Tesla Battery Replacement

Battery pack overview. So, this is a Tesla Model S 85 kWh battery pack. A lot of people think, “Oh, it’s just one big battery.” It’s actually not the truth. So, here you have 16 individual modules throughout the battery pack. In each module, you have cells. So each module has 444 cells. Times that by 16, according to my calculations, that’s 7,104 cells inside of the whole battery pack itself.

And although they kind of look similar — like a 75 and an 85, a 90 and 100 — there are a few small differences. So imagine you and your friend, you both own, let’s say, a Tesla Model S, but one of you owns a 75 kWh and another owns a 100 kWh battery pack. The price range for the battery is going to be drastically different, but it’s not going to be drastically expensive if you take the tip that we give you at the end of the video.

But while we’re here, let’s talk about each individual module itself. So, as I said, 444 cells, and you’re going to have the temperature sensor right here, which manages the temperature of the battery. And the cool thing is, a lot of batteries just have one big BMS. Tesla did it very differently. So each module has a BMB, which communicates to the battery itself and measures voltage and the temperature of the battery, which communicates to the big motherboard, the BMS. So I’m going to say that one more time. You have BMBs on the module and you have the BMS which collects all of the data overall.

So there are companies that do EV repair or Tesla repair. The problem with that is what they do is, like, okay, they’ll say this module is bad — let’s just go ahead and replace that, right? Let’s just go ahead and put a band-aid on my broken arm, but that’s not a solution. Sometimes you need surgery, as you can tell, right? So you want to look for a company that is fixing the common problems in all the modules. And you want a company that doesn’t just pass over the small stuff. Make sure they do the following things. Number one, corroded capacitors on the BMS — the protective coating wears down, allowing moisture damage. Number two, voltage tab corrosion — tabs can break loose, requiring specialized repair equipment. Number three, faulty umbrella valves allow moisture inside, which can trigger the above failures.

Okay, and look at these cool black things that go all along through the battery. And as you can tell, if you look inside, they actually go inside the module. Well, why did they go inside the module? Let me inform you. So what this is actually doing is it’s cooling down the battery. So yes, you’re sending liquid inside of the module itself, and it can either be warm or cool. It’s called coolant, right? Coolant goes through the full battery itself to make sure everything’s a good temperature, because batteries fail in the heat — they overheat. So for a Prius, for example, you’re going to have a fan and the fan cools it down. They don’t have coolant flow. But for EVs, especially Teslas, they made it a lot more advanced where cooling is an easily accessible system.

So we’re definitely not paying Tesla $20,000. But let me tell you, when looking for a company, what to look for. So as I said before, you want to find someone that fixes — and maybe even write this down — the common problems in all of the modules, right? You don’t just have cells, you have temperature sensors, you have a BMB. There’s so many different components, right? That’s number one. Number two, don’t find a company that just repairs or replaces one module. Find a company that takes all of the modules out and cycle tests the modules to make sure the capacity is balanced throughout the whole battery.

So my biggest concern is I live in an apartment complex. So I wanted to find a battery replacement company that could still enable me to supercharge. I read a ton of stuff online that says, “Oh, you can’t supercharge when you get your battery replaced from an aftermarket company.” And that is true for most aftermarket or repair companies. But I did find a solution that I’ll tell you about at the end of the video.

But also something interesting is you can also upgrade your battery. So if you have a 75, you can upgrade to an 85, to a 90, to a 100 kilowatt hour pack, which not just increases the kilowatt hours — you’re increasing the range of your car itself. You could increase the performance of the car itself, but also you’re decreasing the amount of charging time it takes.

So basically for the installation itself, it’s actually pretty simple. What they do is they take the car up, they put it on the lift, they lift it all the way up, and then they drop the battery out from the bottom of the car, they put it away and do whatever they do with the battery, and they grab a new battery — the one that I’m getting — and they put it inside of the car. And then that’s basically it for the battery part. But then they have to program the new battery to the car. For example, mine’s an 85 kWh and I wanted to upgrade to 100 kilowatt hour because I kind of wanted some more range. So the computer has to understand how much range it’s getting, right? So they have to program the new battery to the car, and then also what Greentec does is they cycle test the car, which means they take it on two to three full charging cycles to make sure it’s actually getting that range.

So I did promise you that we would tell you something that’s going to save you up to 50%, and I do keep my promises. So we’re going to get to that right now. The company I work for, Greentec Auto — some of you who’ve been looking at me have probably been seeing this on my shirt, like, what does Greentec Auto do? So we’ve been specializing in hybrid and EV battery replacement since 2012. That’s basically over 13 years of specialized experience in this business. We started off with Priuses, simple batteries like that. But now, as you can tell, we have over 240 different types of batteries all around our warehouse that we sell. We have Tesla Model S’s, Tesla Model 3s working all day long. And if you click the link in our bio, greentecauto.com, you’ll see all the different models of batteries we replace, different kilowatt hour batteries, and also if you own a Model 3, you could see standard, long range, performance, whatever it is. And we have 34 locations across the United States where you can come by and get the installation done in a matter of no time. So hope you guys enjoy.

I’ve owned this car for more than 5 years now. When I purchased it, I thought the price that was on the car was the last thing I ever had to pay for. I thought I never even had to look at a gas station again. I would never have to go to one. But I was wrong. This car has cost me way more than I thought. Okay, so if you’re thinking of buying an EV or you already own an EV, I’m going to give you all the information that I wish I would have known earlier.

So, this is my Tesla Model S. I’ve owned it for just about 5 years now, and I’ve put a pretty decent amount of miles on it — I’ve got 200,000 miles on it. And the main reason why I bought the car is I was spending 800 bucks every single month on gas, and I didn’t even want to have to see a gas station ever again. So, I kind of just wanted to wake up with the car charged. I’m like, you know what? I’m just going to go buy an EV. And as well, a big thing is how it drives. Like as you can tell right now, we’re going pretty fast and you can barely hear anything. You know, my first time in the car, I was like, “Dude, this thing feels like a spaceship. I’m able to drive fast and it’s literally like a spaceship — you can’t hear a single thing in here.” What’s also great that I really like is the regenerative braking, right? Because with a gas car, you’re always gassing, gassing, gassing, gassing. With EVs and also hybrids as well, you get that regenerative braking where every time I put my foot on the brake, it’s charging up the battery to hold more charge. So that’s also a really good feature because I live in an area where there’s not a ton of highway. We’re on the highway right now, but it’s usually kind of a stop-and-go situation. So, in places where I could just stop and charge up the battery through regenerative braking, that was really what I was looking for. That’s a big reason why I bought the car.

As I was saying, a big factor for me buying an EV was charging, right? I could literally just wake up and the car was fully charged, ready to go. With gas cars, I’m a pretty busy guy — you have to go to the gas station, you have to manually go and fill up your car. With EVs, I could get off work, go home, put the charger in, boom, wake up the next day fully charged. And that’s what I really liked about it. And I felt also good about kind of adapting to the future, until the first thing really hit me.

So here right now we have 30 chargers all lined up right here. So for me it’s easy to go charge my car — I have one by my house, one by the gym, one by work. For me it’s super, super easy. But for most people, they don’t have access to this many chargers in their area. So what happens if you don’t? I’ll give you an example. The other week I was headed to my parents’ house. They live in the country and they live pretty far away, and there wasn’t an EV charger within a 30-mile radius of their house. No, don’t worry — I didn’t get stranded. But that just shows that if you live that far, you really have to plan your trips, plan how long it’s going to take to get there, plan how much charge you’re going to have after. So that is kind of another downside, for example. So let’s go charge the car real quickly and then we’ll go back and talk about another hidden secret that most people don’t talk about.

So the next thing is insurance, right? So insurance for EVs or even Teslas, for example, is 20 to 30% higher than a regular gas car. So for my Tesla, I bought insurance for the car like every other car — 20 to 30% higher than my gas car before. And then later on, we had an issue happen to my car, which I’ll talk about later, with the battery, and they didn’t cover it. So I had to buy another insurance policy for the battery itself, which I probably should have thought about — covering the battery — because I’m literally around batteries all day. I mean, this is 250 Tesla Model S batteries right here alone. So that was a big expense that I probably should have looked ahead and really thought about before. But if you’re buying a Tesla or you’ve got a Tesla, make sure the insurance policy you go with covers the battery, because Tesla can charge up to 20 to $25,000 for the replacement itself. Obviously there are some more affordable options out there, but that’s something to really be careful about, because the last thing you want is to have two insurance policies for the same car.

Okay, so the next thing is tires. Okay, so as you can see, this is a Tesla Model S right here. And because of the weight of the Tesla itself — obviously the car is pretty heavy, but the battery is extremely heavy as well — so all that weight on top of tires, and especially how people drive, they just like to gun it, gun it, gun it. Tires wear off really fast. And mine went bad — I think after the first year, I had to get all four of them replaced. So that was another expense. And at this point I’m like, I kind of missed the only thing to worry about being oil changes.

All right. So the next thing is battery cost. Chris, so this battery itself, how much does it cost?

This exact model, it’ll be roughly around 20 grand — from Tesla.

From Tesla. Okay. Yeah. So this is a big thing that a lot of people don’t consider. They buy a Tesla, they like the speed, they like the look, they like the technology in it, but they don’t consider the batteries inside, right? So battery costs are one of the biggest things to worry about, because it’s just a matter of time before they go bad. On average, you know, people say online they’re going to last 10 to 20 years, but we’ve seen that at that 8 to 10 year mark — almost the same as a hybrid vehicle — is when they start to fade. A big thing that people also don’t consider is, you know, for a Prius, for example, people only come to get the battery replaced when it’s bad. But for Tesla, you’re experiencing range loss. And when someone used to get, let’s say, 300 miles or 200 miles, now they only get 100 or 150 — they want to get a new battery because they’re getting half the amount of range, right? And with gas cars, that’s not a problem. It’s not like your fuel tank capacity goes down over time. You’re able to fill the car up the same as you used to, right? That’s kind of another downside that not many people talk about.

And also, there’s so many components to the battery itself. Let’s go actually look at a battery and let me show you how many moving parts there are underneath the top of the case. So this right here is a Tesla Model S 100 kWh battery pack. So if this is the battery that’s in your car, this is what it actually looks like with the case cut off. Okay? So there are 16 modules inside this battery pack itself. You’re going to have 516 cells per module, right? So you have the full battery pack, then you have modules, and then you have cells inside the modules. Okay? And then what’s super interesting about Tesla is there’s so many things that can go wrong, right? The battery is great, the car is great, but there are so many moving components. You have voltage sensors, you have temperature sensors, you have your BMS, right? And another cool fact is each module has its own BMB. So the BMB is taking the voltage and the temperature of the module itself, and each of these modules has a BMB, and it feeds it all back here to the BMS. So the BMS is actually taking 15,000 data points every single second. So if your Tesla has self-drive and you’re sleeping, this thing’s working a lot harder than you are.

Thank you for watching today’s video, and I hope you guys took away the four keys, which is battery cost, insurance, charging, and surprisingly, tires. Okay, make sure you consider those four things when buying an electric vehicle, especially a Tesla.

And if you guys stuck with me through today’s video, I do have a present for you. If you use coupon code GTAI, you’ll get $350 off for not if, but when your Tesla battery goes bad. And who are we? We are Greentec Auto. I was going to get one of our sales representatives to talk to you, but they’re all kind of busy on the phones right now. We’ve been around for 13 years replacing hybrid and electric car batteries. We started off in Sacramento, California. Now we have 34 locations across the United States. We’ve probably sold over 2,000 Tesla batteries nationwide. But we don’t just sell batteries — we sell peace of mind. Our Tesla battery comes with a 48-month, 50,000-mile warranty so you can drive with confidence. Again, thank you guys for today’s video and I hope you guys enjoy.

Hello everybody. My name is Art with Greentec Auto. I have my brother Paul here with me today as well. And we have a fun story to tell you about this Tesla Model S Plaid battery that has some water damage. So, this came from a customer’s car. The son took the car for a joy ride. A couple days later, the check engine came on. They took it to Tesla. Come to find out, it had some water damage. And Tesla actually denied the claim. Come to find out, he went through some puddles — we think he went through some pretty deep puddles. Water got in through the umbrella cups.

We speculate. He also could have accelerated pretty quickly. It is a Plaid, and it could be either the umbrella caps or the caps next to it. And when you hit the gas a little bit, I mean, they are kind of flimsy and plastic and you can get a lot of volume of water rushing in there.

Yeah, any high pressure from all that — if it’s a deep enough puddle and you’re going fast enough, it probably made it through that. And all it takes is a little bit, you know. It doesn’t need a gallon, it doesn’t need to be flooded full of water to fail from water damage. So, this battery did have some serious issues — so much so that the car didn’t drive and we did have to replace it. And of course, from what I remember, it was a pretty big deal because they had to pay a pretty penny for something that should have been covered under warranty in their eyes. So, it was unfortunate that Tesla denied the claim. However, that is negligence. You know, if you run something over on the road with a pothole, Tesla typically won’t fix that and other people won’t either, under warranty or not.

So, I wanted to take this opportunity to go over a couple of things about what I like and don’t like about the battery. And there’s actually more to not like about this battery. It’s very unfortunate. The design — we’ve all heard and seen some of the videos, and we hear about the performance and how it actually performs, and that’s all great. But we are in the remanufacturing business, and that’s what I’d like to point out: this battery was built to be very difficult to remanufacture.

Two of the things I wanted to point out are actually right here in front of you. So we’ve peeled back the inter-module connections, and you can actually see these are the terminal connections. On the Model S — the earlier S and the 3 and Y packs — there were fasteners in between every single module. Now, granted, that took a lot of human effort and this was done by a machine or a robot, it was more automated. But for people like us to be able to try and repair this, we already have a laser welder and we could replicate these, but we have to very carefully tear off those welds or even possibly drill them out. But also there’s a cell right underneath it, so when we do go to reweld it, we’ve got to make sure we’re perfectly calibrated. Not only that, once we take this side out, we’ve got to take out the other side as well, and it’s the same thing. So even on this side, the terminal — the main positive or the main negative — they both come to a fastener at the junction block in here. However, those are the only two on the main positive and main negative. So if you had any one of these modules fail, it’s an extremely large amount of work to just get the module out, without even having to figure out how to repair it and then having very expensive tooling to actually put it back together. So that’s going to be a big problem we’re going to have to overcome in the future. Right now, luckily, there aren’t as many failures yet. However, that’s something we’re already working on. Like I said, we already have some of that equipment just for some of the batteries we already do, but it’s extremely difficult to fine-tune the equipment to this specific task. That’s going to take a lot of work.

The other part I wanted to mention was the BMS. So we have it down here lengthwise of the module width, rather, depending on how you look at it. And we do see all the connections on top here for the cell taps all the way down. And same thing, it’s all laser welded. So again, if that has a failure you still can’t even get to it because you’ve got to have a lot of equipment. Same thing — you have to laser weld it. Too strong of a setting and it’ll burn right through and damage the BMS. So you’ve got to go through a couple of tries to make sure you’ve got it right, and then you’ve got to make sure you don’t go too light either, because then it’s a bad connection and you end up having problems down the road. So this is probably one of the more difficult Tesla packs we’ve seen yet. And actually, not even just Tesla, but just in general, this is going to be a much higher cost repair than we traditionally see for other vehicles.

So, very labor intensive, not very practical. What about second life?

Second life — 82 volts out of the five modules. Five modules, 22s, so it’s roughly an 82-volt module. Not really the best configuration for applications like home use or golf carts. The voltage range isn’t quite right. The size isn’t quite right. You know, if you have a golf cart and you have to fit one of these in there, good luck — it’s not like you can just take this and fold it in half. So really, this is something that if it can’t be reused in the vehicle in its original form, unless there’s a very specific use case dedicated just for these, more than likely we’re going to end up having to discharge and recycle these whenever they’re bad. I can’t say for certain, but as of right now, I don’t foresee a whole lot of second life opportunities for this battery, just because of how difficult it will be to connect them. Not everybody’s going to need all five modules — someone’s going to want one or two or three. Being able to connect them together, especially if you’re not putting them next to each other — let’s say you’re stacking one on top of the other in a different configuration — all of a sudden that becomes a problem. How are you going to connect them together? It’s no longer a bus bar that you can just screw together. Now you’ve got to have special equipment to weld it together. We might have that, but somebody at home trying to do this for a golf cart or EV conversion, they’re not going to have that. And that’s where a problem is going to come in. The second life market outside of vehicle use is going to be very, very difficult.

You said bus bar — let’s jump back to this battery and talk about the two different big bus bars we have right here.

Yeah, actually. So obviously one is thicker than the other. Why, right? Well, it’s actually kind of simple. We have the two charging ports for the supercharger on the top right corner there, and both of those are real nice and thick. And there are actually also two ports for the electric motor connection — one right here underneath and one right here underneath. So you have two electric motor connection ports there. And then you have another one on this side for, I think, the front motor — I could be wrong, but pretty sure it is.

Now this side of the battery — let’s say for practicality reasons this terminal is the positive terminal. It’s the length of the pack, right? That whole strip is the length of the module all the way down. So this is the most positive, that side is the most negative. The two supercharger ports come there, but one of those supercharger points has to also come here, and that’s why this bus bar is a lot thicker. To get this terminal all the way there — sorry, the other way around — we only need a small strip for the motors, but for the supercharger port we need to have a big bus bar to handle the current coming in. And it could be the opposite — it could be that it’s the motors that handle that current, and that’s why it needs to go that direction. Whichever way it is, that’s why one of them is more narrow than the other. It doesn’t need that much current in one use case versus the other.

You know, we weren’t as careful as we could have been, but sometimes you don’t need to be. But ultimately we do have to put these back together in a manner that will seal and go back into the vehicle. So we have to be very careful opening these up and making sure we’re not deforming anything. That’s another hassle with these things — they’re glued a lot, and quite well. Even though they go through all that glue, water still got in through something that was supposed to prevent water from getting in. So that’s unfortunate. It makes our jobs harder to open it up and close it back again.

So that’s a 2022. 2021 is when they adapted the S and X and got the new style, which is kind of like the 3s and Ys, and the installation in cars is far more labor intensive as we know.

Yeah, structural packs.

It’s not as easy to identify either once it’s out of the car. You do have part numbers, but it’s very rare to have a kilowatt hour listed even on the 3, Y, S, X, or Plaid — the new style, however you want to call them. But there’s typically a part number here and one in the front. So how do you find out which version this is?

That’s also difficult because sometimes it’ll give you basic information. Sometimes it’ll tell you if it’s an all-wheel drive dual motor car or a rear-wheel drive. Sometimes it won’t. Tesla just decided to — Google the part number and hope for the best.

Basically. There’s a lot of information online. You do have to do some digging, and nine times out of ten you find what you’re looking for.

Okay. Well, if you have any questions, shoot them in the comments. We’d love to try and answer them. We are going to try to pull one of those modules out just to see how difficult or annoying it is. Unfortunately, this is not a high priority for us, so it might take a little time for us to come up with that video. But as soon as it does, we’ll link it in the comments. And it’d be very interesting to see what those cell connections look like. We obviously know the coolant channels go all the way down and loop back, because coolant is only on one side — it’s not on the other side. So it serpentines that direction and comes back one way or the other. But I’d like to see just how it all looks underneath, because on the Model 3 and Y you see all the little fuses under there, but it looks like all the terminals are on top of this module. And again, we can’t even get to it without picking away at this blue box.

The resin. Yeah, that’s going to be very labor intensive.

Yeah, that makes repairing these batteries a lot more difficult. The more of that they put in, the harder it is. That’s for sure.

So, any additional final thoughts, Paul?

I think that’s it.

All right. Thank you for watching and have a good one.

Hi, I’m Art with Greentec Auto. I’m the CTO, and today we’re coming back with another flooded Tesla battery. I made a video about 10 years ago about a flooded RAV4 Tesla battery, and I’m coming back with another video about a flooded Tesla battery. And we’re going to talk about why this battery is flooded, and one of the reasons is because of the poor gluing job.

This was a DIY project. Somebody did it themselves, or it could have been a shop — we don’t have that information. All we know is that this is what we received as a core, and it has very clearly been gone through, and we have lots and lots of writing on what they did to the battery. But the most important thing is they did not glue it down properly. And we’ll get some close-ups afterwards, but we have multiple points all the way down the line and around the perimeter of the battery where the glue that they used did not make contact with the lid. They also did not remove the old glue. So anywhere that the glue did make contact was not sealed properly. And what that did is put about 4 inches of water in the entire battery. So right now the battery is dry — we had it drying for about a week and a half. But this is the worst battery shape we’ve seen for Tesla yet, and it just goes to show that not every rebuild is done right, not every rebuild is done equally, and you should pick and choose where and how you do it wisely.

So here we have two points where there’s no glue. That tells us two things. One, it’s either stuck to the lid and made poor contact. And two, we can see the gray lid — the old glue from when they first took it apart was never cleaned off. So it was attempting to glue over the old glue, and that is not a good idea. Moving further down, we have a big spot that’s nice and flattened. It’s the wrong type of glue, but the coverage is okay. And then we move on to two more spots where the lid did not really make much contact with the glue. This one you can see clearly had a little bit of contact, but towards the middle there’s not a lot. But if you look towards this last one, you can see a sharp edge on the glue itself — here it’s a little bit flattened, but between here and here there’s no contact with the lid whatsoever. And that is because of the bolt pattern they used to put the lid on, which caused it to have a bubble effect. If it’s not bolted in the right pattern, that’s what happens — it does not make good contact with the glue, and obviously there wasn’t enough glue. So that’s where part of the problem lies.

Down the spine, we have a similar situation where we have points where it’s made contact with the lid and points where it doesn’t. And it gets worse as we move towards the back of the pack, and there is a very specific reason why it’s like that.

So the question is, why didn’t the lid meet the battery down the spine? And it’s really quite simple. The people who built this battery tried to cut corners. Usually what happens is they’ll try to fold up one side wherever the problem is, trying to identify and fix it quickly, realizing that if one module has that issue, most of the modules will have that issue. And then they’ll fold up the other side to check. At that point, they’ll go ahead and remove the entire lid. But that folding and unfolding creates a valley down the middle of the battery lid where it meets the spine. And even if you try and just lay it back flat with glue and put bolts back in, we can clearly see that the glue did not meet the battery. So multiple mistakes — that being one of the bigger ones — is improper lid removal and attempting to do the butterfly method, which is not something that we recommend and not something that we do.

So we at Greentec do things a little differently. Firstly, removing the lid has to be done in a manner that does not deform it or damage it, and it takes extra care. Second, we remove all the old glue on the lid and on the base before applying any new glue when we go to seal it. Thirdly, we don’t fix just the faulty modules — we fix the common problems on every module, whether it’s faulty or not. Fourth, we have a special bolt-down pattern that we follow to ensure that the battery does not have any gaps between the battery and the lid when we’re done. And lastly, we have a special pressurized checker that we use to pressurize the battery and make sure that there is nowhere air is leaking from after we’ve done our refurbishment.

Visit our website if you have a hybrid or electric car and you are interested in what options we have for your vehicle, whether it’s Tesla or something else. And we’ll have a slow-mo around the battery to give you an idea of the extensive damage water can do to an electric car battery.