At Current Rates, Tesla Could Soon Suck Up Worldwide Supply of Li-Ion Cells

cartechboy writes "Lets just say Elon Musk may need to go battery shopping, like, big-time. Here's some little-understood Tesla math that could turn the global market for cylindrical lithium-ion cells upside down by 2015. It turns out the massive Model S battery takes almost 2,000 times the number of cells a basic laptop does. Assume Tesla just doubles production from its current 21K cars/year to 40K cars/year. (Something it expects to do by 2015). At that point, Tesla would require the *entire* existing global capacity for 18650 commodity cells. That assumes no other growth, no next gen model, nada. What should Elon do? Better get on the horn to Panasonic and Samsung."

Comments

Re:18,650? Really?

[homsar]

18650 is the name of the size of cell. See this table.

Perspective is important

[wchin]

The lithium ion 18650 cylindrical cell production has been dropping as laptop demand has dropped and as laptops are moving to lithium polymer flat pack batteries.

Panasonic/Sanyo has had to close factories. Originally, Panasonic's plants that were acquired from Sanyo were supposed to be able to produce 300 million cells in their Suminoe plant in Osaka, Japan in just stage 1.

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800603184_765245_NT_5f784554.HTM

That plant alone, running at full stage 1 capacity could produce enough batteries for 40,000 85kWh Model S's. The demand from Tesla is strong enough that they are expanding production again:

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-08-21/news/41433228_1_lithium-ion-batteries-production-line#

However, it really isn't the Model S or Model X that will have the issue, or even the initial production of whatever Gen 3 car that is coming. The big issue is making enough batteries for millions of EVs, and that will take some planning for the necessary expansion.

Re:On the plus side...

[dj245]

Our newfound infatuation with extremely flat laptops that have about as many user-servicable parts as 2001's Monolith means that demand for 18650 Li-ion cells in laptops should be plummeting! Problem solved. Now we just need to go liberate whoever is living on top of our lithium, and we are good to go.

There is a difference between a "battery" or "battery pack" and a "battery cell". One "battery" generally needs to have several "battery cells" inside. The voltage of the battery "cell" is determined by chemistry and can not be changed. To make higher voltages, you need to use more cells or a different chemistry. The simplest example is a 9V (PP3) battery. Alkaline chemistry gives a per-cell output of abour 1.5v, so to get 9v you need 6 cells. Usually this comes in the form of 6 AAAA batteries inside.