doing everything possible to scale up battery production to very high levels. The company didn’t say out loud that it would get into battery cell manufacturing itself, but Drew Baglino, the vice president of Tesla’s technology division, also said Tesla wants to be “master of its own destiny” when it comes to finding a solution for battery cell manufacturing. For the time being, that is not the case, as Tesla is currently purchasing battery cells from Panasonic for the Model 3, X and S.
During that shareholder meeting, Musk also briefly discussed the integration of Maxwell, a company that Tesla acquired earlier this year. He says the acquisition is very strategic and involves an important technology that Musk says will have a major effect on the cost and scale of cell production. Maxwell is a producer of supercapacitors and battery parts. Compared to lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors are better able to store a high peak current, charge faster and last much longer, but have a much lower energy density. Presumably, Tesla’s interest is not so much in supercapacitors, but in Maxwell’s research into dry electrodes, which can increase the energy density of batteries used by Tesla and make them cheaper to produce.