Most people know that a Tesla runs on electricity. Very few people know what that actually means and what’s physically happening the moment you press the accelerator, what’s moving where, and why a chemical reaction inside a sealed metal pack is what gets you from 0 to 60 in seconds.

This is the real story of how a Tesla moves. From the moment an electron is born, to the instant it spins a motor and pushes you back in your seat.

Where Electrons Come From

Let’s start at the beginning, because electricity doesn’t come from nowhere.

An electron is a subatomic particle, roughly 1/1836th the mass of a proton, carrying a fundamental negative charge. In a conductor, electrons in the outer shells of metal atoms are only loosely bound to their nucleus. Apply the right conditions, a chemical reaction, a spinning magnetic field, sunlight hitting a semiconductor and those electrons begin to flow. That flow is electric current.

When you charge your Tesla at home, electrons come from the grid. Depending on where you live, those electrons were freed by natural gas combustion spinning a turbine, uranium fission heating steam, wind pushing a rotor, or photons from the sun striking silicon cells. The source varies. The particle is always the same.

Your charger’s job is to force those electrons, in a controlled and regulated stream, into your battery, where they get stored, chemically, until your right foot needs them.

The Tesla Battery: A City of Tiny Reactors

The battery pack sitting under the floor of your Tesla is not a battery in the AA sense. It’s a precision-engineered assembly of thousands of individual lithium-ion cells, organised into modules, connected in series and parallel to hit the voltage and capacity the car needs.

Tesla’s newer vehicles use their own 4680 cell, a cylindrical cell 46mm wide and 80mm tall, roughly five times the volume of the older 2170 cell. The “tabless” design reduces internal resistance and heat generation, and the cells are structural, they bond directly to the floor of the car, shaving weight from the overall vehicle.

Inside every cell, the chemistry works the same way. The anode is graphite or a silicon-graphite blend, silicon holds nearly ten times more lithium than graphite, which is why Tesla introduced it in the 4680. The cathode is where Tesla’s different models diverge: Standard Range variants use LFP (lithium iron phosphate), which is thermally stable, tolerates daily 100% charging, and has a longer cycle life. Long Range and Performance variants use high-nickel NCA or NMC chemistry, which stores more energy per kilogram but prefers to be kept below 90% charge. The electrolyte is a lithium salt dissolved in an organic solvent, the medium that lithium ions travel through between electrodes (a thin porous separator between anode and cathode) lets ions through but forces electrons to take the only other path available > through your motor.

The Numbers: How Much Energy Are You Actually Carrying?

Tesla doesn’t publish exact usable capacity for every model, but the figures from testing and teardowns are well established. The Model 3 Standard Range carries around 60 kWh usable (approximately 272 miles of EPA range). The Model 3 Long Range AWD carries around 82 kWh (approximately 358 miles). The Model Y Long Range also sits at around 82 kWh, good for approximately 330 miles. The Model S Long Range pushes to around 100 kWh - approximately 405 miles, the longest range production EV ever sold. The Cybertruck AWD carries around 123 kWh usable, good for approximately 340 miles.

For context: a gallon of petrol contains about 33.7 kWh of energy. Your Model 3 Long Range is carrying the energy equivalent of roughly 2.4 gallons of petrol, but using it far more efficiently, because electric motors convert about 85-90% of stored energy to motion (an internal combustion engine converts roughly 20-40%).

The battery also has a thermal management system running beneath every module (a serpentine coolant loop that keeps cells between 20°C and 40°C) the sweet spot for both performance and longevity. Too cold and lithium ions move sluggishly. Too hot and the cell chemistry degrades faster, and at extreme temperatures, risks thermal runaway (a chain reaction where heat from one cell ignites its neighbours).

The Chemistry When You Press the Accelerator

Here’s where it gets genuinely fascinating.

When your Tesla sits idle, the battery is in a stable state. Lithium ions are embedded in the anode, slotted into the graphite or silicon lattice like letters filed in slots. The electrons that came with those ions are sitting there too, held by the chemistry.

The moment you press the accelerator, the battery management system opens a circuit. Here’s what happens at the atomic level > at the anode, lithium ions begin to pull free from the graphite lattice and enter the electrolyte, migrating toward the cathode. The electrons that were paired with those ions cannot cross the electrolyte (the separator blocks them), they have only one path - through the external circuit. Again, that path runs through your motor.

At the cathode, arriving lithium ions intercalate into the cathode material (the iron phosphate lattice in LFP cells, or the nickel-cobalt-aluminum lattice in NCA). Electrons arriving through the external circuit reunite with the ions. More accelerator pedal means more current requested, which means more lithium ions deintercalating per second, which means more electrons flowing through your motor, which means more of that Tesla torque.

The core chemistry is an electrochemical redox reaction. Lithium is oxidised at the anode (loses electrons), and the cathode material is reduced (gains electrons). The free energy released by that reaction (the difference in chemical potential between a lithium ion in the anode lattice and one in the cathode lattice) is what powers every mile you drive.

From Battery to Motor to Wheel

Electrons leaving the battery are direct current (DC) at roughly 350-400V. Tesla’s drive motors are AC motors, more specifically, a permanent magnet synchronous reluctance motor at the rear. The inverter converts DC to three-phase AC, cycling current through the three phases of the motor’s stator windings in a rotating sequence. This creates a rotating magnetic field. The rotor, embedded with permanent magnets, chases that rotating field. The motor spins.

There’s no gearbox in the conventional sense, just a fixed-ratio single-speed reduction gear (roughly 9:1) that steps the motor’s high-RPM output down to wheel speed. The motor can rev to 20,000+ RPM on the Plaid version.

The absence of gear changes is why Tesla acceleration feels so relentlessly linear, there’s no shift interrupt, no torque dip between gears. From 0 RPM, a permanent magnet motor produces close to maximum torque. Instantaneously.

The Model S Plaid uses three motors, one at each rear wheel plus one at the front, producing a combined 1,020 horsepower and 1,050 lb-ft of torque. It covers 0-60 mph in 1.99 seconds. At that acceleration, you’re experiencing approximately 1.4g, slightly more than the force you’d feel on a steep rollercoaster drop.

The Return Trip: Regenerative Braking

The entire process runs in reverse when you lift your foot.

When you decelerate, the motor becomes a generator. The wheels are now driving the motor instead of the motor driving the wheels, and a spinning permanent magnet motor in a magnetic field induces current, electrons flow back toward the battery, lithium ions reintercalate at the anode, and kinetic energy is converted back to chemical potential energy.

Tesla’s one-pedal driving mode maximises this. Lift off the accelerator entirely and the car decelerates at up to 0.3g, harvesting most of that energy back. In city driving with lots of stop-start traffic, regenerative braking can recover 15-25% of the energy that would otherwise be lost as heat through friction brakes. It’s not perpetual motion, you lose energy to heat in the motor and resistive losses in the wiring every time. But it’s dramatically more efficient than a conventional brake pad heating the atmosphere.

The Bigger Picture

When you press the accelerator in a Tesla, you’re watching electrochemistry, electromagnetic induction, solid-state physics, and power electronics all execute together in under a millisecond, managed by software running on the motor control unit many thousands of times per second.

Lithium ions pull free from a silicon-graphite lattice. Electrons race through copper windings. A magnetic field rotates. A rotor chases it. A reduction gear amplifies the torque. The tyres push against the road.

That’s not just a car. That’s one of the most sophisticated energy conversion systems ever put in a consumer product, packaged in something that just looks like a very quiet, very fast saloon.

And somewhere in your battery pack right now, millions of lithium ions are waiting patiently in their graphite slots, ready to do it all again.