The battery problem is undoubtedly the biggest problem with electric cars and EV adoption has always been hindered by this component, to begin with with electric cars, which despite a substantial drop in lithium to make it an affordable car, have very little to offer. Expensive Tha-ion supply price Battery prices still hinder the development of the field.
There are too few available to meet the growing demand, we now have this situation where people who want electric cars and can’t afford them can’t get them because no one can. Tesla’s New Revolution Batteries Are Getting Better and Better One of the biggest things about nickel battery supply right now is that chain nickel is hard to find and mine.
This global market is heavily influenced by Russian supplies, with Rivian Motors CEO RJ Skarians recently saying that battery shortages are harder to shut down the electric car industry than chip shortages and could last for 10 to 20 years , even if it looks terrible when battery manufacturers continue. RJ’s prediction to build and use the same materials and construction methods they currently use might not be too far off.
While Tesla this is an issue the company is already considering as Elon Musk promised that Tesla would need a massive supply of batteries to deliver on its promise to grow to peak size. To do this they cannot put all the eggs in one basket or in this case the chemistry of the batteries so Tesla is essentially diversifying its battery portfolio.
It will be based on some new experimental ideas as well as tried and true formulas that could pay big dividends over time to revolutionize battery design with the potential to save batteries. We are all familiar with that one word diversification. There is another concept Tesla specifically mentioned in their first Financial Rep 2022 article where they write and I code diversification of battery chemistry to adapt our products to their different use cases is the key to long term capacity growth , which can be optimized better.
To expand our supplier base, nearly half of the vehicles produced in the first quarter were Tesla vehicles. LFP batteries currently equipped with nickel or cobalt-free lithium-ion phosphate batteries are used in most of our standard range of vehicle products as well as in commercial energy storage applications, they are saying in this case that Tesla currently has two Using battery chemistry.
Cobalt and manganese are the old standby formulas in their 2170 and 1865 cells that will power the 1865 Model S and X while the 2170 will power the Model 3 and Y which will be longer range and higher end. There is no doubt that Tesla vehicles do their best. It is superior to its competitors in terms of acceleration and range due to the battery which combines high energy density and power output.
In addition, they are quite expensive due to the use of exotic metals in their composition. The other half is the iron-based cell used to power the new Model 3 rear wheel drive and Model Y standard sold worldwide. Available only in China, these cells are incredibly cheap compared to conventional cells due to their iron cathode, the same material used to make pots and pans.
So we can infer from this that the Model 3 with 270 miles of range, give or take depending on the rear-wheel drive wheel selection, accounts for about half of all Tesla sales for the first quarter of 2016. 022 It’s also worth mentioning that Drew Baglino, Tesla’s vice president for engineering, followed up with this very interesting comment about the change in lfp chemistry of the American-made Model 3.
He said that last quarter half of our products were LFP, which shows how quickly we were able to respond, but to be honest it wasn’t due to a lack of raw materials, it just felt like doing the right thing, we Cathodes can change the chemistry and there is a lot to be done on the cathode side and we are actively trying to deliver. A replacement flexibility in response to market conditions among other cathodes that may be competitors in our vehicle.
There are many options. This is an important quote that we should remember in future as he points out that the company managed to change battery chemistry very quickly and not just because it was imposed on them but purely because it was at the time . It was right to do so when it came several months before the current nickel crisis when he said that Tesla could re-change its cathode chemistry for the products if a better alternative was available.
They are actively investigating these options to use the best possible chemistry which is an incredibly smart move given most Chinese manufacturers are ahead. Based on this strategy, many electric cars have already switched to LFP batteries, even as top-tier Chinese manufacturers such as BYD and Neo have developed their own versions of traditional LFP battery packs.
BID has developed a new cell format called blade which consists of long thin rectangular cells. Looks like one of those weird anime swords because for the Neo they have introduced a hybrid battery pack that combines both NCM and LFP cells for the best of both worlds, meanwhile most of the auto industry that isn’t Tesla or Chinese, Still oozing chemistry when it’s at an all-time high and shows no signs of changing anytime soon, you’ll end up living in a shed.
As Drew mentioned, we can look into the possibility of manganese battery cells as Elon Musk himself has mentioned this option a few times in the past, so it should be of interest to him for the future, Elon said at Giga Berlin Like Tesla reiterated during the opening ceremony. , The rest of the industry will rely on nickel-based chemicals for long-haul vehicles and iron phosphate for short-haul vehicles.
Elon made a quick but interesting comment about manganese-based batteries, saying that I think there’s an interesting potential for manganese that echoes this. Elon Musk tells the crowd at a Battery Day event in September 2020 in New York City as he talks about Tesla’s 4680 battery experiments as Elon says Tesla may quit using cobalt entirely.
Elon said manganese could be substituted, if possible, to reduce nickel consumption. It is relatively simple to make a cathode with two-thirds nickel and one-third manganese which would allow us to do Ma 50 with the same amount of nickel and cell volume and then bring it back to the 2022 event in Berlin. It doesn’t matter how long the battery has been made as long as it’s durable manganese based cells exist in a vacuum, but they haven’t been very common in the past.
Tesla uses manganese-enriched cathode cells in its Power Wall home battery and Nissan uses cathode-enriched manganese cells in its Leaf electric car, which was the world’s best-selling electric vehicle for many years before the Model 3. The idea is very promising and may even serve as a halfway point between Lithium-Ion and LFP batteries. In the past several research groups have published papers on manganese-enriched cathode batteries that may offer unique advantages.
They could be more. Nickel-containing batteries, which are more affordable than iron phosphate batteries, are also an area of speculative battery chemistry. The researchers are pretty sure these ideas could work in the election-trick vehicle industry, but their effectiveness has yet to be demonstrated in the real world. The solid state battery electric car would seem to solve all our problems if it were accompanied by solid-state electronics capable of producing them.
The cells are cost-effective, they are easy to manufacture, they charge very fast and they resist bursting into flames if damaged. Although solid-state technology has been around for decades, we still don’t have a very good product, talking about it is also the idea that graphene can be used as a battery material in the future. Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel and much lighter than steel.
It’s nearly transparent and conducts electricity better than copper, it’s another great idea in principle to make a battery and a lot of people are looking at it probably not for a decade or so at least, Maybe even two when it comes to battery technology we should look to the future like Tesla did What are your thoughts on the possibility that Tesla might develop a solid state battery.