Industry veteran Sandy Munro and his team continued the Tesla Cybertruck teardown with the battery pack. Cracking open the Cybertruck's structural battery revealed intriguing details. Most importantly, the pack appears to be half-empty, which means Tesla deliberately delivered the Cybertruck with a lower range than advertised.
During Battery Day 2020, Tesla unveiled the 4680 cells, the first battery cells it designed from the ground up. Until then, Tesla relied on battery cells supplied by its partners, mostly 18650 cells from Panasonic (for the Model S and Model X) and 2170 cells from Panasonic and LG (for the Model 3 and Model Y). The 4680 cells are much bigger than either of them.
In 2020, Tesla announced that a new manufacturing technique, "dry batter electrode," would allow up to 50% lower production costs. This resulted from reducing the manufacturing time by eliminating several time-consuming and chemical-heavy operations from the manufacturing process. A new silicone anode was also expected to significantly increase battery performance. However, four years after the original announcement, Tesla 4680 cells don't feature a silicone anode, and it's unclear whether the dry electrode process has been implemented.
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