Tesla has a vision it believes will lead it to the promised land of electric vehicle success. It’s called the 4680 battery cell — so named because it is 46 millimeters in diameter and 80 millimeters tall. According to what Elon Musk told the world at Battery Day in 2020, the 4680 battery will unlock a cornucopia of benefits. It will have a higher energy density than any cylindrical battery cells currently in commercial production, which will enable longer range electric vehicles.
The key to the 4680 battery isn’t its size, it’s the manufacturing process used to make it. As Musk and Tesla envision things, the new battery will be manufactured using a new dry electrode process. In today’s lithium-ion batteries, both the anode and the cathode are coated with a wet slurry of chemicals during manufacturing. That coating must be dried before the process continues, which requires a large amount of space in the factory and the use of copious quantities of energy.
If the wet part of the process can be eliminated, the size of a battery factory shrinks considerably, the amount of energy needed to manufacture batteries is dramatically reduced, and there are no harmful chemicals to be recovered. The end result is cheaper batteries, something the world desperately needs if it is to transition to electric transportation.
The story began in 2019, when Tesla bought Maxwell Technology, a company that specialized in dry coatings for supercapacitors. Musk, of course, has boldly promised the 4680 batteries would be in production soon and, in fact, they are being installed in some Model Y vehicles at the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. But while those batteries maydifferent from the 2170 batteries currently used in most of Tesla’s production cars, they use the same tried and true wet slurry manufacturing process.
Batteries are not a sustainable solution to petroleum. Slaves are used to mine, the earth is raped and left to die. Abolish greed and we will succeed. Gov. of China is required as they have no regulations or moral value when mining earth resources while creating pollution. Steam.