Tesla has announced the creation of a new battery design that will help it reach its goal of 10 to 20 terawatt-hours of battery production per year.
The new cell design was announced during its virtual battery day event. Unlike the traditional box design, Tesla’s new design is a tabless, 80-millimetre creation that will give the cells five times the energy density, six times the power, and enable a 16% increase in range.
According to Tesla, manufacturing of the new battery has started. “We’re starting to ramp up manufacturing of these cells at our pilot 10-gigawatt manufacturing facility just around the corner,”
However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk noted during the event that the facility is still at pilot plat level and the new cell manufacturing system isn’t actually working yet but is “close to working”.
Creating more power
Speaking on the new upgrade to the battery, Drew Baglino, the SVP of powertrain and energy engineering at Tesla explained that the team used the change in size to increase power and address the thermal issue in the traditional battery to increase density.
“We came up with this tabless architecture that removes the thermal problem from the equation that allows us to go to the absolute lowest cost form factor and the simplest manufacturing process.”
He explained that the cylindrical dramatically simplifies winding and coating and has an awesome thermal and performance benefit. Baglino also added simpler manufacturing, fewer parts, and a shorter electrical path length.
Speaking about the achievement, Elon Musk acknowledged that it was quite hard to achieve as “nobody’s done it before.”
He added that it was a significant step towards ramp up energy storage.
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