according to foreign media reports, tesla plans to promote a new radical battery design at the "powertrain and battery day" to be held in the second quarter of this year.
according to reliable sources, tesla will make its own battery product line (ref), and the new battery will be manufactured using a completely new process. tesla purchased the seamaster company to customize battery manufacturing equipment, and now combines it with tesla's patent application to provide a completely new method of manufacturing battery packs.
tesla will no longer have two separate manufacturing processes, with one factory making batteries and the other making battery packs. tesla's new approach will integrate two manufacturing processes into one. according to foreign media speculation, these small battery packs will be assembled into a complete battery pack like lego bricks. it is speculated that tesla's cooling system will abandon its current "cooling snake" concept, which is to glue the cooling tube directly to the battery.
what do rivian, tesla semi trucks and cybertruck have in common?
they all stack batteries. rivian's system uses a flat plate between two layers of batteries, which is the ideal solution when stacking batteries. the only problem is that the flat cooling concept cannot be cooled as effectively as tesla's "cooling snake", in which the battery is stuck to the cooling tube. tesla's patent application discusses the use of an engineered dielectric fluid as the coolant, and the battery cells are directly immersed in the coolant, thereby providing good heat transfer.
the battery's cooling fluid surrounds the battery, either circulating through the battery pack as described in the patent application, or not circulating except for natural convection within the battery pack module. it is suspected that the device used by porsche to use its flat cooling system in the taycan and the device used by audi in its suv.
what about cells? tesla will use thicker electrode cells made using the maxwell dry electrode manufacturing process to take advantage of today's chemical methods to increase energy density. thicker electrodes indicate a lower c rate because their batteries are larger (lower c rate). we estimate that the cybertuck 500-mile variant is 250 kwh and the 500-mile semi-variant is 900 kwh. it's also worth noting that electrek's latest report says that hackers found evidence of 100 kwh of model 3 batteries.
another thing about large batteries is that they have low internal resistance, so they generate less heat and don't require much cooling.
in short, a new battery pack manufacturing method will break today's battery pack architecture and significantly reduce costs through a new manufacturing process.
