The team at Munro & Associates have started to take apart their Texas-built Tesla Model Y with a structural battery pack and 4680 cells. In their first video, the team separated the battery pack from the car, revealing that Tesla’s engineering expertise is unmatched in the automotive industry.
As we have seen in official images shared by Tesla and in displays at Giga Texas and Giga Berlin, the structural battery pack forms the entire floor structure of the car with the seats and center console are bolted directly to it. As noted by Cory Steuben, President of Munro & Associates who has over 17 years of experience, seeing something like was “mind blowing.”
“It’s absolutely mind blowing to be standing under a vehicle on a hoist and have absolutely nothing for the floor structure. You’d have hundreds of stamped parts where this front giga casting is, hundreds and hundreds of part in the back. The level of refinement and integration is incredible,” he said.
Along with help from lead engineer on the Model Y teardown project Julian Aytes, the pair goes through some of the changes they observed between the regular 2170 Model Y and this new 4680 Model Y. One of their more interesting findings was how much lighter Tesla’s battery pack was than other EVs, even with the seats and other parts attached to it.
According to Steuben, the entire battery pack with the seats, center console, carpeting and more weighed in at 1,198 pounds, while just the battery pack in some of the other EVs they have taken apart weigh twice as much.
Now that the battery pack is out, their next step is to remove the cover and hopefully uncover some secrets with Tesla’s 4680 cells.
You can watch the full video below. It is 17 minutes long, but gives great insight into how far ahead Tesla is compared to the competition.
