Before becoming a well-known Tesla expert, industry consultant Sandy Munro had to find clients who would pay his company Munro & Associates to disassemble cars to analyze the construction and components used.
According to him, his first insights into the Model 3 only became public because Audi had ordered an analysis and then no longer wanted it. The general interest was all the greater, and even Tesla boss Elon Musk listened to the former Ford manager and gave him an interview.
Munro now regularly buys electric cars for disassembly on his own account – and his team is currently taking on the new Model Y with 4680 battery from the Gigafactory in Texas.
Model Y without floor structure except for the battery
For example, Munro & Associates previously disassembled a Tesla Model S Plaid and found light and shadows. The founder described the battery of the fast electric car as a “masterpiece”, but he was disappointed with the door design due to its high complexity. He also secured an early copy of the Model Y from the Tesla factory in Fremont in April 2020, where he was primarily interested in the internal differences to the Model 3.
Through a lost customer from Florida, Munro has now also acquired one of the first Model Ys to be produced in the new Gigafactory in Texas with a structural battery pack made from 4680 format batteries.
At the beginning of the current video about it, the object of greatest interest has already been dismantled, and two colleagues are sitting on it – at least almost: in one of the peculiarities of the new Tesla design, the center console and front seats are fixes.
Just 38 bolts previously connected the 4680-cell battery pack to the rest of the Model Y, including the large castings for the rear and front of the frame, one counted. Together with the necessary removal of cables and parts of the interior paneling, he describes the effort for the removal as minimal.
His colleague later finds it “breathtaking” to stand under the Model Y without a battery and to be able to see through its glass roof to the hall ceiling, because otherwise, it has “absolutely no floor structure”. Overall, he praises the high level of sophistication and integration in the latest Tesla. A small tab for attaching lines and cables is even integrated into one of the die-cast parts.
Tesla’s boss is reluctant to respond to praise
The Tesla dismantlers only want to take a look at the inner workings of the 4680 battery in one of the next videos. But they already weighed it with the seats and came up with a value of 543 kilograms. That’s unbelievable, says one of them, because the batteries of some other electric cars in their workshop would weigh twice as much without assembly.
As an example, he cites the Rivian R1T, which can also be seen briefly there, but also has almost twice the battery capacity. In any case, the new 4680 cells and construction have apparently not changed much in the overall weight of the Model Y so far. According to EPA data, it should only weigh a good 10 kilograms less than the Model Y Long Range, which has a larger battery made of conventional cells.
Perhaps that’s why CEO Elon Musk was reluctant to respond to a blogger who cheered on Twitter for a report on the Munro video that Tesla had achieved a “dramatic reduction in vehicle weight” with the 4680 cells. Overall, from a physical point of view, structural battery packs are the right architecture for electric cars, he explained. But they are far from optimized.
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