> Why would Tesla have better access to batteries than other carmakers?

Because Tesla has an exclusive partnership with Panasonic and the operate one of the largest battery factories in the world together.

Tesla is one of the largest costumers of LG and they are a significant costumer of CATL already.

Tesla is also massively investing in its own battery production and Tesla will actually produce the batteries in the same building as the Cybertruck. The explicit reason why Tesla invested in first a partnership and now creating their own production is because of the limited supply. Tesla has realized the problems with supply years ago and have been working on if for a decade now.

Ford until the CEO switch simply refused to even do a partnership with another battery company. Something that literally ever other significant EV player did years ago. Ford believed they could buy everything in the open market, only with the new CEO now he quickly changed his tune and now they have created a partnership with SK. Funny how the old CEO was like 'all of this is no problem' and the new CEO who wants the company to actually be contender in the future is like 'we need a partnership ASAP'. They are where Tesla was in 2012.

If you actually do the math what kind of battery production you need to support 400k F-150 a year, you quickly realized that 'buying it' is not really possible.

> German carmakers for example are heavily invested in solid state batteries that have the potential to outperform Lithium-based batteries in almost every metric and are allegedly already performing well in the prototype phase. If this pans out, Tesla invested billions in building factories for old tech.

Its pretty clear form this comment that you don't actually understand what you are talking about. Solid state batteries are lithium base batteries. The cathode is actually pretty much the same between the two. The thing you are talking about doesn't actually have anything to do with 'solid state', what you are talking about lithium metal anodes. There are plenty of solid state batteries that don't have any of these properties.

The media has picked up the term because it generates hype and sounds cool, but there are plenty of competitors in the market who have lithium metal anodes with a liquid electrolyte as well.

Much of what you read about solid state is hype, its good technology but if you think solid state are gone be a significant % of the market by 2030 you are not very informed. Just for reference, the largest actually seriously planned facility for the leading 'solid state' company, QS is a few GWh a year and that will take until like 2025 to be operational. The traditional battery companies and Tesla are planning multiple 100GWh+ factories by that point.

Traditional liquid high nickel-graphite Li-Ion is here to stay for a while and its not close to being done in terms of development. Tesla has singificant investment (bought multiple companies and have a their own research team) into silicon anodes. Silicon anodes can actually perform almost as well lithium metal anodes and are far, far easier to mass produce. There are a lot of silicon anode companies that all produce a product that can be used in traditional production lines.

Just like Giga-Nevada, these factories will continue to improve what they actually produce as the materials improves over time.

I would actually argue Tesla is the leader in silicon anode technology when their first cars with the new cells are actually delivered.

VW (and everybody else) actually knows this but its way cooler to talk about the amazing future solid state thing that the media is so hype about. If you watch their Powerday presentation, they will actually invest in manganese and high nickel cathodes with traditional anodes. That is what actually what will drive their growth in the BEV sector, not solid state.

And that is ignoring all those other things Tesla has that nobody else is even close to, like dry electrode production. If you think the factories Tesla are building now are gone be useless, you have a real bad understand of the industry. In fact, every serious competitor is rushing to build as many as they can and Tesla has a number of major manufacturing innovations that nobody else has yet.