Tesla is building its own cell line, including in Europe.
Tesla prepares to launch a lithium-ion battery production line in Fremont. This is due to the job advertisements posted on the manufacturer's website. In recent years, Elon Musk's company has been intensively preparing to expand its business with this type of activity.
Tesla wants to have 1 GWh of cells per year
Musk announced last year that the company would need 1 GWh/000 TWh of cells per year. To achieve this efficiency - which is several times greater than the current production capacity of all factories in the world - Tesla would have to have its own line with cells in almost every gigafactory.
It is possible that the Californian manufacturer is preparing for this. The company has already bought the German company Grohmann, which produces automation for battery assembly. She bought a Canadian Hibar that does the same. It acquired Maxwell Technologies, a supercapacitor manufacturer and patent holder for lithium-ion cell technology.
> Here's a car that shouldn't be there anymore. This is the result of calculations by German scientists.
Now, as Electrek notes, Tesla is looking for a "pilot production line engineer, cell specialist." The announcement indicated that it was "to improve the effectiveness of the program." production new generation battery cells“. This shows that the company already has a cell development department (source).
The role of the new employee is to, among other things, planning and launching production of cells in Europe... This means that the claimed assembly line at Gigafactory 4 near Berlin could be Tesla's own line, rather than a rental site for Panasonic or LG Chem.
The California manufacturer currently uses lithium-ion cells supplied by Panasonic in the US, and in China by Panasonic and LG Chem, with the ability to use CATL resources:
> China's CATL has confirmed the supply of cells for Tesla. This is the third branch of the Californian manufacturer.
Tesla is organizing Batteries and Powertrain Day in April 2020.... Then we will probably find out more details.
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