Panasonic, one of the battery suppliers for Tesla, has made a nice promise. The batteries become 20 percent more efficient within five years.
In addition to LG Chem and CATL, Panasonic supplies batteries that are used in Teslas. Here in the Netherlands, most batteries in Tesla will come from the Japanese company, since the Model 3 has batteries on board. Those batteries still have plenty of room for improvement, the company sees. Yasuaki Takamoto, the top executive of Panasonic’s US EV branch, makes a promise to Reuters. He states that the density of the batteries will improve by 20 percent in the next five years. This means that the same amount of energy can be stored in a smaller space. Or that a larger range is possible with the same size. In that case (with the Model 3) a range of far above 600 km would be possible.
Panasonic says that it is not only working hard on efficiency, but also on the composition of the batteries. There is a lot to do especially for the cobalt in the batteries. This is regularly linked to child labor in Africa and is also quite expensive. The goal is to further reduce the amount of cobalt use in the cathodes of the batteries. The collaboration between Panasonic dates back to 2010 and for a long time it was the exclusive battery supplier of Tesla. In 2014, it was decided to integrate Tesla battery production in the US. Panasonic is working on this in the Gigafactory 1 in Nevada.