Tesla Battery Day Is So Much-Anticipated: But What Is It All About?
Tesla Battery Day will take place on September 22nd, at the same time as the general meeting of shareholders of the electric vehicle company. But what exactly is it, and why is it so important?
Scheduled for July, Tesla’s annual general meeting of shareholders will finally take place on September 22, 2020, the company announced in a press release on July 10, 2020. The event has been postponed because of the ban on large gatherings that has been maintained in California due to the coronavirus pandemic raging around the world, and the risks of a second wave that remain in everyone’s minds.
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On that day, Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, will also be holding a Battery Day, which seems to be eagerly awaited by industry experts and fans of the brand. Only “eligible shareholders” will be entitled to attend this separate presentation, explains the press release, while “further details will be announced later in the year”.
Tesla Battery Day: what is this all about?
Batteries to change everything
This conference will be an opportunity for Tesla to present its technological advances in electric vehicle battery technology. This project, which has been kept relatively secret for years, is eagerly awaited, as there are commercial, financial and industrial stakes behind it.
If the manufacturer were able to produce cheaper and more powerful batteries, it could gain independence from its suppliers, offer even cheaper electric vehicles and even become a supplier to its competitors.
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Already in 2019, Tesla bought Maxwell, which specializes in the development of battery and energy storage technologies, for more than $200 million. At the time, last year’s Battery Day was called Autonomy Day. In a LinkedIn post, Matthieu Moors, an engineer in charge of battery R&D, spoke more recently about a complete “reinvention” of the battery. The multinational’s project even has a secret code name: Roadrunner, which aims to increase Tesla’s battery production capacity while reducing costs.
It must be said that the company that succeeds in significantly improving the performance of electric vehicle batteries will have gold in its hands. Whether in bicycles, scooters or cars, the range offered is the factor most sought after by consumers: the less they need to recharge, the more satisfied they will be. Today, however, batteries are still heavy and offer limited performance (count 100 km maximum range for an electric scooter with a single battery, which is also heavy). Tesla is currently overcoming this problem with superchargers scattered all over the roads.
Tesla would work on the development of these new batteries with the Chinese Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL).
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There remains, however, the problem of the manufacture of the batteries themselves, which require rare natural resources increasingly in demand by the industry (nickel, cobalt, copper or lithium), sometimes extracted under very difficult conditions. For the time being, it is obvious that the “green battery” does not exist. Nevertheless, rumor has it that Tesla is working on batteries that are not very dependent on cobalt.
