Tesla: Want to get rid of the fate of Panasonic battery

As the cheapest Tesla, Tesla MODEL3 has already booked more than 370,000 units. To know that this is a product that will be sold two years in advance, Tesla officials have even had to cut off part of the product in order to guarantee timely delivery. Duplicate orders.

Although Tesla’s sales have been extremely hot, since the establishment of Tesla until today, no real profits have been achieved and the company has been losing money. However, as the only battery supplier of Tesla at present, Matsushita Electric has earned enough money.

According to published data, the Tesla Modes battery has a capacity of 85KWH and uses 8142 3.4AH Panasonic 18650 batteries. Tesla engineers solved the ternary lithium battery safety problem through an effective power management system, and its battery price was $416/KWH. Therefore, the cost of the Tesla P85 battery is 35360 dollars, compared with the price of 85,070 dollars, the battery cost accounted for 41.6% of the car price. To know that this 35,360 US dollars is the purchase price of Tesla battery costs, if you set aside MODELSP85 sales profit, then the battery at least accounted for more than 50% of MODELS manufacturing costs, or even more.

Obviously, at least 50% or more of Tesla’s profits have been earned by Panasonic, and Tesla’s loss is a matter of course. In 2015, Tesla sold only 50,500 vehicles throughout the year, and such sales could not share the high operating costs, and it was even more difficult to share the huge R&D costs originally invested. At the same time, because of the inability to achieve economies of scale, its marginal cost has remained high.

Therefore, as the second step of Tesla's three-tiered step-by-step development strategy, MODELS caused the loss of the company is inevitable. After all, the MODELS price is close to one hundred thousand dollars, which is already one level with the traditional D-class luxury car. Compared with the traditional D-Class car has nearly half a century of technical precipitation and market base, MODELS apparently can not directly compete with it.

Such an unusually high sales of MODEL3 has caused Tesla to seek a self-built battery super factory on the one hand, and has to seek new battery partners on the other. At present, Tesla has had business talks with South Korea's LG Chem, Samsung, and SK. LG Chemical once stated that it "expects to win cooperation with Tesla's business and promises to provide a good price and lead time."

A few days ago, Tesla CEO Musk had already advanced his goal of producing 500,000 electric vehicles by 2020 to 2018. Although some people in the industry believe that Tesla could not complete, from the perspective of seeking more suppliers from Musk, this production plan is now slowly going on. However, if MODEL3's impulse-like products can really bring about the economies of scale for Tesla, the fate of working for battery suppliers will soon come to an end.

In fact, at present, most domestic autonomous electric passenger vehicles have little profit even if the government gives them a large subsidy. On the one hand, this is also because of the high cost of batteries, and BYD’s self-produced electric vehicle model has achieved great results. Profit, this may be the key reason why BYD, the battery OEM, can stand out in the field of electric vehicles. Tesla now seems to have come to understand and started to build a super battery plant with Panasonic.