Tesla To Delay  4680 cells For Model Y 

Tesla is known to be fully committed to the self-developed 4680 battery cell.

The company's production is lagging behind the forecast, as Elon Musk admitted last Thursday at the Tesla annual general meeting. For 2022, however, Tesla still has enough batteries for 1.5 million electric cars from suppliers like Panasonic.

Accordingly, the 4680s would only become important in 2023; there would be enough capacity available this year. Nevertheless, Tesla's production is expected to reach reasonable volumes by the end of this year; observers reckon with 5,000 battery packs per week (i.e. about 250,000 per year). That would correspond to about 15 to 20-gigawatt hours, which would be enough to equip all Model Y cars built in the USA and Germany with batteries produced in-house. Originally, 10-gigawatt hours were supposed to leave the pilot plant in Fremont in 2021, and even 100-gigawatt hours worldwide by the end of this year.

Musk is holding back on concrete announcements after several forecasts were not met. It was not possible to elicit from him exactly when this high production volume is to be achieved. However, he was confident that the time would come this year. But then battery production in Texas would also have to start because the target for the pilot plant in Fremont was only about 1,000 batteries per week. Last year, Musk had assumed that the Model Y would only be equipped with 4680 batteries from the moment it was unveiled. Tesla's 4680 cells could mean price parity between electric cars and internal combustion engines by the middle of the decade at the latest. For example, the 4680 cells are said to have 5 times the energy density and 6 times the power compared to Tesla's current cell type, at half the cost.

The Model Y is still partly equipped with conventional 2170 batteries in Texas and Grünheide. Therefore, a certain stock of 4680 batteries could be built up. The market is also contributing: after a record in the first quarter of this year, production and delivery of the Model Y declined because the factory in China was only able to produce to a limited extent. It reached a new record in June and the factory was rebuilt in July for a further increase in capacity.