The design of the Tesla Semi battery pack has leaked – revealing how Tesla fits a massive ~900 kWh pack in the truck.
When Tesla unveiled the production version of its Tesla Semi class 8 electric truck and delivered the first units last month.
At the event, Tesla described an electric truck that could truly disrupt the trucking industry.
However, we noted that there were a few pieces of information that Tesla omitted from the event that could really make a significant difference in the usefulness of the truck.
The two main missing pieces of information were the battery pack capacity and the weight of the tractor, which determines the load capacity since total weight with load and trailer is limited to 82,000 lbs.
Later, CEO Elon Musk released a few details that enable us to confirm that the Tesla Semi battery pack has an energy capacity of about 900 kWh.
The battery pack has never been really visible on the Tesla Semi prototypes, which is impressive because how you hide almost 1 MWh pack inside a vehicle like that?
Now thanks to Tesla hacker Green the Only, we get our first look at the Tesla Semi battery pack design and other important components:
The images appear to be from the parts catalog for the Tesla Semi. it’s singles out the components – including the battery pack.
It confirms that the Tesla Semi battery pack is located underneath the cabin at the base of the vehicle:
That’s not unusual for Tesla vehicles as the automaker attempts to keep the center of gravity low.
However, the pack design itself is quite different from anything else we have seen before.
It appears to feature 9 large modules with two different sizes. The ones in the middle appear significantly larger than the ones on the sides of the vehicle.
The modules are also much taller than any other Tesla battery pack, which previously only were the height of one row of battery cells plus hardware.
Now it looks more like the Tesla’s old Model S battery modules being stacked up together:
There are a lot of unanswered questions about the Tesla Semi battery. For example, we still don’t know for sure what cell Tesla is using in the truck.
It was believed that the automaker would use its own 4680 cells, but CEO Elon Musk indicated that it wouldn’t necessarily be the case.
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