Quantamscape’s Pilot Plant Will Set The Base For Mass Production by 2024

Many consider Solid-State Battery Technology as a significant breakthrough for the EV industry. QuantamScape, the Battery specialist, backed by the likes of Bill Gates & Volkswagen, first revealed details about its initial findings & performance metrics of its prototype cells back in December last year.

The batter maker based out of San Jose, California, has stated that it intends to build a pilot production plant. This Pilot plant will be used to setup the foundations that will be required to scale up mass manufacturing in the future at its main plant.

According to QuantamScape, this will help in its efforts to further scale on its recent progress. The company said in its Q4 letter to its Shareholders that its pre-production pilot facility in San Jose would be called QS-0.

The pilot factory will differ from the later main manufacturing facility in that it can handle a limited capacity of 100,000 cells annually.

QS-0 will be a highly automated production facility capable of manufacturing over 100,000 of these cells annually. It expects to finalise a long-term lease for a second building with an area of roughly 18,580 m2 through the second half of 2021.

Even though the production capacity of the cells is limited, these cells can still be provided for a range of development work. The company also added that this Pilot plant would undoubtedly help design the next-gen state of the art production sites.

The firm also added that QS-0 would also assist the manufacturer in providing an additional capacity that the company needs for development work and would allow the firm to expedite the work on the next-generation tools necessary from mass production.

The cell maker is also committed to increasing the production capacity of batteries for a couple of hundred BEV Test Vehicles. Doing this will enable QuantamScape to provide early cells for Volkswagen and various automotive partners to explore several non-automotive applications.

The main Manufacturing Plant is scheduled to begin mass production of these solid-state batteries by 2024. The cost of the facility is expected to be close to 1.6 billion dollars.

The construction of the pilot factory will incur a capital expenditure of between 230 to 290 million US dollars. A recent SPAC IPO deal and Volkswagen will fund the construction of QuantamScape’s Pilot Factory.

Originally published at https://evtransform.com on February 25, 2021.