Jakarta –
Some time ago it was reported that a man from Finland was disappointed because the price of Tesla’s battery components was expensive to hundreds of millions. Why is this important component so expensive?
The man named Toumas Katainen has a Tesla Model S produced in 2013. However, after touching a distance of 1,500 km, an error code began to appear.
After being sent to a Tesla repair shop and having it checked, the only way to deal with the problem is to replace all the batteries which cost up to IDR 321 million. As a result, he chose to blow up his own electric car.
Quoted from Bloomberg, there are a number of factors that cause battery components to be very expensive. Today’s EV cars mostly use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, the same is found in laptops or smartphones, but they are much larger for cars.
Inside the battery, there are various cells grouped together like a large suitcase. The most expensive component in any battery cell is the cathode, which is one of the two electrodes for storing and releasing electricity.
Well, the materials needed in the cathode to store more energy are often expensive. These include metals, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and manganese. These materials need to be extracted from the mine and processed into chemical compounds with high purity levels.
The process is not easy and the number of materials needed makes the price of electric car batteries expensive. For the current price and package size, the average cost of a regular electric car battery can be around US$ 6,300. If the EV car is in the premium class, the price may be even more expensive.
But, can the price of electric car batteries be cheap in the future? One option is to replace cobalt with nickel, which is cheaper and saves more energy. However, cobalt has advantages over nickel, where cobalt is not easily heated so it is more durable and does not burn quickly.
In addition to using nickel, the material that can be used is cheap lithium iron phosphate as a substitute for the cathode. However, these materials are rated worse and dangerous.
A number of factors above are the reason why the price of electric cars is still relatively expensive, because the materials to make the batteries are also not cheap.
Watch Videos “Ex-Tesla Engineer: Electric Car Prices Are Unreasonable, Should Be Equal to Avanza“
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(rgr / din)
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