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The 4680 battery is coming...

2021-11-08

The stimulating third-quarter financial reporting season has just passed. Last weekend, major battery manufacturers once again used a wave of intensive power battery capacity expansion plans to usher in the fourth quarter. This year is worthy of the "battery expansion year." Almost every quarter there is a plan for a large-scale expansion of battery manufacturers.

And this time, not only the leading Ningde Times has thrown out two major expansion projects (building battery production base projects in Xiamen and Guizhou, with a total investment of no more than 8 billion and 7 billion yuan respectively), and Yiwei Lithium Energy also invested 30.521 billion yuan and 62 million yuan respectively. 100 million yuan to build a 152.61GWh lithium battery and system R&D and production base in Jingmen, as well as a 20GWh large cylindrical battery production line and auxiliary facility project for passenger cars, a 16GWh prismatic lithium iron phosphate battery production line and auxiliary facility project; in addition, the lithium battery giant Panasonic also officially announced The 4680 battery is close to commercial maturity and plans to further expand its production capacity in Mexico.

Why 4680?

First of all, from a global perspective, the large-scale use of cylindrical power batteries is Tesla. European car companies such as Daimler, Nissan, Renault, Volkswagen, and Hyundai mainly use soft pack batteries, while domestic car companies mostly use square batteries.

The battery selection and planning of car companies cannot be changed in a short time. So even if the 4680 battery is successfully launched and the effect is good, other car companies may follow up and try to use cylindrical batteries, but in the short term, the main customers are also concentrated in On Tesla.

And Tesla`s new battery 4680 battery launched on Battery Day last year, the number 46 refers to the diameter of the cylindrical battery 46mm, and 80 means the height of the battery is 80mm.

Compared with the 18650 and 21700 cylindrical lithium batteries used by Tesla before, the advantages of the 4680 battery are reflected in battery capacity, production cost and efficiency.

Tesla used cells

Tesla used cylindrical cells.

The reason for the increase in battery capacity is the increase in size. This is not a special case of the 4680 itself. The previous 21700 battery has 50% more battery capacity than the 18650 battery, and the 4680 is 5 times the battery capacity of the 2170 (not the energy density increase by 5 Times), and the increase in battery capacity will also lead to an increase in cruising range (an increase of 16%).

The increase in production efficiency and the reduction in cost (14% decrease) are reflected in the large batteries, which are also used in 75KWh electric vehicles. The old 18650 requires about 7100 batteries, and the 2170 cylinder requires 4400+ batteries. , While the new battery 4680 only needs 950 cells, a smaller number of monomers means that the space utilization rate of PACK is improved, and the time required for production and assembly is reduced, so the grouping efficiency is greatly improved.

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