if other companies wanted to build a new factory with panasonic, perhaps they could do that....and then we'll start to see their results sometime in the 2020s....
Source on their panels from Buffalo mostly going to non-Tesla installers?
And that is a pro-Tesla source. I had a WSJ link before that I don't have time to look up.
The chemistry might also be finely tuned to work with their own battery management units, though I'm less sure of that.
This is the same as Anker; they use the same lithium cells in their products as almost all of their competitors. Their secret sauce is assembly the cells together with other components to make the final products.
On top of those bare cells, third parties may add protection circuits, or maybe Panasonic does it themselves in some cases.
Panasonic makes the cells, which is easy to do, to scale and to copy. Tesla's added value is the charging control for each cell in the battery pack.
For small currents, yes. For the huge current spikes both in draining and charging, or the continuous massive loads of supercharging? No. Same for the actual science: figuring out a way to pull/push hundreds of amps to the pack while taking care that no single cell is overloaded/overheated or that faulty or degraded cells are taken care of.
I would love to see the engineering details around the 'moat' that Tesla has with batteries.