A study from Adamas Intelligenc showed that Tesla used nearly twice as much lithium, 17 times as much nickel and four times more cobalt than BYD in its electric cars.
According to the study, September was the best month for Tesla in terms of electric car delivery, following selling more than 190,000 cars around the world, and the exciting thing is the amount of battery capacity published by the American company.
In September 2022 alone, it was 13.9 GWh (global), which is a very high number, and when compared to car sales, it’s also regarding 73 kWh per car on average.
Between January 2021 and September 2022, Tesla apparently deployed 132.9 GWh of batteries. This would be regarding 71.9 kWh per car on average.
As for BYD, the world’s largest company in the production of electric cars of all kinds, it delivered more than 192,000 electric and hybrid cars during September, and a total of 1.769 million cars between January 2021 and September 2022.
Meanwhile, battery penetration is estimated at 6.7 GWh (34.8 kWh per car) and 65.6 GWh (37.1 kWh per car) respectively.
This means that Tesla consumes regarding twice as much battery as BYD, and the reason for this is simple, billionaire Elon Musk’s company has a long-term policy in electric cars that differs from the policy of the Chinese company.
That and one last thing is that Tesla uses a lot of nickel-rich NCA and NCM battery chemistries (in addition to LFP), while BYD relies mostly on LFP (and some NCM).