Tesla’s Panasonic batteries reportedly last significantly longer than LG’s

The EV Clinic, a specialised workshop for electric vehicles, has documented significant quality differences between Tesla battery suppliers. According to their findings, NCA batteries produced by Panasonic in the US last significantly longer than LG's NCM811 battery packs manufactured in China.

Ev clinic akku analyse tesla lges panasonic — Image: EV Clinic

EV Clinic is a highly respected specialist workshop for electric vehicles based in Croatia, which also operates a site in Berlin in partnership with a franchise partner. The workshop has compared the quality of various battery packs used in Tesla vehicles and found significant differences.

In a post on X, EV Clinic stated that there is little truth to the hype surrounding battery systems ‘Made in China,’ which are often claimed to be the ‘best’ in the industry. In reality, the opposite appears to be true—at least when comparing the battery packs used in the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. This comparison does not cover all manufacturers but focuses specifically on NCM811 battery packs produced by LG Energy Solution in Nanjing, China, for the Tesla Model 3/Y, and NCA packs from Panasonic ‘Made in USA.’

The LG battery packs exhibit extremely high failure rates and a significantly shorter lifespan than Panasonic’s. According to EV Clinic’s empirical data, LG batteries last only 250,000 kilometres, while Panasonic batteries can last up to 400,000 kilometres.

Specifically, EV Clinic reports that in over 90 per cent of cases where customers required assistance, cell-level repairs for LG batteries were not feasible. The cell degradation within the affected modules far exceeded what could be restored. The issue was rarely a single defective cell—most faulty modules contained multiple cells with extremely high internal resistance. Even when EV Clinic replaced defective cells with used, matching donor cells, the remaining weakened cells often failed in a cascading manner. In short, repairing these batteries is uneconomical.

“The cells are, to put it mildly, catastrophic,” EV Clinic stated regarding the problematic LG cells. In contrast, Panasonic batteries typically experience only a single cell failure at around 250,000 km, which is repairable, whereas LG batteries already show multiple cell failures by that point.

x.com, insideevs.com

This article was first published by Florian Treiß for electrive’s German edition.