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

On the plus side...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Statistical fallicies

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

price competition via supply shortfall.

[goombah99]

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.