Tesla makes a lot of batteries. Now it gets some unexpected help from a new employee.
Saturday, Tesla tweeted that it had manufactured its 100 millionth 4680 battery cell. Those are Tesla’s larger, most advanced batteries that allow for more energy, longer range, and lower manufacturing costs.
The 4680 figure refers to the size. The cylindrical battery has a 46-millimeter diameter and is 80 millimeters long. The other size Tesla uses is a 2170 with a 21-millimeter diameter and 70-millimeter length. (A typical AA battery has a 14-millimeter diameter and 50-millimeter length.)
There might be 1,000 battery cells in a Tesla car. So Tesla has made enough batteries for about 100,000 electric vehicles. Tesla is expected to produce about 1.8 million EVs in 2024, so there is still some work to do raising 4680 cell output.
Some of that work looks like it will be done using Optimus, Tesla’s AI-trained humanoid robot. The tweet announcing the milestone included a picture of Optimus holding the battery. Now, videos of Optimus sorting batteries are circulating on X, and one employee said Optimus played a “(very) small role” in hitting the 100 million mark.
Any update about Optimus is noteworthy because they aren’t frequent. Tesla started talking about the potential for labor-saving robots in late 2021. Famously, that presentation included a human dancer in a robot suit. A year after the human dancer, Tesla demonstrated a real Tesla-built dancing robot. Now Optimus is doing a little bit of work.
Tesla trains Optimus using AI-based computing, similar to how it trains its self-driving technology. Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu believes Tesla is becoming a leader in AI. Optimus and self-driving cars are the initial applications for Tesla AI technology. Still, he says robots are far in the future. “You just got to give a lot more runway for those things,” he says.
He rates shares Buy and has a $295 price target for the stock. The robot opportunity accounts for $22 of that target price. That’s based on 2035 sales of 200,000 robots. If that timeline proves conservative, the $22 number would go higher.
The timeline for Tesla’s saleable robots is still anyone’s guess, but the company has made a lot of progress over the past three years.
Coming into Monday trading, Tesla stock was down about 7% year to date, trailing the S&P 500 by some 25 percentage points.
