Over the past month, Sandy Munro of Munro & Associates has posted videos of their Tesla Model Y teardown.
If you’re not familiar with Munro & Associates, they’re a company that is a world-renowned engineering and manufacturing consulting firm who disassemble vehicles for a living.
A vehicle teardown is usually kept very private as the information and recommendations are assembled into a report worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Usually commissioned by competing automakers, these reports help understand not only what components were used in a vehicle’s construction, but also enters into detailed pricing estimates around the cost of components and assemble.
This report also goes further, highlighted recommendations for improvements that could be made to save time and complexity on the manufacturing line.
Given Tesla introduced a number of innovations to the industry in their Model S, Model X and Model 3 vehicles, by the time the Model Y rolled around, understanding Tesla’s latest offering was had international attention.
With the Model Y, Munro did something new, they created Munro Live, a YouTube channel that now has 4,608,772 views, thanks to almost daily videos, around 10 minutes in length. These videos are like a behind the scenes look at the breakdown process and Sandy does a great job of detailing the improvements made in the Model Y, compared to the previously stripped, Model 3.
The biggest improvements appear to be the rear assembly castings moving from 70 pieces to just 2, battery pack optimisations, the Heat Pump to reduce power consumption, the headliner, but there are hundreds of small tweaks in the Model Y. We’ve now seen some of those changes in the Model Y flowing back into the Model 3 line.
Personally, I’ve really enjoyed waking up each day and watching the clips from Sandy and learning much about the internals of the Model Y. Now the teardown is coming to an end, it’s great to learn that Munro Live will continue with new teardowns of other vehicles.
As an automaker, it must be fairly daunting to have your vehicle development publicly exposed, but does offer the ability to learn where you can improve, or how much catching up you have to do.
With a heavy focus on technology, the one piece of IP that Munro can’t (or haven’t yet), been able to break down, is the HW3 module that is the brains of the car and enables Tesla’s the runway to create a fully autonomous vehicle in the future.
Sandy is clearly someone who thinks about optimising the world and clearly has some scars from his time at Ford when his suggestions fell on deaf ears. Hopefully, this teardown is watched by every member of the Ford Mustang Mach-E engineering team and they can make a better competitor as a result.
Here’s Sandy’s final video, which includes the top 10 takeaways and the future plans for the channel.
If you haven’t watched the Model Y teardown videos yet, do yourself a favour and go watch it now.
Sandy also tore down the Model 3; his initial “skin deep” impressions of that were not good. Once he got under the skin he was as excited as a little puppy. His knowledge and stories are amazing and he kindly shares it all with us.