Improved battery design is key to cost savings

The team from Carnegie Mellon University, including a post-doctoral research associate from MIT, analysed the design and production of vehicle batteries in a study appearing in the Journal of Power Sources and reported that mass production has limitations when bringing down costs.

‘Electric vehicle batteries are expensive,’ said CMU’s Jeremy Michalek, Professor of Engineering and Public Policy and Mechanical Engineering. ‘Federal and state governments have been subsidising and mandating electric vehicle sales for years with the idea that increasing production volume will reduce costs and make these vehicles viable for mainstream consumers.’

Tesla’s planned Gigafactory has similar ambitions, promising major cost reductions at higher volume.

‘But we found that battery economies of scale are exhausted quickly, at around 200-300MWh of annual production. That’s comparable to the amount of batteries produced for the Nissan Leaf or the Chevy Volt last year,’ Michalek said in a statement. ‘Past this point, higher volume alone won’t do much to cut cost.’