Have Tesla Purchased This Company For Ultracapacitor Or Something Else?

Tesla, one of the most famous electric car manufacturers in the world, has bought a company called Maxwell which specializes in producing ultracapacitors and battery components. The price Elon Musk’s company paid to own Maxwell was over $200 million.

This purchase may help Tesla to take a big step forward on the production of electric cars.

According to many sources, Elon Musk has always shown his interest in supercapacitors, or ultracapacitors. The most prominent advantage of these high-capacity capacitors is to allow users to charge energy much faster than almost all of the other batteries. However, they also have a clear disadvantage: the stored energy is limited. Initially, Musk had planned to aim at Stanford but everything was changed.

For now, what Tesla is going to do with the ultracapacitor manufacturer has not been revealed. In addition to Elon Musk’s company, a lot of researchers have been still chasing the dream supplying the power for electric cars by capacitors; however, the current technology has not met their demands. In other words, everything is just theoretical.

As the Electrek’s editor in chief, Fred Lambert always follows every event happening around Tesla. That’s why we have been not surprised at all when he was keen on its latest purchase. In fact, Lambert believed that Tesla seems to prefer the dry electrode technology for batteries to ultracapacitors. The dry electrode technology is considered one of the most important technologies of Maxwell.