On Thu, 28 Aug 2014, Ben Goren wrote: > On Aug 28, 2014, at 12:07 PM, Ed Blackmond via EV <[email protected]> wrote: > > > In the leasing model, battery packs have a guaranteed capacity. It does > > not have a guaranteed manufacture date. > > That implies a corollary: that you might buy the car with a lease on a 24 kWh > battery...but are you still going to pay the same lease rate for that battery > a couple years later when it's only a 20 kWh battery? Is the car going to > report its battery capacity to the leasing agency, and you have a variable > payment based on capacity? Will you be penalized if you run the car hard and > the battery loses capacity faster than average? Will there be seasonal > adjustments in extreme climates? I would think it would work the other way. Instrumentation in the car would inform the driver of the capacaty the pack is able to guarantee. When it goes below the amount the driver is paying for, the driver would have the pack replaced or have the lease agreement modified.
> > A Tesla battery swap can be done in under two minutes, but I'm gonna take a > wild guess and suggest that a Leaf battery swap is no less than an hour of > shop time, conceivably a few hours if they didn't design it with > ease-of-access in mind. If you have a 20 kWh battery as your daily driver and > need a 90 kWh battery for your vacation trip, is it worth paying a couple > hundred dollars in labor just for the privilege? Either *somebody* is going > to have to eat those shop time costs (and that somebody will inevitably be > you) or else the car is going to have to be designed for rapid swapping. But > the engineering for rapid swapping is only going to make sense if it's a > common occurrence, such as what Tesla anticipates for their charging station. I would think that a manufacturer wishing to enable a pack swapping paradigm would design the vehicle and pack to make swapping as affordable and quick as possible. > > Then there's also the question of standardized battery packs, at least within > a manufacturer's product lineup if not across all manufacturers. That > probably won't happen until batteries have energy densities akin to gasoline. > At that point, you can imagine a standardized suitcase-sized module that you > just hoist into place; until then, we're going to continue to see batteries > in all sorts of weird shapes and sizes and locations to accommodate different > vehicle configurations. That's especially the case with today's EVs with > their weight- and drag-induced design restrictions. I suspect all the manufacturers are looking at ways to standardize this already. They do it with everything else on the vehicles. The Nissan Leaf uses the same backup camera and software as other Nissan and Infiniti vehicles. The Navigation system is the same across their whole line of vehicles as well. The same goes for things like shocks, brakes, wheels, and lots of other things. Why would a battery pack be any different? > > It's a great idea, but I don't see it meeting a practical intersection of > price and value before battery technology simply gets to the point that your > BEV econobox has a multiple-hundred mile range with battery pack lifetimes > comparable to today's ICE cars's engines and transmissions. On the other > hand, if batteries _don't_ improve at the pace one might anticipate, that > could well be the route the industry winds up taking. > I see this as the way to make the econobox electric vehicles possible. The Nissan Leaf would sell for the same price as its essential twin the Versa and the battery pack would be leased. Ed _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
