Soda Can Sized Tesla Battery Appears Confirmed

The Electrek leak of a larger Tesla battery cell is not being disputed by Elon Musk.

The larger cell would be able to reduce the number of battery cells in a Model 3 from 4200 of the 2170 sized battery to five hundred 5498 cells. This would have massive cost and production speed improvements. The rumors are that Tesla will show actual batteries in production.

The battery appears to be tabless which would make the battery factory have fewer steps and speed the production.


The old Tesla batteries were about 1.5 times wider and taller than a double A battery. The new ones are about the size of a can of soda.

SOURCES – Tesla, Teslarati, Elon Musk twitter, Elektrek, BRCooper, Limiting Factor
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com (Brian owns shares of Tesla)

16 thoughts on “Soda Can Sized Tesla Battery Appears Confirmed”

  1. I strongly suspect these larger cells are for the home power storage product they have. For home power storage you generally don't need to rapidly charge or discharge cells. And as a result the cooling issue of a larger cells may not be a major issue. I also don't think that using a tabless design is going to help much in the cooling issue since most of the the heat is created by the chemical reaction in the battery and the flow of electricity though the Anode and Cathode.

    Or the battery has major changes to the anode and cathode that improve heat flow and the later battery will be used in future S,X, Roadster, and semi models.

  2. ⌀54 mm × 98 mm yields 224 ml, and I have seen recently Coca-cola being sold in 220 ml cans (though 290 ml is still more common). So I would argue that it can be classed as "soda-can sized."

  3. For comparisons: This old GE capacitor is the closest I could find in dimensions to what was stated in the story. And I'm comparing it directly to a 18650 lithium cell.

  4. Maybe he's European. Soda cans are smaller there, like the smaller Coke ones I've seen gaining popularity in the US.

  5. Prior batteries, like the 18650? Pre-existing commercial product. All of my high powered LED flashlights use them, among other things.

  6. And the cooling can take the same short path, ie from top to middle and from bottom to middle.

    Less heating and better cooling….

  7. Yes, the dimensions are right in the name.
    5498 is still a lot smaller than your standard coke can.

    Dimensions of standard 375 mL can is 66 mm diameter and 130 mm tall

  8. I need to fix that, the heat pump is new, but it basically is just an efficiency improvement over the previous design.

  9. well, yes they redesigned the cooling pump…but it is believed the larger and better tabless design in the batteries results in less resistance heat build up.
    Tesla has had active cooling all along. The new Y just has a unique pump/cooling manifold.

  10. part of the issue is the resistance of the electrons having to go a long distance. This resulted in heat build up. The new tab-less design cell has a much larger area for connection

  11. Reversing the question – why were the batteries so small previously? Cooling? Likelihood of flaws increasing with size? Limited by the current through the "tab" that's now gone? And, I guess, why not even bigger for this generation?

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