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

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 3, 2013 @02:05AM 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."

1 of 351 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

18,650? Really? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-03 02:12 · Score: -1, Offtopic

The global supply of laptop cells per year is 18,650? As in... 18,650 laptops are sold per year. Across the planet? That seems implausibly low. Did anyone try applying some common sense to this story?