On 29 July, 2016, Tesla Motors Inc. (Tesla) announced the latest progress of its Gigafactory situated in Nevada, the US. As planned, the factory, running at full capacity, will satisfy the battery demand from 500,000 battery electric vehicles (BEV).

                                                                                       Source: Baidu

Tesla has blazed the trail in BEV segment and has brought quite a shake to the world's automobile industry.

In regard to positionings and pricings, Tesla's automobiles do earn the name of “luxury” in electric vehicle industry. Early at the end of March, 2016, Tesla officially initiated the reservations for Model 3 (a cheap version), and within 2 weeks, got the orders for 400,000 vehicles worldwide, beyond the full-year sales of BEVs in China in 2015.

It is notable that Tesla schedules to start mass production of Model 3 as late as 2018, even though it had the reservations this year. This is an indication that Tesla defeated many of its competitors and exerted overwhelming pressure on them 2 years earlier before the model is launched.

However, restricted by BEV properties, power battery is a key obstacle to Tesla’s development: now the company is still spending much on power battery. The Gigafactory will be critical in reversing the course.

At present, all the power batteries used by Tesla are offered by Panasonic Corporation's Asian plants. As constant promotions are made in constructing the Gigafactory project, Tesla is gradually reconstructing its battery supply chain to reduce costs for power battery.

Gigafactory is only about 400 km away from Tesla’s automobile factory in Fremont and Tesla will build a railway between the 2 places for the transportation of power battery.

In this way, the cost for power battery in the future is expected to be cut by 30%+.

"Besides Model 3, Tesla will put forward a much cheaper one in the future," commented a trade source, "With lowered cost for in power battery, it is hoped that Tesla will expand its consumer range, to ordinary consumers, which is a focus by most BEV manufacturers now."

Despite only 14% of the Gigafactory completed, Tesla plans to advance the date of completion, from 2020 to 2018, in order to deliver the Model 3 on time. In light of the orders, the Gigafactory, once put into operation, has to work at full capacity to meet the market demand.

This article comes from China Li-ion Battery E-News 1608, CCM

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Tag: battery