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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite see lithium battery tech to be a market dominating advantage.

Case in point - despite branding Gigafactory is at least in part a Panasonic operation. Don't believe me? See panasonic annual report:

https://www.panasonic.com/global/corporate/ir/pdf/panasonic_...

Largest lithium battery supplier in the world? Panasonic.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries...

BMW doesn't need experience in batteries - they'll buy them from a battery manufacturer.

The real difference here is that BMW can afford a wait and see approach for another year or so. Tesla is all-in committed right now & it has to work out asap since they're making huge losses. For each dollar in sales they're incurring 1.3 in costs. Which brings us back full circle to BMW's comment:

>"not profitable enough to scale up for volume production"

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I think it's quite the opposite, battery production is the key.

The problem is that no one can mass produce batteries for cars at this scale. As of now the projected capacity of the Gigafactory is enough batteries for 500k cars / year. By 2020 it will be 1.5M cars / year. This is more batteries than the whole world produced in 2013.

By 2020 Tesla is gonna have a lot of experience how to do this efficiently so the cost will be much lower. They are gonna have a new gigafactory in the EU. Lithium mines can't produce enough lithium at this scale so Tesla already makes deals with them to ramp up the production.

BMW makes 2.5 million cars a year. So what's the plan exactly? Just buy the batteries? From whom? When every other large car manufacturer wants to buy batteries and there is not enough on the market the price will go up.

Every time I read something like Volkswagen|Mercedes|Audi|whatever plans to sell x ev cars by 2020 I never see any mention about who is going to make the batteries.

I think the large car manufacturers are already behind, they should start working on their battery factories right now.

>So what's the plan exactly? Just buy the batteries? From whom?

One of the top lithium battery manufacturers as per my link. Lithium batteries are literally everywhere. Do you see Apple proudly proclaiming they make their own batteries for their ipads & how their battery knowledge is their key competitive advantage? No they use a supply chain.

Sure there will be a supply crunch, but even that is exaggerated in my view.

>Lithium mines can't produce enough lithium

See recent (last month) comment from Morgan Stanley:

>“We expect these supply additions to swamp forecast demand growth,”

https://www.ft.com/content/4faf029a-1ae7-11e8-aaca-4574d7dab...

Panasonic owns a small part. There's over 300 Tesla employees at the factory vs ~50 Panasonic, and Tesla owns the building and the land. Panasonic leases part of the building and owns some of the equipment.

If BMW is buying from the manufacturer, there's a high chance Tesla will be one of them.

>Panasonic owns a small part. There's over 300 Tesla employees at the factory vs ~50 Panasonic, and Tesla owns the building and the land.

That's good info. Thanks

Absolutely. "Tesla's" cells that have been showcased are 99% made possible by Panasonic. You don't need battery expertise to build a decent battery pack using off-the-shelf cells.

It's extremely frustrating how people here - who usually are at least moderately skeptical about other technologies - eat up piles of inaccurate battery news with gusto.

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