It’s almost an open secret that Tesla will soon be producing its own battery cells for the batteries in its electric cars and stationary storage. After the first indications from CEO Musk at the Annual General Meeting in summer 2019, more and more information leaked out – at an investor day probably this spring, Tesla later wants to officially inform Musk about his spectacular plans. The blog Electrek has already gathered new information about the battery cell plans at Tesla.
According to this, several Tesla executives have been campaigning on LinkedIn for qualified employees for the new area in the past few days. For the time being, it seems less about revolutionary cell technologies than about producing more or less conventional lithium-ion cells more efficiently in order to get higher quantities at lower costs. According to CEO Musk, Tesla plans to increase battery production by several terawatt hours per year.
And these plans are obviously becoming more and more concrete. An R&D engineer at the company invited interested parties to join Tesla on LinkedIn, according to Electrek, to “reinvent lithium ion battery production technology.” A Tesla manager, who Electrek calls “Senior Manager Cell Manufacturing,” wrote of “World-class technologies for battery cell production” for “The next generation of low-cost, high-performance electric cars and energy storage products”.
At the same time, more and more job advertisements appear on the Tesla job pages, which explicitly contain the word “cell” in English. There are currently a good 30, many of them more recent and for California, China and Berlin, where Tesla’s fourth Gigafactory is currently under construction. Shortly after the plans for the German factory were announced, Teslamag.de had announced that battery cells are also expected to be produced there.
According to Electrek, the not so secret battery cell project at Tesla is now running under the code name “Roadrunner”. However, improvements are not only being worked on at the cell level, but also for modules and battery packs to which the cells are integrated. A source is said to have said that CEO Musk is pushing for one of the new packs to be presented on the planned battery day (the exact date is still open).
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