No, Teslas do not have batteries placed throughout the car. They have a single large battery pack that bolts to the underside of the car. Inside that are smaller battery packs that contain the cells as well as the cooling channels and electrical connections.

If you want to completely replace the batteries in a Tesla you can do so in less than an hour, if I recall correctly. It doesn’t require any special equipment either.

It does not require specialized equipment, but it does require a lift --which few people have in their garage, and you have to remove all the seats. But to be fair, swapping out an ICE engine is even more work/difficult. On the other hand, one bad cell means you have to pull out the whole battery pack to replace the single deflective cell.

You probably won’t be able to do the job in an hour without a lift, but you _can_ use just ordinary jacks. Certainly every car shop on the planet has the tools to do it; they won’t have to buy anything specialized from Tesla.

One Tesla tool they need —which Tesla released— is diagnostic sw to help ID the bad cell(s), else it would take longer to find a bad cell among ~1,500 of them.

Tesla just replaces whole packs now. They might have a tool to diagnose a bad battery but they don’t replace modules, they only replace entire packs.

As such their next gen pack is a single structural member of the car and likely will not be replaceable at all.

As I understand it, neither of those statements are exactly true.

Tesla replaces battery packs and then sends the old one back to the factory to be refurbished, rather than junked.

As for future designs, a structural battery pack would still be replaceable. The difference is that the battery pack would supply a portion of the strength and rigidity of the frame. That doesn’t mean the car would fall apart if you removed it, however.

That’s true if there are a small number of bad modules that you want to replace, but not really relevant if you’re just going to swap a new battery into an old Tesla.

But the battery management system automatically disables bad cells so you wouldn’t need to replace an individual cell.

People seem to have a different experience. See here: https://electrek.co/2021/09/13/tesla-battery-pack-replacemen...

There are different models of Tesla packs in circulation.

That seems really unlikely, or impossible. The 18650 cells in a Tesla Model S are only about twice as big as an AA and they are grouped in parallel blocks that are then connected in series. There does not appear to be any way of isolating a specific cell.

Each module has six groups of cells in series, 74 in parallel in each group, giving a module voltage of 22.8 V.

See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Tesla-Model-S-74p6s-Batt...

Newer Tesla batteries are fused per cell, so when a battery dies and it's neighbor cells start dumping charge into it the fuse goes and hopefully that's that. So it's perfectly possible for a single battery to become disconnected from the rest of the pack. But that's not a function of the battery management system, it's purely a safety feature (otherwise the pack would almost certainly go up).

Does the Tesla battery come with electronic chips to prevent 3rd party batteries like inkjet printer cartridges?

No. But if you inject a new battery it needs to be mostly the same as the others and you need to re-balance the pack. There is software for this.

I've never heard of balancing batteries. All i could find about it was a forum post with people just as confused as me. [0]

Do you have resources on this topic?

[0] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/balancing-the-batter...

This video shows how it works and from there you might find some more information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Q0nNkQTC

Really about 5-6 min in.

I don’t know that you’ll be able to do that as they change to their structural batteries.

There are two: the main traction battery and a 12 V battery that keeps the control system alive even if the main battery is completely flat.