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Comment by justapassenger | Hacker News Reader

You don’t need to be manufacturing batteries to make EVs. Even vertical integration darling, Tesla, is buying most of their batteries (and the tech behind them) from suppliers like BYD and Panasonic. Their in-house efforts so far are not yielding any massive success.

Batteries at the core are commodities, where you have laser thin margins and supplier model that is pulling R&D costs from many companies is basically only long term way to go.

Electric part of an EV is easy. It’s a car that’s hard part.

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>Batteries at the core are commodities

I would argue that might have been true 5 years ago, but now it's proving to be the competitive advantage. Batteries and the materials that produce them are no longer selling at 'Razor thin margins' because the 'Commodity' is extremely constrained. No EV manufacturer can get enough batterys to produce the cars they sell.

It’s a temporary state. There’s nothing at the core that would make batteries not a commodities, production just needs to pick up (and both suppliers and raw materials producers are making huge investments to make that happen). Plus we’re in a weird state where COVID supply chain issues and overheating of economy makes it very hard to reason about true state of the market.

But please tell me who has that competitive advantage? Tesla? They’re Panasonic/CATL shop, with negligible amount of in house production.

When batteries are the primary bottleneck on production, the primary source of innovation, change, and price drops, then in that case batteries are not mere commodities but a key technology in the car.

The rest of an EV is pretty simple. Drivetrain is no longer a really hard component, as electric motors are far more straight forward.

> > It’s a car that’s hard part.

Countries that try to kickstart a new car industry often outsource the drivetrain, as it's the most difficult part to build.

With EVs, batteries are by far the touchiest and most difficult part to build. Companies that outsource battery design, or at a bare minimum are not intimated involved with the batteries for their own packs, will be left behind.

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