Lithium-ion battery

Tesla just announced details of the Battery Gigafactory to be located in the Southwest US. The location hasn’t yet been selected but will provide 6500 US jobs and, in 2020, enough batteries for 500,000 electric vehicles.

Tesla also announced a $1.6B convertible notes offering to fund the Gigafactory and other ramping.

As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible. In cooperation with strategic battery manufacturing partners, we’re planning to build a large scale factory that will allow us to achieve economies of scale and minimize costs through innovative manufacturing, reduction of logistics waste, optimization of co-located processes and reduced overhead.

The Gigafactory is designed to reduce cell costs much faster than the status quo and, by 2020, produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent. Here are some details about what the Gigafactory will look like.

Learn more about the Tesla Gigafactory

TESLA ANNOUNCES $1.6 BILLION CONVERTIBLE NOTES OFFERING http://t.co/rHkp9L1rWe

— Electrek.co (@ElectrekCo) February 26, 2014

Press release follows:
Expand
Expanding
Close

You’ll recall that I picked Panasonic and Solar City to be among partners in Tesla’s upcoming Gigafactory announcement back in mid-January. I went on Bloomberg earlier this month to re-iterate those claims. Today, Panasonic got a little bit more official.

Reuters picks up a Nikkei report:

Panasonic Corp is inviting a number of Japanese materials suppliers to join it in investing in a U.S. car battery plant that it plans to build with Tesla Motors Inc, with investment expected to reach more than 100 billion yen ($979 million), the Nikkei reported.

The plant, expected to go on-stream in 2017, will bolster Panasonic’s supply of lithium-ion batteries to the U.S. electric-car maker.

Last week, Tesla shed some light on its plans for building a lithium-ion battery plant, or “giga factory,” that will cut battery costs and allow the company to launch a more affordable electric car in 2017. However, it said at the time that further details would be announced this week.

The U.S. plant, which will handle everything from processing raw materials to assembly, will produce small, lightweight batteries for Tesla and may also supply Toyota Motor Corp and other automakers, the Nikkei said.

Battery costs have been a major stumbling block to widespread electric car adoption in the United States, according to analysts. Tesla’s giga factory will lower costs by shifting material, cell, module and pack production to one spot.

In Tesla’s earnings conference call last week, Chief Executive Elon Musk said the electric car maker expects to build the factory with more than one partner, but a “default assumption” was that Panasonic, as a current battery cell partner, “would continue to partner with us in the giga factory.”

“The factory is really there to support the volume of the third generation car,” Musk said on the call. “We want to have the vehicle engineering and tooling come to fruition the same time as the giga factory. It is already part of one strategy, one combined effort.”

The pieces are starting to come together. The biggest question now is how Tesla funds the other $4B in costs. Will it issue more stock? Will it bring in some very rich partners like Apple? On that note we go to last week’s earnings call for more color on that:
Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG2-LNbNnYQ] We’re big fans of the looks of the Porsche Panamera S Hybrid (especially the interior) but were saddened to learn that the onboard battery/motor drivetrain was only good for 20 miles via the sub-100HP engine and 9.4-kWh lithium-ion battery.  That’s a lot closer to the Plug-in Prius than anything else Porsche has made.

That’s why it is amusing  to learn that the original car that Ferdinand Porsche built in 1898, which was discovered this week, actually boasts better electric car range than the current Panamera S hybrid. The specs of the Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle show it has 120 amp hour battery good for around 49 miles of range with a top speed of over 20 mph. Not too shabby. That’s also further than a Chevy Volt.