Comment by ardme
7 hours ago
No firstly there are several Korean companies making both batteries and battery manufacturing machine tools.
There are big factories in both Michigan and Kentucky Ford operates it just took over from Blueoval SK.
They retooled Ford plants are now making grid batteries instead of car batteries is my understanding.
Tesla also has battery factories in the USA as well as a lithium refinery.
Batteries are complex but less complex than semiconductors. They are rapidly dropping in cost too.
My understanding is that a large portion of Tesla's batteries are still manufactured by Panasonic, and most of the rest by other third parties. Some of this is in the US, but the production does not belong to Tesla.
Panasonic (as well as CATL and LG) manufactures the physical lithium-ion battery cells while Tesla assembles them into a complete battery pack. When we talk about car batteries I think people are mostly referring to the battery pack which contains a lot of IP separate from the battery cell. So the supply chain is a bit more complicated its most accurate to say that while Tesla performs some of the manufacturing itself in the US it is not fully vertically integrated.