I just got a random idea. On the January 10th (4 days from writing this) Tesla is going to be releasing their new model S with the 4680 cells. Anyway, I ran some math and figured that I could buy a full Tesla, disassemble the battery, and sell each cell for $20 and after parting out the car easily get the money back. I also figured that a single Tesla model S would have the battery cells to make over one hundred 4.1kWh paramotor battery packs using 48 Tesla cells that would also drop the sp140 weight by almost 8 lbs.
Anyway, I am serious tempted to do this and it would be awesome if we could finally get our hands on 4680 cells. Does anyone have any thoughts on it?
What does that mean, “parting out”? Disassembling the car? Or selling the car? Who would buy a car with no batteries tho. Or would you be selling the parts to different people like on ebay or something?
Getting $20 per cell would actually be about the point where I could push the rest of the tesla off a cliff and not loose money. I would probably part out the rest of the tesla or sell it to someone else who would part it out. I could keep that money to pay myself back for the hundreds of hours that it will be required to take apart the structural battery pack.
I thought that Sandy Munro speculated Tesla maybe filling the gaps of the pack with an epoxy or such to stiffen it up as structural member – if that is the case, taking it apart would be an horrendous task of labor.
I would wait to see for Munro to get one for their teardown review to get verification.
Cheers
It is a structural battery pack. (has an epoxy like filling between the cells like you mentioned) so taking it apart would be very difficult. I do like your idea of waiting a month for Sandy Munro to do his “review” of the battery before doing this.
Surprisingly there is a (small) market currently for tesla parts, since they don’t play nice with people doing work on their own. I imagine that interest will grow as electric becomes more popular. Currently those groups buy wrecked cars, perhaps they might make a fair offer for the remaining vehicle being undamaged. The only trouble is if everyone started getting this idea, eventually that value could drop. Dishing out just a few of them? After the Munro breakdown, could be a good move!
That doesn’t add up. The Model S would then have a 400kwh pack. That’s 4 times the current size of the biggest Model S pack. Thinking you could get more like 25 packs at most. Figuring $2000 each that’s $50k worth of battery packs. The new Model S is probably close to twice that.