At last year’s Battery Day event, Tesla not only launched a new 4680 battery cell but also introduced a new cell architecture built around the new battery, which is the so-called structural battery pack.
Tesla is quite silent on the progress of its 4680 cells and structural battery packs, but the Model Y test body photographed recently at the Texas Gigafactory shows that the introduction of this innovative technology of structural battery packs may be more than expected. Earlier.
Joe Tegtmeyer recently used a drone to photograph the Texas Gigafactory complex and found a Model Y test body unloaded from a trailer. This body is particularly special. It can be immediately noticed from the aerial footage that this Model Y test body does not have a floor system.
The floor system of the car seems to be assigned to a component that has not yet been seen. The outside world believes that this means that it was recently delivered to the Texas Gigafactory for testing. The car body is designed with a structural battery pack.
Tesla’s structural battery pack, as the name suggests, is built on the structural platform of the vehicle. According to Tesla’s speech on Battery Day in September 2020, structural batteries are designed to strengthen the body and chassis of the vehicle, while increasing the range and reducing production costs. Elon Musk compared Tesla’s structural battery to the space in the wing of an airplane as a space for storing fuel.
Tesla’s structural battery pack may be the world’s first true CTC battery. The so-called CTC (Cell to Chassis), in layman’s terms, is that the battery has eliminated the concept of modules and packages, and directly used the body as The upper and lower cover of the battery, the battery and the body are integrated.
Tesla can use its expertise in giant castings to connect the large integrated rear and front underbody to the structural battery pack. This new design reduces the number of parts and the total mass of the battery pack, thereby increasing the range of electric vehicles.
The models equipped with this battery pack have two molded parts on the front and rear of the chassis, and the battery can be placed in the middle. Therefore, this also greatly simplifies the production process and flow. Structured batteries are likely to be promoted to Tesla’s entire car lineup in the future, and this technology will be the first to be introduced in Model Y.