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  jqpabc123
  For years, we’ve been told that the 4680 cell was the “holy grail” that would allow Tesla to produce a $25,000 electric car.For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/elon-musk-with-straight-face-...
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  fencepost
  Doing a quick bit of searching based on the 4680 makes me think that there has been or will be a change from NMC811 to LFP chemistry in the 4680, including one article talking about changing to US and European-based in-house manufacturing and reducing dependence on China.I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."2023 article confirming NMC chemistry: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad14d05/2025 article discussing change to LFP: https://roboticsbiz.com/teslas-4680-lfp-battery-explained-ch...3/2025 article comparing BYD's LFP and Tesla's NMC/NCM: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
• MagicMoonlight
  Tesla had a ridiculous lead over everyone and they spaffed it.No new features, no HUD, no dashboard. They want 60k for cars which have nothing in them. Other companies have now ripped the software and the iPad, so they have nothing unique.All they had to do was continue to improve the product. They didn’t even try.
• Neil44
  Reuters earlier this year - "The development of the 4680 battery has been facing troubles, with the company losing 70% to 80% of the cathodes in test production compared with conventional battery makers, which lose fewer than 2% of their components to manufacturing defects, the report said."The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.ref https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-plans-four-new-batt...
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  omarforgotpwd
  Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier. Typical sloppy reporting from Electrek.
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  Veserv
  A headline that actually undersells the article. The 2,900,000,000 $ deal to 7,400 $ is not just a 99% reduction, it is actually over a 99.999% reduction. I guess that is one way to get the "march of nines" they keep promising.
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  nemomarx
  Tesla stock dipped a little today it seems but it's still up 8 percent over the month. I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
• KnuthIsGod
  "In a regulatory filing today, L&F revealed that the contract’s value has been written down to just $7,386.No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400."https://electrek.co/2025/12/29/tesla-4680-battery-supply-cha...
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  ryukoposting
  Is anybody surprised by the cratering demand for the Cybertruck (directly attributable to 4680 troubles)? Tesla sold the idea of a crazy space truck to a bunch of techie dorks, who then pulled out of the deal when faced with the reality of owning a vehicle that they have to clean with Barkeeper's Friend. This was the obvious result.
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  thebruce87m
  > In a regulatory filing today, L&F revealed that the contract’s value has been written down to just $7,386.> No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.Ooft. That’s one hell of a write down. Imagine the person that had to do the calculation and report it back.
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  nate
  I know there’s a lot of Tesla/Elon hate here. I’m not denying any of it. I’m just sharing a genuinely strange experience I wasn’t expecting.We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.Then v14.2 landed.Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.Two moments that really stuck with me:While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
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  jack_riminton
  Electrek’s ‘reporting’ has proven so one-sided that I take all their stories with a bucket of salt. Even if the truck has been a flop I doubt their whole battery program has been. Perhaps they’re rejigging suppliers and pausing whilst they get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
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  manoDev
  The future of electrification is at risk because the market chose to bet on TSLA. Many companies backpedaled on EV and the POTUS is making a major push towards oil (including invading Venezuela). The future looks grim.
• RataNova
  Yet the 4680 was supposed to be a platform shift, not a single-model experiment
• sidcool
  The picture of Tesla across internet is so polarizing. X and YouTube is full of Tesla is the future vibe. Electrek and HN is calling it a complete scam. I am sure it's in the middle, but I can't find a balanced opinion anywhere.But I have seen Electrek being too negative about Tesla always. And never reporting anything positive as such.
• epolanski
  Which bmw models use that battery?In any case I'm more and more convinced that Tesla does not hold any significant advantage anymore over legacy automakers in EV space like Volkswagen group, which has 20+ electric models.
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  netdur
  i don't understand americans, two years ago i wanted a tesla, now i want a byd, you've let down the only american company competing against the chinese, all because of trump and politics
• seltzered_
  Worth noting this Branden Flasch video from a year ago talking about how the charging speed on the 4680 pack tesla Model Y was uncompetitively slow and arguably shouldn't have been sold: https://youtu.be/eQeziVkRwSA
• elif
  There's a lot of speculation here.The actual facts of this reporting could just as likely be explained by vertical integration, very typical of Tesla, or of a supplier shift due to absurdly high tariffs.
• ggm
  How easily can stocks be redirected to eg energy supply logistics and make battery stacks?How easily can the inputs be redirected by the source to more viable longterm contract sells?How strongly will this push back on mining and minerals in related fields? E.g. palladium prices have collapsed, could this kind of thing move mining product pricing?
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  Moto7451
  Aren’t shaped prismatic cells the current state of the art anyway? The article mentioned BMW and Rivian using this size of cylindrical cell but I believe the latest from GM, Hyundai, and VW are all prismatic after the earlier designs were either pouch cells or cylindrical.
• everfrustrated
  Seems odd to have a supply contract without a penalty clause.
• nerdo
  What is TSLA's valuation based on anymore? Maybe next week it'll be the moon colony they’ll have up and running in 2028.
• timzaman
  author (Fred Lambert) cannot be trusted. very biased anti-elon writer.
• messyfork
  Turns out making a box is even easier than a larger tootsie roll.
• throw-12-16
  I ride in budget BYD’s regularly in Asia.Tesla is absolutely fucked.
• jeffbee
  The big lie that you've all been sold is that Tesla has any kind of battery technology at all. Outside of repackaging Panasonic (in America) and other batteries (abroad), Tesla has dabbled in a few experiments and they all failed.
• wilg
  Unfortunately nobody else makes any good electric cars at this time, and certainly none that have anything approaching FSD. But you can't buy one due to Elon's treachery. It's extremely frustrating.
• anon
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• mvdtnz
  This 2 hour old entry with 242 comments and 231 points has dropped off the front page. Interesting.
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  beepbooptheory
  A little tangential, but seeing now the name of the steering-wheel-less cabs, why'd they name it Cyber{truck,cab} anyway? Doesn't it imply we use them to drive through the internet?
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  neuroelectron
  I actually did want a lighter, 2 Wheel Drive Cybertruck (for $40,000). The "Long Range" trim was close. But it was actually $70k not the $60k they were saying.Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
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  doctorpangloss
  what would it look like to directly sell EV batteries to consumers? what would have to happen?this sort of happened. the people who sold these battery materials for the 4680 thought they were making a B2B sale, and they still wound up making a B2C sale - that ended in disaster - in disguise.
• submeta
  Musk increasingly feels like a charlatan selling snake oil. He is great at hype and storytelling, not so great at execution. Big promises, missed timelines, excuses reframed as genius.He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
• simianparrot
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  yalogin
  So this battery pipeline can only be used for the cybertruck? Cannot be adapted to be used with the other vehicles? That seems odd.
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  maxdo
  If you see electrek news , these are just plain sour haters.Cyberteack is a flop. This battery has a parallel track and is used elsewhere so conclusions are just basesless .
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  mocmoc
  Electric cars is a failed technology. By 2050 it will be gone and remember like the laser disk of cars
• syspec
  Don't worry, the 99% reduction in battery materials is just a strategic pivot to an 'asset-light' approach. The 4680 supply chain isn't collapsing, it’s just being 'optimized' for a future where cars apparently don't need batteries—just FSD subscriptions and robotaxis that run on optimism.
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  spullara
  I think the amount of vitriol in this thread directed at one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of all time is sad. He may be too optimistic in his predictions but at least he has goals worth achieving and doesn't stop just because it doesn't work the first time.