A Closer Look At the Model 3 Battery Pack

Tesla CEO has just approved a budget increase of $216 million into the Model 3 battery module production line at Gigafactory 1. The first Model 3 battery modules are being hand-built by a team of 150 employees over 24-hour shifts. Along with the news of this budget increase, we also get some better details on the battery pack itself.

It takes approximately 10 minutes to complete one section of a battery module (out of seven total section per module) with two employees transferring the 2170 lithium-ion cell from a box into the battery module itself. Tesla is currently churning out approximately 20 battery modules per day by hand.

https://youtu.be/746frhedR0U

The budget increase will be put towards automating this process, which will take the assembly time from 10 minutes down to approximately 10 seconds. Once fully automated, the Tesla battery production line will be able to produce over 4,000 battery modules per day.

A Tesla press release gives some more details on the increase:

“Details on the Model 3 Battery Production Line capital expenditure:

Model 3 Battery Module Lines 1, 2 and 3 are capacitated to produce 5,000 cars/week by running parallel at 61 second ideal cycle time (TAKT) time operated at 75% overall equipment efficiency (OEE). The current overall budget for the equipment is $216.0M. The budget is allocated to:

Current Collector Feeder Line: $13.0M

Cell Handling: $19.2M

Cell to Tube Attach (CTA): $30.7M

Mount Attach Module Close (MAMC): $22.0M

Current Collector Clamshell Attach (C3A): $27.5M

Cell Position Mapping (CPM): $2.8M

Interconnect: $20.8M

Interconnect: $5.0M

Module Test: $1.1M

Buffering & Conveyance: $29.4M

Module Configuration: $42.5M

Controls Contractors: $2.0M”

The 2170 module that is in question is different than the 2170 module that is currently in use in the Powerwall 2 and Powerpack 2 products. The ones mentioned here are specific only to the Model 3. Currently, Tesla is producing three separate module lines at the moment, which will produce a battery module every 61 seconds.

As it stands, it looks like the base Model 3 will start at 60kWh, which will meet the 215-mile range that was announced for the vehicle. There are currently rumors of Tesla considering a 74kWh premium battery, though there is currently nothing official on that front.

SOURCE | Teslarati