To fund their ongoing engagement with electric vehicle company Tesla, industrial consulting firm Munro Associates has come up with a new model. After initially doing so only on behalf of paying customers, she recently bought several Teslas herself and then reported extensively on YouTube about their dismantling. At the start of their latest project, the Model Y with a new 4,680 battery, Munro also offered individual batteries for sale for $800 each. Then it turned out that getting out of the Model Y was a lot more difficult than expected – but at least now the first 4680 battery has been removed and rendered.
First Tesla cell after 4 weeks of labor
The Tesla Model Y AWD from the Gigafactory in Texas may not have many examples with outside customers yet, but Munro Associates has secured one. What sets it apart is that the 4680 large format batteries with the battery pack form part of the supporting structure. The full battery could easily be separated from the rest of the Model Y when disassembly began in early July, but even the pros have reached their limits when taking it apart into its individual parts.
So they could not easily remove the steel battery cover after disassembling the fasteners. Instead, the entire packaging turned out to be foam-lined with a hard, sticky plastic, presumably polyurethane. So Monroe’s team couldn’t see anything inside even after removing the cover. To do this, they first had to attack the battery with a dry ice detonator, as recommended by knowledgeable onlookers.
Last Friday, with this help it was apparently possible to remove the first 4680 battery from the Model Y, and Monroe insisted on doing so with one Birth Announcement on Twitter in order to celebrate. “It’s a girl,” reads in pink over a photo of a battery wrapped in a towel gently held by a person wearing a Monroe shirt (above). The photo on Twitter also shows the most important data: 80 mm (which is not surprising, because from this height the 4680 battery got the second part of its name) and weight 355 grams, the work could have lasted four weeks.
Battery 4680 for Model Y with many innovations
So it was a long and difficult birth, but with the help of dry ice, Monroe should also be able to separate the first hive siblings from the 4680 pack and sell them as planned for $800 a piece. The team is careful not to damage any small components inside the stubborn foam. So far, I’ve found that, contrary to expectations, 4,680 batteries are cooled on the side rather than the bottom, and that they’re divided into four parallel units inside the battery pack. Overall, he was impressed by how different it was from what Tesla saw earlier, says Sandy Monroe in her latest Model Y teardown video. It’s as if the 4680’s battery came from a completely different company.
