One production line, 5 stations, in order
A battery pack is not built in a single step. A real production line in Mirabel, Quebec, named its own process in 5 stations, in this order, cell placement, module assembly, cell bonding, pack assembly, testing. Lion Electric ran the line, rated at 1.7 gigawatt hours of battery capacity a year, a unit for how much energy a full year of production adds up to, and stated to be scalable to 5.0 gigawatt hours. It was built to supply battery packs for up to 5,000 medium and heavy duty electric vehicles a year, run by approximately 10 production staff. In 2025 its equipment went up for auction.
What it took to run the line
The equipment list behind that auction shows what each station needed. Cell bonding alone used 21 wire bonders, machines that fuse wires onto cell terminals to carry current. Moving parts through the 5 stations took 13 robots, a total across 5 separate robot models the equipment list names but never adds up itself. Testing finished packs needed 5 high voltage battery test systems. Cleaning cell surfaces before welding needed 2 laser cleaners.
Robots is MAOWCE own sum of 5 separate Fanuc robot models the equipment list states and counts separately, and never totals itself.
Show the numbers
| Wire bonders | 21 |
| Robots | 13 |
| High voltage test systems | 5 |
| Laser cleaners | 2 |
The station nobody can picture, cell bonding
Cell bonding is the 1 station the equipment list names but does not explain. An ultrasonic wire bond vibrates at around 100 kilohertz, a measure of how fast it shakes each second, never gets hotter than 80 to 100 degrees Celsius, and fuses metal in a few hundred milliseconds without ever melting it, said Hans Georg von Ribbeck, an engineer at the battery bonding equipment maker F and K Delvotec, quoted by Charged EVs. Ribbeck explained the tradeoff behind a laser weld, the alternative method.
For example, if you have a battery module with 120 batteries, then you need 240 clamped parts.
Hans Georg von Ribbeck, an engineer at F and K Delvotec, a maker of battery bonding equipment. Source 4.
A wire bond is capped at about 30 amps, a unit of electric current. A laser weld can carry more than 60 amps, over double, but needs 2 clamped parts for every cell it joins.
What a module and a pack each have to do
Once cells are grouped into a module, that module holds the cells under steady pressure, wires them together in series and parallel, one arrangement adding voltage and the other adding capacity, and carries the sensors that watch each cell voltage and temperature. Compression pads inside the module manage the swelling cells go through over their lifetime. A pack turns modules, or cell strings, into 1 electrical system, joined by metal strips called busbars, protected by switches called contactors and fuses, and wired through a high voltage interlock loop that cuts power if the pack case is opened. The battery management system, the software that reads sensors and controls the pack, is finished last, because it needs every other layer decided before it knows what it is watching or controlling.
The cost that comes before any of this
Before a single cell reaches a line like the one in Mirabel, making the electrode, the coated metal foil inside every cell, is already the second most expensive part of a battery pack. The Congressional Research Service reports that a study it cites found electrode manufacturing costs 20% to 40% of a battery pack total cost, and that electrode preparation alone, 1 step inside that process, accounts for 27% to 40% of the electrode manufacturing cost.
The Congressional Research Service reports these figures from a study it cites. This file read the Congressional Research Service report, not the underlying study, so the figures are attributed to the Congressional Research Service throughout.
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| Electrode manufacturing | 20% to 40% of total pack cost |
| Electrode preparation | 27% to 40% of electrode cost |