Tesla has just announced another milestone in its innovative 4680-type battery cell production. According to the American electric vehicle giant, it cranked out enough battery cells to produce over 1,000 Cybertrucks a week at Gigafactory Texas.
Tesla ramps up battery cell production at Giga Texas
Tesla’s separate X account for the Cybertruck shared the good news on March 20, indicating that Giga Texas can now produce 1,000 units of the electric pickup a week with a sufficient supply of 4680 battery cells.
“Produced over 1k Cybertrucks’ worth of 4680 cells at Giga Texas last week!”
Cybertruck X account
Unfortunately, Tesla omitted to reveal the specific number of cells Giga Texas produced last week. The Cybertruck boasts an estimated battery capacity of approximately 123 kWh. Therefore, 1,000+ battery packs would be 123+ MWh/week (6+ GWh/year).
Notably, a single battery pack probably features about 1,360 individual cells. In that sense, the production rate is at around 1.4 million units a week. It indicates a notable increase from the 868,000/week record as of December last year.
Cybertruck production
Tesla’s 4680-type battery cell production may be sufficient to build more than 1,000 Cybertrucks a week or over 4,000 a month. However, Cybertruck’s current production rate is only at a few hundred per week rate, based on the recent drone videos captured at Giga Texas.
Earlier this year, the Musk-led company confirmed that the battery cell production is ahead of the Cybertruck. At this time, it has already halted the production of the 4680-powered Tesla Model Y to upgrade the production lines for the second-gen 4680 cells named “Cybercells.”
Tesla assured that battery cells will not be a bottleneck in its Cybertruck production. Last year, it also indicated in the shareholder deck that the American EV giant could theoretically build 125,000 Cybertrucks annually at Giga Texas. However, the Cybertruck’s production remains lower than that.
It must be noted that many factors can affect Cybertruck production ramp-up apart from battery cell production, such as the design complexity and other component supplies.
Giga Texas’ battery cell production progress
This new production milestone suggests that Giga Texas achieved a 6+ GWh/year run rate, indicating about a 24% increase from the 5 GWh record in October 2023.
However, industry insider Jordan Giesige from the Limiting Factor channel was not impressed with this growth, emphasizing that Tesla took over 5 months to add 1.2 GWh of production capacity at Giga Texas.
As of now, it remains unclear whether the production capacity improvement is due to production issue mitigation or the need to boost Cybertruck production. AutoEvolution suggests that the production capacity growth is most likely a mix of the said two factors.
