I believe it (the Tesla battery plant) was built as a joint venture with Panasonic giving the IP and tooling and Tesla operating the plant. They're using a custom cell format also, away from the ubiquitous and standard 18650.

LG, Panasonic and Samsung make almost all the lithium ion cells used today so it doesn't seem odd that Tesla would license one of their technologies to start. The r&d savings would be in the billions.

The 2170 (or 21700) batteries used in the Model 3 were not invented for the Model 3 originally. AFAIK, they predate the development of that vehicle.

They might not have invented the format, but they are fairly certainly using chemistry optimized for their cars.

Not sure whether Panasonic does it for them but the way I hear them talk about it they seem to have quite a bit of R&D in house.

> Someone else owning your key competitive advantage sounds like a vulnerability...

Musk has repeatedly mentioned how aware of this he is. That explains his insistence on building the Gigafactory.

interesting! [citation requested]

I haven’t been able to find a clear quote in print, but a year-old article in Vox [1] reads:

> “Musk has been the visionary,” said Steve LeVine, a journalist at Axios who has written a book about the battery industry. “He has been willing to take the plunge all the way along, from the very beginning.” In contrast, he told me in a phone interview, “Detroit has approached this race so cautiously.”

I remember hearing Musk being quite adamant the scale of the factory was for batteries, but you have to understand, he can’t really publicly say that he’s leveraging Panasonic for now, but will drop them as soon as he can.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/17/15293892/tesla-batte...

Everything that he has been saying lately implies that they won't drop them. They may add other suppliers (especially for the factory in China), but they will likely always rely on suppliers for the cells themselves. I can't really think of a good reason for this to change.

After all, they are by far the world's largest consumer of batteries. They have leverage.

The touchscreen was done elsewhere, by someone else. Seriously, it was presented as a product to several phone companies and did not draw them in. The key to the first IPhone was the interface and form factor.

Ballmer was famously quoted in an interview laughing at it claiming it wouldn't appeal to customers due to not having a keyboard.

Hell, back in the 40's even Thomas Watson of IBM claimed there was only enough market for 5 computers in the world.

Many times it is a different style of how standard business operates so someone coming in and changing the market is really hard to look at when your mind is already made up.