Why The Texas Made Model Y Is About To Take Over!

So, some of you may have heard that there is something different about the Tesla Model Y that is being built right now at the brand new GigaFactory in Austin, Texas. And some of you may already know exactly what that difference is. But let’s just take a few minutes today to appreciate that the next major step change in electric vehicle technology is brewing right now on a Tesla assembly line. And unlike every other company on Earth, Tesla aren’t reserving their latest and greatest tech for the top tier luxury and performance cars; they’re throwing everything they’ve got into building a mid level, crossover SUV. Which is extremely commendable and it’s something that people should know about. So let’s talk about why the Texas built Model Y is the best electric vehicle ever made. Bold claim right? We’ll see if we can back it up.

OK, let’s cut right to the chase here - the number one, biggest difference between a Tesla Model Y built at their current, Fremont California plant, and the new Austin Texas plant is the batteries.

Batteries are the heart of an electric car, they play a key role in pretty much every major function of the vehicle - the range, the power, the charging speed, the crash safety, even the way the car handles is impacted by how the batteries are implemented.

And the Texas made Model Y is the first Tesla vehicle to be equipped with their brand new battery format, which is called a 4680 - and that just refers to the size of the cell - It’s a cylinder with a diameter of 46mm and a length of 80mm. Nothing too fancy there. The batteries that Tesla uses in a California made Model Y are 2170, same naming format, just describes the diameter of 21mm and the length of 70mm.

So, the new battery is bigger. Does that mean it’s better? Not necessarily. Because in most cases, when you make the cell larger, you also increase the amount of resistance that the electrons will face as they try to move through the cell from the positive to the negative terminal. Because we know that a cylindrical battery is actually just a tight roll of material inside a tubular package - so, the longer the roll, the longer the path of resistance and the lower the power output of the battery.

Except in the case of the Tesla 4680 cell. This completely flies in the face of traditional battery conventions by having 5 times more volume than the 2170 cell, but at the same time having 6 times more power output.

So, we can call that reason number 1: the Texas Model Y batteries have more power. And as Tim the Toolman Taylor would happily remind us, more power is always better.

The short answer as to how Tesla is able to do this is with the internal design of the cell - just like with people, when it comes to batteries, it’s what’s inside that counts. Tesla uses a manufacturing technique that they call a ‘tabless’ design. In a regular battery you would have one tab on the positive terminal and one tab on the negative terminal and all of the energy would flow between those two points of contact. Inside the Tesla 4680 cell there is a network of tiny copper shingles that provide thousands of points for the electrons to move through. 

So imagine an island with just two bridges connecting it to the mainland versus an island with a thousand bridges of connection - more traffic will flow more quickly to and from the island with a thousand bridges, obviously.

That brings us to reason number 2: faster charging. Not only is there an opportunity to get more power flowing out of these new cells, but there is also now an opportunity to get more power flowing into the cells - and that’s going to come from your Supercharging sessions. That counts for the existing stations, there will be less energy lost or wasted to inefficiency during the charging process. And it also opens up the opportunity for Tesla to bring in even higher output chargers that can match the capabilities of the 4680 cell. So whatever the new maximum capacity of the V4 Supercharger turns out to be, 300 or 325 kilowatt hours - or maybe more - it will only be to run at full capacity into vehicles with the 4680 cell.

So we have more power and more efficiency on the cell level of the battery, one big cell doing the same job and more as 5 small cells - and that extends to the full scale of the battery pack. Because the cells themselves are so much larger and have these solid steel casings, they can actually start to become load bearing supports within the structure of the battery pack and even become part of the structure of the vehicle frame.

So the usual way to build an electric car battery pack is to load all of your cells into a module, which if you look at it is pretty much just a box and it’s mostly made of plastic. And then those modules are assembled into a pack, which is just a bigger box that holds all of the smaller boxes. And of course, between the modules there are all of the extra components for connecting the flow of electricity between them and dissipating heat and all of that kind of thing. So, there is a lot of stuff inside a typical EV battery pack beyond just the actual cells.

But inside this new kind of battery pack, that again only the Texas made Model Y has, it’s all cells and no filler components. There are no modules inside a 4680 battery pack, the cells go straight in. There's a little bit of heatsink material in between, but nothing else. And because we have these big, strong, cylindrical battery cells and we sandwich them between big plates of steel, we actually get an incredibly rigid structure that is made up mostly of just batteries. Like, imagine if you went to your kitchen and started gluing all your soup cans to a baking sheet, and then glued another baking sheet on the top - you’d end up an incredibly solid object. And two ruined baking sheets, don't actually try that. But you get my drift, hopefully.

So that battery sandwich structure is actually strong enough to just become the center frame of the entire Model Y. That’s advantage number 4: a structural battery pack. Less wasted or empty space inside the pack means more room for active battery material and that means the potential for much more energy stored inside the pack and that means more range from your vehicle - something like 20 to 30% more real world range with everything put together. Obviously we love that. But there are other advantages - that super rigid frame means less flex during hard cornering or emergency maneuvers, and that means more control over the vehicle. That also means more strength in the event of a collision - you obviously want crumple zones, but at a certain point you also want the car to hold strong and not let anything come into the cabin area. And you might also notice that the cells in a 4680 structural pack are more concentrated towards the center of the vehicle, the existing one with the plastic modules comes all the way to the edge of the vehicle. If you were to ever get T-boned, you want as much room between the impact zone and the batteries as possible - a rupture of the cell is what causes fire in electric cars, and obviously that’s the last thing that we want to happen.

Speaking of structural integrity we can go ahead to reason number 5 the new Model Y is the best electric car in the world: a die casted frame. So, in a usual car, the structure of the body is made from a whole laundry list of different components that are individually stamped and casted; and then all of those are bolted, welded, or even glued together to create the internal frame of a car. That’s not ideal, because it introduces points of failure, opportunities for corrosion to set in and possible misalignment of the components. We know that these kinds of issues has plagued Tesla for years, particularly misalignment - Tesla are famous for panel gaps and cock eyed doors and stuff just not fitting properly.

But we can do away with every single one of these problems by replacing all of those little bits all stuck together with one single, solid chunk. So, one piece of metal that forms the front frame of the car, and another piece that forms the rear frame. And the only way to create such a big component in just one piece is die casting. So, molten aluminum gets pushed into a mold by a humongous, hydraulic press that Tesla calls the Giga Press; which unloads 6,000 tons of force onto the liquid metal and perfectly fills out that entire mold - creating one perfectly formed component. 

Then the front and back castings get attached to the structural battery pack and the underbody of the car is good to go. Simple, solid, efficient. And Tesla is the only car company, the only one, that is using any of these manufacturing techniques - and they’re only being used all at once on the Model Y vehicle that is being built at Giga Texas. Even the 140 grand Model S Plaid doesn’t have any of this tech. Model S and Model X are both still made the same old way that they always have been. Only the Model Y and only the vehicles produced at Giga Texas get the cutting edge of Tesla manufacturing and battery technology.

Which sounds wrong - like it does not match up with general consumer expectations that we have to pay more to get more. But we don’t. A car that most average families could afford to buy, and would find spectacularly useful and versatile, actually comes with the most advanced electric vehicle tech in the world. What a time to be alive, right?

There’s only downside - and there is one, you know the shoe had to drop eventually. Whatever that means. But the problem arises for those of us living in North America: there are two Tesla factories building the Model Y; one of them is the amazing new Texas version that we’ve been hyping up, and the other is the regular old California version - which is still a dope car and anyone should be happy to have one. But that’s not why we’re here today, we want to know which one is better, because we’re humans and we always want to have the latest and greatest thing; no matter how destructive that attitude might be to the very planet that we live on.

And that brings us to the most heated question among would-be Model Y buyers and order holders: how do you know which version of the car you’re going to get? Well, the simple answer is this: we don’t know.

Yeah, sorry to kind of string you along there. But as of yet, there’s been no clear indication on how they’re going to distribute these cars. So if you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people expecting a Tesla Model Y delivery sometime this year, then it’s probably going to come down to a surprise on delivery over which version you get. And I know for most people that’s going to be absolutely infuriating, but that’s just part of the fun of being a Tesla owner, it’s all part of the delivery experience, there’s always going to be some kind of drama attached to it.