What's inside a Tesla Battery?

(smash)
(people cheering)
- Welcome back to What's Inside?
I'm Lincoln, this is Dan,
and today we're gonna see what's inside
a Tesla Model S battery.
- This is our car that, sadly,
we are getting rid of tomorrow.
We bought this guy off of- - Ebaaay!
- Underneath your Tesla car it has 15 of these cells.
That's where a lot of the weight comes from on the Tesla.
We did cut open an actual engine from a Jeep recently.
Yes!
But for this, it's basically a battery
and then you have the drivetrain
that's built into the tires.
They really wrapped that well in that plastic.
I have a friend, I have a neighbor,
he drives only Nissan Leafs,
he has solar panels on his house,
this guy knows a lot about batteries.
- John has a website called johnsavesenergy,
teaches you lots of really cool tips,
how to build your own car.
You wanna build your own electric car?
He's done it.
Not once, but twice.
Here's our battery. - Wow.
That is a thing of beauty.
21.5 volts.
I think a fully charged one should be about 24 to 26 volts.
- A few things that we've determined
is that this right here, this is the actual battery,
and it has around 450
is what we determined are inside of this
without taking off the top layer.
This is very well-protected.
It has plastic that is glued on,
it has the metal tray on the top.
It's not like there's a couple of screws
that you undo and you get into this thing.
But right here, what we assume this is,
the actual coolant right here.
- It's amazing that even just one module
has a computer on it.
So it's just taking all these measurements all the time.
- Here's the deal:
You have all these batteries that are underneath your car,
if you're lookin' to buy an electric vehicle
that might scare you a little bit to think,
"What if a metal bar is bouncing on the road
"and it comes up and punctures your battery?"
- Well what if you did that to your gas tank?
It would go boom!
- Yes.
If it happened to a gas tank and there was a spark
that would happen too.
- That's what's mostly startling to me,
is like 250,000 cars burn to the ground every year.
- 250,000?
- Yes, in the United States.
And no one's startled.
- I've got an idea that involves a metal-tipped arrow
and the Tesla battery.
I wanna see if we can shoot it and hit one of the batteries.
We've already determined that there's some power in here,
there's some juice in here.
So I would expect some type of fire,
but what happens when you puncture a battery pack
with 450 batteries at 21.5 volts?
- So here's the setup.
We have a Tesla battery on top of this,
arrow block?
I don't really know what to call it.
And then we have the safe door from the bank video.
- That's solid. (knocking)
That's solid.
So the idea is we take the arrow
and we try to shoot it right in between here or here.
There's a lot of things that could go wrong here.
I'm gonna be honest.
But the goal is we hit the batteries,
it goes through and punctures a few of 'em-
- It goes kaboom!
- And hopefully there's some kaboom.
Don't try this at home.
(dramatic music)
(clank)
- Ohh! - Whoooa!
What happened?
Ohh, it went right through there.
It went through,
oh, is there heat comin' off this?
I'm not feeling any heat.
We clearly have punctured it.
Oh man.
It ate the tip.
Oh look, there's some black stuff went down there.
Not what I expected.
I expected a kaboom.
(elevator muzak)
(smash)
(slow-mo smash)
Ohh!
- [Lincoln] Do you hear that sizzling?
- It's still sizzling.
It's smoking.
But I really feel like it needs one more drop,
so I'm gonna take the chance
of running in my house up the stairs
out London's room,
to throw it back off the roof again
and hopefully it doesn't explode on my trip through there.
This is sketchy.
(dramatic music)
(smash)
Ohh ha ha! - Whooaa!
(slo-mo smash)
- Batteries everywhere!
It just came down, just smashed,
and poom!
- Here's your coolant rack right here.
If I pull on this it should just drop the batteries out.
(cracking)
What I think is cool
is how the coolant is weaved in between every one of them.
So it's getting both sides, but it's just metal and plastic.
I mean, this metal,
look at that, it can come off,
it's pretty thin.
(ripping)
See that?
There's a layer of that metal.
It's pretty light.
(clanking)
There's some battery acid comin' out of it right there.
It's probably super hot right now.
Kudos to Tesla for making a battery
that really doesn't explode all that easily.
We gave it multiple times,
with a hatchet, with a bow and arrow.
That was fun.
And batteries are dangerous,
don't mess around with batteries like we do.
We had some people helping supervise this.
You may not see it,
but they're behind you right now.
- Two people. - Watching.
We are going to take these to a battery store,
they know how to properly dispose of these.
We're getting rid of our Tesla,
and we're getting rid of these Tesla batteries.
That was a nice way to send it out.
- So go and watch our family channel,
then we can explain why we're getting rid of our Tesla.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- For sure. - Yeah.
- That's it. - Yeah.
- Goodbye. - Goodbye.
- Yep. - Yeah.

What's inside a Tesla Battery?

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