I thought Tesla’s batteries are fairly run of the mill. The competitive advantage is they’re producing them at scale. That’s a moat, but an expensive one to maintain. Cutting prices would seem to remain a mistake.
What's stopping any of the other vehicle manufacturers from entering a joint venture agreement with any of the other large battery manufacturers?
Tesla designed and makes everything else, and that's a lot. The technology that goes into making sure that the battery lasts a long time, works decently in cold and hot, can be charged at high speeds, doesn't explode etc. is very sophisticated and no other car maker has this knowledge in house.
Even at the battery cell level Tesla doesn't just rely on Panasonic. Browse LinkedIn a bit and you'll see that they have in-house R&D for battery cells, they sponsor well-known cell-level academic researchers and they just spent over $200 million on Maxwell Technologies to get their cell-level IP.
The first thing that stops other car makers from making big moves in the battery space is lack of conviction. They still act like they are only half-convinced that EVs are 100% of their future in very short order (speaking relatively in car business years).
And the second thing that stops them is massive investments needed to build their own battery gigafactories.
Third is probably lack of internal expertise (which Tesla was building since the days of roadster).
Even those most committed (like Volksvagen) project for 2025 maybe 1/4th of (projected) Tesla's production.
Fun fact: Volkswagen wants to partner with SK Technologies on battery factories.
Reportedly their current supplier (LG Chem) threatened to cut them off if they proceed.
It's unprecedented for a supplier to threaten their biggest buyer which should tell you the current distribution of power in battery technology.
or think "the individual cells that make up the tesla battery pack".
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-22/toyota...
This has just been confirmed:
>CATL has been discussing the required specifications for the batteries with Tesla officials, the people said, asking not to be named because the talks are private.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-11/tesla-is-...
The performance and degradation of the battery packs is absolutely unparalleled at this time and it remains to be seen when any other company will catch up to them.
Source: http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/1b240f1e-b519-4b40-b14b-fea...
