Tesla is celebrating the milestone of one million 4680 cylindrical lithium-ion battery cells. Tesla tweeted the news on Friday along with an image of employees standing in front of Tesla’s Kato Road facility in Fremont. The milestone took place in January.
Celebrating our one millionth 4680 cell in January pic.twitter.com/d19IPFu18u
— Tesla (@Tesla) February 18, 2022
The 4680 cylindrical cells will be used in Tesla’s new EVs in structural battery packs beginning with the Model Y vehicles produced at Giga Texas. The 4680 cell was unveiled in September 2020 at Tesla’s Battery Day event. By unveiling the new cell, Tesla entered into another industry.
During the Battery Day event, Drew Baglino, Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla, noted that the new cell design would provide five times the energy with six times the power while enabling a 16% range increase.
Tesla’s milestone of one million 4680 battery cells is a phenomenal achievement for a company that was once expected to fail. Tesla started as an automaker and moved into energy as it kept its focus on its core mission, which is accelerating the world’s transition to sustainability.
Notably, batteries are the foundation of the three elements of a sustainable future: sustainable energy generation, energy storage, and sustainable transport.
One key benefit of the 4680 cells is that they cost 10% to 20% less to manufacture, in addition to having higher energy density than the lithium-ion batteries Tesla has been using.
Earlier this year, Panasonic announced that it was investing $700 million to expand its battery factory in Wakayama prefecture, Japan, and bringing in new equipment to manufacture the new 4680 cells developed by Tesla. You can read more about that here.
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