On December 29, according to IT Home, at last year's Battery Day event, Tesla not only launched a new 4680 battery cell, but also launched a new cell architecture built around the new battery, which is the so-called structural battery pack. Tesla has been fairly silent about its progress on its 4,680 batteries and structural battery packs, but a recent model Y test body photographed at the Texas Gigafactory suggests that the launch of this innovative technology for structured battery packs may be earlier than expected.
Foreign netizen Joe Tegtmeyer recently used a drone to photograph the Texas Gigafactory complex when he found a Model Y test body unloaded from a trailer, which is particularly special.
It is immediately noted from aerial footage that this Model Y test body does not have a floor system, and the car's floor system appears to be assigned to a component that has not yet been seen, which is believed to mean that the test body recently delivered to the Texas Gigafactory was designed with a structural battery pack.
Tesla's structural battery packs, as the name suggests, are built on the structural platform of the vehicle. According to Tesla's presentation at Battery Day in September 2020, structural batteries are designed to strengthen the vehicle's body and chassis while increasing range and reducing production costs. Elon Musk likened Tesla's structural batteries to space inside the wings of an airplane as a space to store fuel.
Tesla's structural battery pack may be the world's first true meaning of the "CTC battery", the so-called CTC (Cell to Chassis), popularly speaking, the battery cancels the concept of modules and packages, directly using the body as the upper and lower cover of the battery, the battery and the body are integrated.
Tesla is understood to use its expertise in giant castings to connect the large one-piece rear body and front body bottom to the structural battery pack. This new design reduces the number of parts and the total mass of the battery pack, thereby increasing the range of electric vehicles.
The model equipped with this battery pack has two molded parts in the front and rear of the chassis, and the battery can be placed in the middle. As a result, production processes and processes are greatly simplified.