What's Inside an Electric Bike Battery? | E-BIKE BATTERIES

Hey, everyone. Peter Kaltreider here at sixthreezero bikes. A question we get a lot is, what is inside the battery? Let's find out.

All right. So, what is inside this battery? This is a very common question. It's also very surprising. I think very few people really know what's in this mysterious black box. I'll show you. I pulled one apart last night. I almost electrocuted myself so don't do this at home. But I'll show you.

So, it's really fascinating, but the battery pack, this is just a case basically. What it does is it enclose the battery cells. The battery cells are those that are actually also batteries themselves. So, this is more of a battery pack. This is a 500-watt battery so it has 52 of these cells or batteries. There are 13 sets of four right now.

The cool thing about this is that it's really just a battery. This is like, the same thing you could find in a rechargeable flashlight. There's just, instead of three or four batteries, there's 52 of them. If you get an electric car like a Tesla, a Tesla has the same batteries, 18650. Or at least they start out with that, but they have about 7,000 of these guys. So, that's all there is in that battery that makes the car go 300 miles. Really fascinating. The 18650 is just called that because that's the size. It's 18 millimeters in diameter by 65 millimeters long.

Actually, the battery itself, the cells themselves are quite interesting. They are a lot less toxic than old batteries used to be with the lead and acid. These are lithium ions. The lithium-ion is a really ingenious device. Let me just give you an example.

As you can see, it's a cylinder. Let me put it down. The cylinder is made up of really kind of like a roll of paper towels. There's a long sheet-like this made of several layers of strips of lithium-ion, copper, and separators. Then, those are simply rolled up into a cylinder and then stuck into a small can. And that's how the battery is made. It's just a rolled-up sheet, several sheets of lithium-ion, graphite, copper, separators, and then that's stuck into an ionic gel or substance that helps the transfer of the electrons when the battery's activated.

So, that's all it is. It's just a bunch of little batteries. Same thing with an electric car or all sorts of other rechargeable devices. I hope that helps.

All right. Thanks for watching. I really hope that was helpful. If you need any more help, please don't hesitate to contact us at (310) 982-2877 or the team at sixthreezero.com. Sixthreezero is spelled out. S-I-X-T-H-R-E-E-Z-E-R-O. Also, subscribe to our channel. And remember, it's your journey, your experience. Enjoy the ride.