See What's Inside A Tesla 4680 Battery

One of the cells has been fully disassembled.

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09:41

Mark Kane

By: Mark Kane

Sep 13, 2022 at 7:30am ET

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After completing the teardown of the Made-in-Texas (MIT) Tesla Model Y's structural battery pack, Munro Live's team finally had a while to present also an individual 4680-type cylindrical battery cell.

This latest high-capacity round cell is exceptionally interesting and, just like the pack, includes many new solutions. The Limiting Factor already highlighted a lot of things, including the tabless design, initial chemistry research (NCM 811), and measures of energy density.

Here we can see Munro Live's Cory Steuben and Antonio Dinunno discussing all of the elements of the cell, completely torn down to a single element. Not only that, the video includes a few computed tomography (CT) images of the cell, provided by Kinetic Vision (see from 3:20).

Just like in the previous reports, Munro Live confirms a rather thick piece of steel for the enclosure (cell can), which is most likely crucial to make a cell a structural element of the entire car (carry loads).

Inside, there is the tabless design battery, with aluminum and copper "flowers" (they are kind of inversed) - see at 4:20.

Tesla's solution is pretty complex, as it engaged a completely new manufacturing approach, both in terms of cell assembly and welding, as well as production of the electrode active materials (the graphite anode already uses dry battery electrode technology).

Considering what we saw so far, it seems that it's still an early series production version, which might be further improved, but that's not a surprise. Tesla is known for the constant improvements applied to its products.

What do you think?

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It's also not clear whether other battery manufacturers will follow Tesla's way exactly. They might come with something different, maintaining only the external form factor. The chemistry, production technology, tabless design, dry battery electrode technology, or even cell height (for other carmakers) might differ.

Currently, there are several manufacturers involved in the 46 mm diameter battery cells, including BMW, CATL, EVE Energy, LG Energy Solution, Panasonic and Samsung SDI or BAK Battery to name just some of them.