At the last investors meeting, battery production is what Elon said is the main bottleneck at this time for model 3s.
AFAIK, all the others are going to get their batteries from third party vendors (except maybe Nissan?). That is going to cause a cost for everyone but Tesla.
Panasonic isn't scaling back production. Tesla is the one who refused to approve additional scaling up because Panasonic hasn't been able to reach the promised production rate with their existing capacity.
> Nikkei said that Panasonic “froze” a decision to put an additional $900 million to $1.35 billion of investment into the Nevada Gigafactory in a bid to “reduce its dependence on the automaker.” Tesla is Panasonic’s biggest customer for electric vehicle batteries, and the Japanese battery maker had already suffered millions in losses due to the slower-than-expected ramp-up of Model 3 production.
Yeah parent is saying Tesla denied that Nikkei report. Might be true, might be not, but lying would be very risky for a public company. Remember Bloomberg story about stealth chips in Supermicro servers?
Panasonic provide the cells, Tesla combines thousands of cells into battery packs, and the battery packs are quite complex bits of engineering, with monitoring, cooling, heating, balancing etc.
AFAIK, all the others are going to get their batteries from third party vendors (except maybe Nissan?). That is going to cause a cost for everyone but Tesla.