The founder and chairman of CATL, one of the world’s largest battery suppliers, believes that Elon Musk’s 4860 technology will never be successful. Robin Zeng said this in an interview with Reuters, where he also discussed hopes for the opening of a CATL plant in the United States to produce batteries for companies such as Ford and Tesla.
CATL already supplies Tesla with batteries for cars produced at its Shanghai plant and has an agreement with the electric car maker to license CATL’s technology to produce batteries in Nevada. But Tesla has said for years that an innovative cylindrical battery of its own design will be the key to increasing the range and reducing the cost of its cars. According to some estimates, batteries account for about 30% of the cost of an electric vehicle. In 2020, Musk announced that Tesla’s 4860 battery would be 10-20% cheaper to produce and provide a fivefold increase in capacity.
Numerous reports indicate that Tesla has faced challenges in improving the 4860 battery, which is currently used in the Cybertruck and some other vehicles. In recent months, Musk has reportedly been pushing engineers to further reduce costs and resolve a technical issue that causes the batteries to break down during use, according to The Information. Other challenges included scaling up the use of a dry electrode coating system, which is applied to the batteries using large rollers; moving the rollers at high speeds reportedly led to problems with the temperature of the binding agents.
“We had a very big argument, and I showed him,” Zeng told Reuters in an interview about a recent meeting with Musk. “He was silent. He doesn’t know how to make a battery. It’s electrochemistry. He’s good at chips, software, hardware, mechanical things.” Zeng praised Musk’s autonomous strategy of using cameras and artificial intelligence instead of more expensive lidar sensors, a controversial decision in the world of self-driving.
CATL, which stands for Contemporary Amperex Technology Co, produces batteries for Tesla cars in China, as well as for Ford cars in the United States. The company uses a more traditional LFP battery technology that does not provide the same range as Tesla’s 4860 batteries, but can be mass-produced right now.
Reuters does not provide any details of Zeng’s reasoning, and whatever you think of Musk, he often proves skeptics wrong. Zeng and his Chinese competitor BYD have become dominant in the world of electric vehicle batteries, and BYD produces its own electric vehicles, quickly becoming one of the largest electric vehicle manufacturers in the world. This success may be making Zeng a bit complacent.
