The newly built Model Y 4680 battery packs are seeing an impressive and positive (pun intended) charging speed.
According to Twitter user The Kilowatts, they were able to charge their new Model Y from 0% to 97% in just 52 minutes.
The Kilowatts’s Ryan Levenson took delivery of an Austin, Texas-made dual-motor Model Y, which is built with Tesla’s highly anticipated 4680 battery pack.
Levenson rents out electric vehicles he owns on Turo and maintains them. Levenson shared on Twitter that he drove the new Model Y three miles past its 0% state of charge. He noted that there was no effect on the vehicle’s acceleration.
“0% -> 97% in 52 minutes for our MIT (made in Texas) Dual Motor Model Y,” Levenson writes on Twitter.
“Plugged in at 12:25 am with 0 miles of range remaining (actually drove 3 miles beyond 0 with seemingly no impact on acceleration). Unplugged at 1:17 am with 270 miles of range.”
0% -> 97% in 52 minutes for our MIT Dual Motor Model Y
— The Kilowatts ?⚡️ (@klwtts) July 1, 2022
Plugged in at 12:25 am with 0 miles of range remaining (actually drove 3 miles beyond 0 with seemingly no impact on acceleration)
Unplugged at 1:17 am with 270 miles of range. ?? pic.twitter.com/q4Yef2uKKe
Levenson noticed that by plugging into a V3 supercharger, the vehicle almost immediately ramped up to the 250kW charging rate, which is much different than Tesla’s current battery packs that take time to ramp up to the 250kW rate.
“For anyone trying to analyze the charge curve here, it seems quick but what I find most interesting is the almost immediate jump to ~250kW unlike the ramp up to 250kW we’re used to and from there it slowly tapers down throughout the charge cycle.”
Tesla’s currently listing the Model Y dual motor configuration to have a total of 279 miles of EPA-rated range.
Being able to drive past 0% state of charge is interesting. Tesla purposely builds in a little buffer to err on the side of caution when estimating the remaining range.
Tesla does software lock the range on its vehicles to prevent them from losing all of their charge and damaging the battery.
In order to meet manufacturing efficiencies, Tesla has previously shipped vehicles with larger batteries and software-locked them if an owner bought a model with a shorter range.
Although the owner can only access the portion of the battery that they paid for, they actually receive a couple of hidden benefits.
The car can be charged to "100%" every day without any ill effects since the battery itself is not charged to 100%, only the portion the owner paid for.
Another advantage of such models is that the owner can buy and unlock the additional range at a later date if they choose to.
In 2019, during Hurricane Dorian in Florida, Tesla remotely extended the ranges on such vehicles so they could escape Dorian’s path.
They also provided Tesla drivers with free supercharger access and force-charged the Powerwall batteries to full power so they would be ready in case of a severe power outage.
Tesla’s battery day event back in September 2020 unveiled some pretty impressive technologies coming, but Tesla has yet to share in-depth data on what we can expect in real-world scenarios.
