Tesla Looks to Improve LFP Battery Performance and Bring Production to the U.S.

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The article doesn't really say anything... Will Tesla stop using CATL and BYD batteries? Are they working with one of those companies to open an LFP factory in the US?

I guess most likely they will be working with these companies to bring the manufacturing to US, just like they did with LG/Panasonic.

Good. If LFP are cheaper to make, use less sensitive materials, better for longevity, why is it taking so long to make them domestically?

Probably because of less performance. But it's very good for RWD 3/Y as these are not aiming for performance.

Energy density maybe. Reduce power output really isn't a big deal for the average joe. Oh no, my LFP car only has 300 hp vs my neighbor's NMC car with 400 hp! How will I possibly get to work? LFP have a very flat voltage curve so they actually have more consistent power output as the SOC drops vs NMC while giving up a little peak performance.

Agreed, it definitely has the market.

Another Notateslaapp clickbait article that doesn’t really say anything of substance

They bought some LFP enquipment from CATL https://battery-news.de/en/2024/02/02/tesla-new-lfp-plant-with-catl-equipment/

Thanks for the share

also charging performance

There are many proprietary techniques needed to get the energy density they have now. Basic LFP from papers is lower capacity, so much lower it is not feasible. China developed a huge lead over decades because they broke the LFP patents.

Less profitable. It'll take just as much resources to build up a LFP manufacturing plant as any other lithium ion plant. Obviously you would go for the higher capacity (which sells with a larger margin) ones first.

It says that Tesla has the new patent so assume they will make in house.

There are LFP batteries that can charge at 5.5C which is around 10-12min for 10% to 80% so really fast.

What is the profit margin difference between an LFP and NMC/NCA style pack?

What is the profit margin difference between an LFP and NMC/NCA style pack?

I’m pretty sure I’ve read the headline that Tesla is bringing LFP production to the US for a few years now

LFP is dead... https://www.electronicdesign.com/blogs/nonlinearities/article/55291382/electronic-design-sonmc-battery-chemistry-is-no-longer-gonna-fly

i believe one of the drawback is massive energy loss in colder climate so with LFP batteries, any states that has winter season, the potential customers might pass on LFP battery EV

Retaining 90% capacity after 7000 hours of cycling at 40C would be incredible. For reference, my 2.5 year old LFP Model 3 is already down to around 94-96% capacity, depending on how you measure, after only 631 hours of driving, which equates to 23.5k miles. So 7000 hours of cycling is probably in the 200k-300k miles ballpark, potentially more if you do mostly highway driving. Edit: I should note, however, that even for current LFP batteries, most of the degradation seems to be from calendar aging, not cyclical (usage-based) aging, so other LFP Tesla owners with 2.5 year old cars likely have similar remaining capacity to me, regardless of whether they drove 5k miles or 50k miles. And the article didn’t mention if this new type of LFP battery has improved calendar aging characteristics.

That's interesting. We should expect some better results from LFP

The difference would basically be the amount of money consumers are willing to pay for the long range over the standard range minus some amount.

Until recently, there were patents involved. https://www.torquenews.com/14335/catl-lfp-batteries-have-expiring-patents-why-good-tesla

I hope so, the best battery that they have yet is the BYD Blade battery they put in some Model Ys.

I've heard about that too, but not sure if it's ever coming to North America.

And what is that?

Plus you can charge to 100%?

Well, standard range model 3 used to sell around $7000 less than the long range. Of course, you need to take into consideration for the cost for the additional motor and premium speakers which I'd guess it to be around $4000... so $3000 difference per pack (which seems in line with the approximate cost of the batteries. 55kWh LFP vs 82kWh NMC). While the profit percentage might not be much higher, the total dollar profit will be. Also, the revenue would be about 10% higher as well.

Tesla has cell lab jobs listed all day every day, they're constantly testing cell variations in the labs.

The good news is the 5% degradation is normal for the first couple years. The LFP degradation rate will slow down and flatten out over time. LFP batteries will easily outlast the car. Estimates for Tesla LFP batteries are 500k to a million miles.

The original LFP batteries had low energy density, were not good in cold weather and were slow to charge. CATL and BYD have solved these issues. Based on the patent it appears Tesla has as well.

Yes, I wish more people understood this before making a fuss about degradation. Lithium-ion batteries typically follow a bathtub-shaped degradation curve. There’s an initial drop of about 5–10% early on, but after that, the rate of degradation slows significantly and remains relatively flat for a long time.

This is the answer.

It's very hard to improve calendar aging. Most of it is on the graphite anode, and is lithium becoming immobile in a film. LFP and NMC/NCA are the same here, same graphite, same lithium. The upside of that is the calendar aging rate slows down as the film grows. The research literature models the process as sqrt(time) as the most basic approximation. Improved cyclic aging is really good for utility energy storage which will be nearly fully cycled every day, unlike personally owned cars. but batteries are actually very complicated: recent review article [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435124005105](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435124005105) Commercial batteries are already highly optimized across multiple requirements, and often fixing one thing hurts some other property. Calendar aging is also the hardest to experimentally determine because there's no shortcut to actual age, other than raising temperature but that gets you results at non-realistic conditions which may not scale as you think to normal temperatures. If you need to publish a paper or get a PhD thesis, cyclic aging is much easier to get somewhere.

Yup even with a properly warm battery max I can charge at is 170kw and thats only for 3 minutes. After that it settles at around 130