The 2022 Model Y Update Is Here!
Let’s talk about the new features coming to Tesla vehicles in the year 2022. There are some major upgrades that we know are in the pipe for vehicles like the Model Y and some that we think might be on the way as well. It’s going be another crazy year for Tesla and as fans and potential buyers of these vehicles, we have a lot to look forward to. So let’s talk about.
2022 Tesla Model Y
Of course before we get too deep into anything we have to acknowledge that Tesla doesn't do model years like every other car maker - that is to say, they don’t make updates on a schedule and they don’t just make all of the changes for a given year all at once. Some of these new features might roll out in a month, or six months or even 12 months from now. Whenever a new feature is ready to go, it gets worked into production. The upside to this is that when you get a new Tesla, you are getting the best possible car that they can build at that moment. But the downside is that you never know when those step changes are coming, so you might miss an upgrade by a week or a month, and that kind of sucks. That’s life though.
With the recent launch of Tesla’s GigaFactory in Berlin Germany, we got our first good look into the next generation Tesla Model Y that will be coming onto the market in 2022. The body shape remains the same, of course, we know that Tesla don’t waste time and money changing the exterior design of their cars. But we do know that there are significant upgrades coming on both the outside and the inside of the crossover SUV.
This latest information is coming from the Giga Factory in Berlin, but we can’t see any reason why the same would not apply for Tesla production at the Giga Factory in Austin Texas. Both factories started construction at more or less the same time and should start producing vehicles later this year at basically the same time. It wouldn’t make any sense for Austin to be less advanced or lack features that Berlin has. I think this is mostly a case of Elon wanting to stay in good favour with the German government and making them feel very special for having all of this amazing new manufacturing tech debut in Germany.
The biggest change that we’ve been able to see is the new battery cell and structural pack architecture, combined with the solid front and rear, die casted frame sections. This is what the bones of the 2022 Model Y are going to look like. It’s so simple that it almost looks like a toy, and most of it is made with the same process that they use to make Hotwheels, but this is actually the most advanced vehicle frame design that we know of. It’s pretty wild. They form the front and rear sections by pressing a molten aluminum alloy into a mold using a 6,000 ton press machine. When the aluminum hardens, it pops out as one solid chunk of vehicle frame. Any other car maker will use a series of small stamping and casting machines to form individual parts, and then have an army of robots and people to weld, bolt and glue all of the pieces together.
Structural Battery Pack
Tesla also revealed some details about the new battery pack that makes up the centre structure of the vehicle and the new battery cells that are inside. Though you’ll notice that Tesla is still holding something back with this demonstration. Because we get to see two battery packs, one cross sectioned and one closed. The pack that is integrated with the front and rear castings is closed. While the pack that is cut open is actually sitting in the old version of the Model Y frame with the multiple stamped parts all connected together. So the cross sectioned pack could actually be an older design or something like that. Obviously Tesla still doesn't want us to be able to see everything at once. But what we can see is that the new pack is filled with the larger diameter, cylindrical cells - these are 46 millimeters in diameter and 80 millimeters in length, and they use a nickel and manganese based, lithium ion chemistry inside a steel can. When the tightly packed group of cylinders is sandwiched between two sheets of stamped metal, it creates a structure that is pretty similar to honeycomb - obviously the cells are round, not hexagons, but basically the same effect, and honeycomb is known to have an exceptional strength to weight ratio. That allows the battery pack to be more than rigid enough to function as the middle frame of the car. The top of the battery pack is actually going to double as the floor of the cabin and the seats will be hard mounted to the pack.
For comparison, Tesla also laid out a cross section of the existing Model Y battery pack. This one uses their 2170 cylindrical cell, so just 12 millimeters diameter. And the cells are loaded into these plastic modules, which are bolted to the vehicle frame to form the pack.
That all sounds great, but what does it actually mean to the consumer? Well, an electric vehicle frame built in this way is going to be inherently stronger than a traditional frame while also being lighter weight at the same time. Reducing the number of contact points where different pieces of metal connect and eliminating voids and hollow spaces between those parts is going to mean an end to rattling and clanginging noises from inside the car body. It’s also going to mean that the margin for error in the alignment of the frame is going to be pretty much zero, you know that the body is going to be straight and on centre.
And another obvious advantage to a stronger vehicle frame is going to be crash safety - there's a certain peace of mind that is going to come from knowing that you have a solid chunk of aluminum in between you and whatever you’re about to hit. Obviously there is still a crumple zone in front of the casting, it’s not going to be like a brick hitting something, but anything that hits hard enough to make it through the crumple zone is going to have a hard time reaching the cabin. There’s even an advantage in the side impact scenarios, because the design of the structural battery pack moves the cells closer into the centre of the body and away from the impact zone - you can see from the two cross sections that the plastic modules on the current pack come right to the edge of the frame, but the bigger cells on the new pack have at least 6 inches or more clearance from the edge.
Some people worry that the castings can’t be replaced if they’re damaged in a crash, but honestly, if anything hits you hard enough to bend those solid chunks of aluminum or break the battery pack, then the whole car is going to be toast, regardless.
Because the new frame design is both lighter and more efficient, it will equal out to a longer range per charge than the existing design. If given an equal battery pack of course. But the new 4680 cylindrical cell design is also much more efficient than the current battery cell with 6 times more power, 5 times more energy capacity and a 16 percent increase in range.
Longer Range
So Tesla can go two ways here: They could maintain the current pack size and allow the performance of the Model Y Long Range to increase by something like 20 percent, give or take. That gets us up to 390 miles per charge EPA rated. Or they could maintain the current spec of 326 miles of range, which is great already, and use fewer battery resources in the pack. Either way, the price of the battery pack will be able to come down - Tesla forecast that the 4680 cell will be 14 percent cheaper per kilowatt hour, so they could probably shave a bit off the total vehicle price with that. But if they were to use less battery cell material AND cheaper cells, then now we’re looking at a big savings on the pack level and that should translate to a noticeable savings on the total vehicle price. We’ll just have to wait and see what direction they go.
We know that with their new refresh of the Model S Plaid, Tesla chose option number two, they reduced the pack capacity from 104 to 100 kilowatt hours and used increases in design efficiency to achieve pretty much the same range as the older Performance model even though they added a third motor and made the car outrageously powerful. And the Model S still uses Tesla’s oldest battery tech - they’re pretty much just laptop batteries on steroids.
The production of these new battery cells is still in the test phase right now at a Tesla facility in California, but volume production is coming in 2022. Tesla is currently building a new battery cell production facility on the grounds of Giga Berlin for the express purpose of making these 4680 batteries. That new Berlin factory should be finished in the spring of 2022. Thanks to the company’s advancements in the manufacturing process, these should ramp up pretty quickly to be the fastest moving battery production lines we’ve ever seen.
New Exterior Upgrades
On the outside the 2022 Model Y gets 2 significant upgrades. Number one is new paint - Tesla are beginning to show off the results from their brand new, state of the art paint shop at Giga Berlin. Paint has been a long standing issue for Tesla. The quality of their paint finishing has never been very good, and even though they narrowed down the colour choices to just 5 generic options, they still have some issues with quality control. Tesla used to have some cool colour options, back in the day there was green and brown, different shades of silver and grey, two kinds of white and two kinds of black. The new paint shop should get us back to those days when you could have a really, cool, unique looking Tesla straight from the factory with no need to opt for a vinyl wrap. The new paint process allows them to build up multiple layers of paint that will create an illusion of depth in the colour and will visibly change as the light falls on the curves of the body. It also allows for a much more precise application of the colour, Tesla showed off what they were capable of with a couple of custom designs that had these really hard edged, geometric shapes on one and a really beautiful piece of art on the other. We know that multiple new paint colours are coming for 2022. We’ve seen the crimson red before on Elon Musk’s personal Model S and we saw it again during the factory tour - cell phone cameras and device screens are basically the worst way to try and represent an accurate color, but it’s a really dark red, possibly a little on the purple side that has a ton of depth. Then we also saw this crazy blue colour - again, probably not accurate to real life but the photo shows a super bright and saturated blue car.
Upgrade number two on the Model Y exterior for 2022 is the new headlight design. We saved the most exciting for last, obviously. But for real, these are pretty neat as far as headlights go. They use high precision LED lights on a gimbal mechanism that can project the light not only in any direction the car needs, but also in any shape. In the demonstration at the factory, the headlights were projecting the word Tesla onto a wall - which is pretty crazy for car headlights to do, as far as I know. Elon says that this design is going to allow the car to keep the light out of other people’s eyes, whether they’re other drivers, pedestrians or cyclists. We have to imagine this is also going to be a big improvement for Autopilot and Full Self Driving at night, as the car can only drive as good as the digital cameras can see, so now the FSD computer can manipulate the headlights to shine brighter on anything that it needs to get a better look at.
Adaptive Air Suspension
Let’s get into a rumour here - this is the first new feature that we don’t know for sure is actually coming in 2022, but we can say there is still a good chance of seeing it. And that is adaptive air suspension for the Model Y.
Earlier we talked about how these new methods for producing the body and new battery technologies were going to make the cars much cheaper to build, and that could translate to a lower cost to the consumer. And that could be awesome, the Model Y isn’t cheap - but it’s also not terribly expensive either. In September, the average selling price of a new car in America was 45 thousand dollars, the Model Y is 55 grand. So it’s not out of line with the rest of the vehicle market and it’s a really compelling car at the current price. So maybe instead of dropping the sticker price, Tesla rolled that cost saving into a new feature.
The Model Y is stupid fast for a crossover SUV and it handles amazing for a vehicle of that size. People love the performance of the car, but most owners don’t love the rough ride that comes along with it. With a traditional, coil suspension system, you can either have tight, responsive handling or you can have a smooth, comfortable ride, a stiff spring or a loose spring - but you can’t have both at the same time. Unless the car has an adaptive suspension built in - most high end vehicles have this kind of a system, you can put the car in sport or track mode for a tighter suspension feel and leave it in standard or comfort mode for city streets. The Tesla Model S and Model X do this with an adaptive air suspension system that has air bags or bellows on each strut that control the cushioning effect. Tesla’s adaptive air suspension was introduced in 2019 and it’s an intelligent system that will actively control the ride height of the vehicle and the stiffness of the shock absorbers to suit the current speed, location and road conditions. So the car will actually lower itself down when you’re driving at highway speeds to reduce drag and it will lift itself up to provide more ground clearance on rough and uneven roads.
We know from the design blueprints of the Model Y that it was built with the possibility of adaptive air suspension in mind, the system can fit into the body without modifications. And there is a hacker on Twitter called Green The Only who likes to dig around in his Tesla’s source code and look for hidden Easter eggs. He’a found a couple of software references to adaptive air suspension in the Model Y firmware that suggest it’s been considered as a feature.
It really looks like with all of this new development in body engineering and battery cell technology that the next generation of the Tesla Model Y in 2022 is set to become a much more premium product - probably one of the most advanced electric cars on the planet. With the new casting design and structural battery, the Model Y will have a build quality that is more on par with a Bently or Rolls Royce and the acceleration capability of Lambo - so it would be a bit of a miss if Tesla didn’t back that up with world class handling and ride quality to match.
None of that to say that there is anything wrong with the Model Y as it is today, if you’ve got the opportunity to grab one right now, then by all means do it. But since the lead time on a new Model Y Long Range is now all the way out to July of 2022, then it’s more likely that the car you order today is going to have more in common with the next generation Y than the model that is on sale right now.
