Panasonic - Battery Design

Company URL: panasonic.com/global/energy

Panasonic Energy Co., Ltd. is the battery arm of the Panasonic Group. It has operated as a separate operating company since April 2022, but the group has been making batteries for close to a century: Matsushita, as Panasonic was then called, took dry-cell production in-house in 1931 [1]. For pack engineers, Panasonic is best known as the high-nickel cylindrical cell supplier behind Tesla’s vehicles, first with 18650 cells and then with the 2170 cells built at Gigafactory Nevada.

What sets Panasonic apart from most of the other top-tier cell makers is how closely it has stuck to one format. After its prismatic automotive cell business moved into Prime Planet Energy & Solutions, a joint venture with Toyota set up in 2020 [1], Panasonic’s own EV cell output has been cylindrical. Its current headline claim is a volumetric energy density of 800 Wh/L for its high-capacity automotive cells [2].

1. Cell Technology and Product Roadmap

Panasonic’s automotive range is built around three cylindrical sizes. The comparison post on 4680 vs 21700 vs 18650 covers the format trade-offs in more depth.

Format	Status	Notes
18650	Mature	High-nickel automotive version in production from 2006 [1]; the cell used in Tesla’s Model S and Model X
2170	Main volume product	Automotive production since 2017 in Nevada and since July 2025 in Kansas; Panasonic plans a further ~5% capacity gain from new materials [2]
4680	Delayed	Two lines installed at Wakayama in 2023; mass production has slipped several times and was still waiting on a customer order in May 2026 [3]

The 4680 delay is not purely a Panasonic problem. Tesla’s own 4680 programme depended on a dry electrode process that has proved hard to scale, and the vehicles that were meant to consume the cell have sold in lower volumes than planned [3]. See Tesla 4680 Cell Generation 2 for a teardown-level view of the Tesla cell.

2. Manufacturing Footprint

Site	Products	Notes
Sparks, Nevada, USA (at Tesla Gigafactory Nevada)	2170	Operating since 2017; roughly 41 GWh per year [2]
De Soto, Kansas, USA	2170	Opened July 2025; targeting about 32 GWh per year, with Panasonic claiming around 20% higher productivity than Nevada [2]
Wakayama, Japan	4680	Intended “mother factory” for 4680 production; volume production not yet started [3]
Suminoe, Osaka, Japan	2170	Some lines being repurposed for energy storage systems for data centres [3]

Once Kansas reaches full output, Panasonic expects its US capacity to be around 73 GWh a year [2]. A planned third US factory was put on hold in 2024 [3].

3. Market Position

By March 2025, Panasonic said it had supplied about 19 billion automotive cells, enough for roughly 3.7 million EVs [2]. Its business remains heavily tied to a single large customer, which is one reason the 4680 programme has stalled while the order question is unresolved. With EV demand growing more slowly than forecast, Panasonic has been shifting part of its cylindrical capacity towards stationary storage for data centres [3].

1931

Matsushita takes over a dry-battery factory and starts producing its own cells.

1994

Panasonic develops lithium-ion cells; Sanyo starts mass producing cylindrical lithium-ion cells the same year (see Sony’s 1991 commercial launch for the wider context).