> The first of these was announced just last week when the Chinese battery-maker that supplies most of the major car makers, including Tesla, revealed it had produced the first "million mile battery".
> Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) says its new battery is capable of powering a vehicle for more than a million miles (1.2 million, to be precise - or 1.9 million km) over a 16-year lifespan.
I keep being told Tesla has some big tech advantage, but here they are buying the same batteries as everyone else.
It's both. They are buying batteries from suppliers in China in order to keep up with demand, but they are also working closely with Panasonic on the chemistry for the majority of their batteries. In addition they are directly funding and performing in-house research on next generation battery chemistries. We also don't have many details about this new CATL battery. Almost all Li-ion batteries are capable of lasting a million miles under the right conditions, so the devil is in the details. A true million mile battery will be able to last a million miles under most real world conditions, which hopefully both this CATL battery and the Tesla million mile battery will be able to do. I think Tesla might have a bit of an advantage there since they control the whole stack, but we will have to see.
They are buying the same batteries currently, but are scheduled to announce an important battery breakthrough sometime this month at "Battery Day". According to leaks, this is known as project roadrunner inside Tesla.
They did, Tesla was the first to invest into Gigantic battery production and winning with economy of scale and vertical integration.
That was until China has more electric vehicles sold than rest of the world combined. They made 95% of all electric buses in the world. So the economy of scale somewhat shifted. And the rest comes with continual investment.
This is mostly assumptions, we don't know if any of this is true. Tesla has some news about batteries and they are working on something, if it just that the buy the same batteries as everybody else it would be pretty weak. I don't think that's it.
If there's an article about Elon Musk's achievements and contributions I'd like to read about, it certainly won't be from the BBC, who's technical content still glosses over details and is stuck in the 1990s.
While I also hope for a revolutionary leap in battery technology one should remember that Elon says a log of things and sincerely means all of them until he is sued at which point he was just exercising his First Amendment right to say whatever he wants.
Note that although Panasonic is technically building them, they are doing so inside the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada. Panasonic wasn't able to deliver the gains that Tesla wanted which strained the relationship and led to Tesla's decision to manufacture cells independently.