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

Posted by timothy on from the markets-tend-to-respond-to-demand dept.

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."

11 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. On the plus side... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:On the plus side... by X0563511 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perfect example of patents stifling progress instead of encouraging it.

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    2. Re:On the plus side... by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perfect example of patents stifling progress instead of encouraging it.

      It's an even better example of patents serving the precise purpose they were designed to prevent.

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    3. Re:On the plus side... by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So why exactly are you demonizing oil companies in your post? Sounds like they played a big role in creating these large-format batteries.

      Because they used their battery patent to force Toyota to not only discontinue manufacturing their first pure-electric RAV4, but also pay a large fine for daring to do so. That vehicle was their CUSTOMER, and they killed it with a lawsuit. Toyota would have been paying them royalty money for over a decade, on potentially tens of thousands of vehicles worth of batteries, but they insisted on total shutdown of production instead.

      That's how much oil companies fear the possibility of a successful electric car. They're not "energy companies", all branding efforts to the contrary. They're oil companies. They act exactly the way oil companies have acted for over a century.

  2. Statistical fallicies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If we extrapolate this curve and assume everything else remains constant, DOOOOOOOOOM!!!!

    But it gets the clicks, and that's all that matters on the tubes.

    1. Re:Statistical fallicies by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There were no smartphones before the iPhone? Really? There was no desire for portable computing?

      There was no demand for cars before Tesla?

      Demand exists before supply. If no one wanted to ever go faster than a horse the car would never have been a success.

  3. Do I lack reading comprehensiosn skills? by oodaloop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So if Tesla doubles production, it would consume the entire world's production of li-ion cells. So the measly 21k cars Tesla produces use half of the world's production already? Maybe I can't read and/or do math though.

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    1. Re:Do I lack reading comprehensiosn skills? by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So if Tesla doubles production, it would consume the entire world's production of li-ion cells. So the measly 21k cars Tesla produces use half of the world's production already? Maybe I can't read and/or do math though.

      It's not your math, it's the lack of data in TFAs. I can't find the number of cells per Tesla battery in any of the articles, either. Maybe I just got bored paging through. Stupid ADD. Anyway. searching around gives guesses of 7500 to 8000 cells in the top-of-the-line pack. So another 20000 cars would be 160 million more cells. If a laptop uses four to eight cells per battery, that's a lot of laptops worth of cells.

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      I am not a crackpot.
  4. Rather Breathless Headline by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We start with some seriously breathless doom-and-gloom headlines and summary, then reading the articles we find this sort of thing:

    The carmaker's rapid production scale-up has prompted Panasonic to expand capacity, by reopening previously idled plants, while simultaneously committing to build entirely new production lines.

    So prices had been dropping, production had been cut, but now at least one cell maker has restarted idled lines. That doesn't exactly sound like a disaster in the making.

    --
    I am not a crackpot.
  5. price competition via supply shortfall. by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder which has the better profit margin, electronic devices or Tesla? Presumably that decides how this plays out. The interesting thing is that it's going to become a barrier to entry for electric car makers. The one with the highest profit margin can set the price of the batteries above the profit margin of the competition when there is a supply shortfall.

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  6. Re:And, Li-Ion batteries are improving exponential by smith6174 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously, putting an r-squared value on the chart for apparently FOUR data points? Scientist card revoked.