Why CATL Upstaged Tesla With Million Mile Battery Announcement

A few days ago Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL), China's largest electric car battery producer, who is also in battery development relationship with Tesla, announced its million-mile battery. Why did it upstage Tesla?

Torque News contributor Dean McManis explains.

CATL was a good partner for Tesla specifically for their lower cost China-only battery. CATL already was selling its LFP prismatic battery, which did not use cobalt, so Tesla only needed to adapt the CATL LFP battery to the Chinese Model 3 (and probably Model Y). Plus Tesla buyers will be able to get broader Chinese buyer subsidies if they use Chinese batteries. But the million-mile battery is another matter.

First off, if Tesla just wanted to have a battery manufacturer build their new million-mile battery for them, they would more likely have used Panasonic, who is a long time partner, an expert battery manufacturer, and shares their Nevada Gigafactory. Plus Tesla's valuable patents would be safe with a Japanese company like Panasonic, as opposed to Chinese companies who have a history of stealing foreign patents.

Notice that CATL's announcement specifically did NOT mention any of the Tesla's patent items in their MM battery announcement, no Maxwell dry electrode, no single crystal cathode, and Tesla's tab-less battery technology would not be a perfect fit for many CATL customers. Plus, even though nobody is going to mention it, many ICE (internal combustion engine) automakers actually have based their car designs on planned obsolescence, so that the vehicles will require more maintenance (to have dealerships make money through service) and have a limited lifespan, to get car owners to buy new cars every couple years.

The 300,000-500,000 lifespan of current Model 3 batteries are already beyond the needs of most EV buyers, but Tesla has other EV plans which include their Robotaxi service and their Semis, as well as commercial Cybertruck owners, who will actually NEED longer lifespan batteries. CATL and LG, probably already had working MM batteries previously which could last between 4,000-8,000 charge cycles, but other automakers probably weren't interested in a MM battery until Tesla started releasing information on their new battery technology patents, and since then EV buyers have responded well to the idea of super long life EV batteries. And they will compare battery life against other EV maker's vehicles.

Part of the reason for Tesla creating their Roadrunner project, and their publicized plans to build their own batteries was for vertical integration, and specifically so that Tesla would not be subject to battery manufacturers, and future battery supply shortages which have plagued other EV automakers recently.

With all that we have learned so far from Tesla and their own battery development, it does not make sense that they would just have CATL make their battery, but it does make sense that CATL, who knows that Tesla wants to build their own million-mile battery, would do this preemptive announcement to profit off of the implication that CATL would be building Tesla's MM battery. It's a cheap shot by CATL, but they will make a bag of money now by their stock prices rising, and be able to sell their million-mile batteries to EV automakers who are competing against Tesla as well.

#Tesla
#CATL
#MillionMileBattery
#TeslaBatteryDay

This is Armen Hareyan from Torque News. Please, visit us at https://www.TorqueNews.com for daily car sector news and follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/torquenewsauto for daily automotive sector tweets.

Видео Why CATL Upstaged Tesla With Million Mile Battery Announcement канала Torque News