Tesla announced today that the Giga Texas plant has just built its 20 millionth 4680-type cylindrical battery cell: “Just built our 20 millionth 4680 cell at Giga Texas!”
It’s a very significant milestone, which also reveals the average production rate over the past four months, because on June 16, the company celebrated 10 million cells produced at the site.
It means that 10 million additional cells were produced in slightly less than four months. That’s almost 17 weeks and an average rate of 2.5+ million cells per month (roughly 600,000 cells per week).
Tesla analyst Troy Teslike estimates that the average production rate of 85,470 cells per day (assuming 10,000,000 cells over 117 days) and 89.4 watt-hours of energy per cell (unofficially), is about 7.6 megawatt-hours of energy per day or 53.5 MWh of energy per week (228 MWh per month).
Now, assuming the expected Tesla Cybertruck‘s battery capacity, we can find that there should be enough battery cells for at least several hundred pickups per week:
- assuming 100 kWh pack: 534/week or over 2,000 per month
- assuming 120 kWh pack: 445/week
- assuming 150 kWh pack: 356/week
For reference, the retired Tesla Model Y AWD from Texas (the only one with 4680-type batteries), was equipped with a 67.3-kWh battery pack with (828 cells), according to unofficial reports. Because the battery pack in the Tesla Cybertruck might be much bigger, the same amount of batteries, will last for a lower number of vehicles.
We guess that at 2,000+ 100-kWh battery sets, Tesla probably is not limited by the battery cell output right now. Some analysts say that the company will produce a rather small number of vehicles for customers this year – 100-200 units. However, things will get serious next year and in 2025.
Because we are talking about an average rate, and because the ramp-up is probably progressing gradually, the current 4680-type battery production most likely is higher than the average over a four-month period. Nonetheless, Tesla will have to tremendously increase the output, if the Cybertruck production is expected to go high-volume in 2024 or 2025.
Even at 100,000 Tesla Cybertrucks per year and 100-kWh battery packs, we are talking about more than 110 million battery cells (3-4 higher than the average in the past four months).