Highly unlikely. I imagine they use these if and only if there are not suitable remanufactured packs available due to temporary supply constraints. They are constantly taking in and refurbing old batteries and I imagine they’ll always prioritize using those first vs. something brand new.
They've got an "interesting" problem on their hands.
How many resources do they want to dedicate to fixing this? Properly refurbishing a sick pack likely involves putting failed packs on a test harness, putting it through cycles, then cracking it open and putting modules on another test bench, then pulling out cells and assessing the health of each cell, then taking "like" cells (or modules) and stitching them back together to make a "new" pack.
I'm guessing that properly assessing and rebuilding a pack involves putting the sick pack on a harness, testing it, then cracking it open and putting modules or cells in a test cycle or two, then sorting the resulting mess, then stitching together like piles of cells or modules into a new pack that ideally is similar to something that was originally sold. If I understand correctly, there are parts inside the pack that will kill you dead dead dead if you lick them, so you need to train people and treat the packs with respect.
This takes space and people. Potentially some very expensive resources. This crazy machine that stitches together thousands of little battery cylinders into a cohesive module is actually one of the crown-jewels of Tesla; nobody else even tries -- they use enormous pouch cells.
So -- how much of some factory space is tesla going to dedicate to this process? And, let's assume that these packs are coming back because they're sick -- they may actually be so sick that any rebuilt pack made up of these modules will still be 0.001% failure prone... So you're playing a mug's game where you're rebuilding packs that will fail soon anyhow, because they've all been subjected to regen charging when too cold, or supercharging with too much ethanol in the winter, or whatever the heck it is that's actually broken these things after 5 seasons of use.
Another choice is to cell the sick packs to someone else who will break them down and use the cells for rechargeable flashlights or e-scooters for hipsters or maybe home power buffers for eco-utopians. Let that 3rd party play cell testing and tetris; if they don't have to stack 8,000 like cells together they've got a much easier game than you have trying to make a sane set of 4 refurbished 85 packs using 5 worn out 85 packs.
If you do that, some other entity assumes the liability of not-licking the insides of the pack, of letting the cells catch fire, or whatever.
We don't know what's going on, but I think there's a non-zero chance that they've been refurbishing packs because they didn't have an alternative, and that they'll be switching to something else as quickly as possible.
I for one am going to be watching this closely....
