Tesla (TSLA) has just lately launched plans to provide its personal battery cells known as ‘4680’, however now we be taught that Panasonic can even be producing the brand new cell for them, in line with a brand new report.

Whereas Tesla has been working by itself battery cell chemstry for years, it has at all times labored with skilled battery cell producers to provide them whereas it centered on battery module and pack manufacturing.

Panasonic has been Tesla’s essential companion relating to battery cell provide, however the firm has additionally been utilizing LG Chem and CATL extra just lately.

At its ‘Battery Day’ occasion in September, the automaker introduced a long-anticipated change in its technique.

It unveiled a new tabless battery cell in a bigger format with a new chemistry and plans to provide it itself with manufacturing equipment designed in-house.

Nonetheless, CEO Elon Musk additionally made clear on the occasion that Tesla would nonetheless proceed to make use of battery producers and purchase all of the battery cell provide they’ll get to help to formidable progress plan.

However the CEO didn’t say if the battery producers would produce Tesla’s new battery cell or they’ll preserve shopping for cells from the present 2170 and 18650 codecs, which all their electrical automobiles nonetheless use.

Now Nikkei Asia, an Asia-based enterprise newspaper, reviews that Panasonic is engaged on constructing manufacturing traces to provide prototypes of Tesla’s 4680 battery cells at its current amenities:

“Panasonic will arrange a prototype manufacturing line at current amenities. The price of the undertaking is predicted to run into the tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.”

The publication reviews that manufacturing of the prototype cells would begin subsequent yr and it might result in a brand new provide settlement with Tesla.

At the moment, the brand new cells are solely being produced at a pilot plant in Fremont, however Tesla is already engaged on giant scale factories to provide the batteries at Gigafactory Berlin and different places.

Electrek’s Take

That is an attention-grabbing growth.

At Battery Day, Elon made it clear that Tesla would stil purchase battery cells from different suppliers even after they set up their very own battery manufacturing.

Nonetheless, he didn’t made it clear that these different suppliers can be making the 4680 cells because the new tabless design and a number of other parts within the cell required Tesla to design new manufacturing processes.

Although it does make sense contemplating all the advantages of the brand new type issue, however we additionally know that it’s going to take a while for Tesla to change all its car packages to the brand new format.

Apparently, apart from Panasonic, we additionally just lately reported on LG Chem talking about producing new battery cells that sounded a lot like Tesla’s 4680, however they by no means truly talked about the automaker.

If a number of battery suppliers begin producing these cells for Tesla, we might see an actual shift within the trade to this new format.

---

Subscribe to Electrek on YouTube for exclusive videos and subscribe to the podcast.