BYD was founded 1995 as a Chinese battery company. Tesla, stolen 20 years ago from its founders by a South African son of blood mining empire, is known for being a low quality car assembly brand that sources Japanese batteries.
When Tesla began its “4680 cylindrical cells” production using factories in California and Texas, with prismatic cells sourced from CATL, it begged the question was it doing anything better, let alone good?
A new study looks at these BYD and Tesla car batteries, concluding Tesla’s batteries are significantly worse than the latest BYD engineering.
Comparing this specific heating per volume, the Tesla 4680 cell creates around 2× of the heat to be dissipated at a 1 C load (Figure 8). Thus, when designing a system with the same power requirements, the cooling needed for the Tesla 4680 cells must dissipate approximately 2× more heat per volume than that needed for the BYD cell at the same load.
Perhaps most interesting of all is how clear the gap in performance is, next to the finding that battery performance is virtually unresearched. In other words, for 20 years Tesla could lie about its batteries and scientists didn’t have data yet to expose fraud.
There is no doubt that Japanese and Chinese battery experts have known this whole time the Tesla engineering was low quality. But there has been far too little exposure to the general public.
