Building A Leaf

[Hank Scorpio]

On 7/18/2018 at 5:58 AM, Duncan said:

even with current (global)/ upcoming (oz) leaf, I am not at all convinced that larger batteries are the only way to go.  In my opinion buyers who think properly about it should be able to choose say a 24kwh battery for 25k instead of a 40kwh one for 40k. 24kwh has been plenty for day to day use in the city, and conversely 40kwh isn't enough for all of the longer distances uses we would need so it is just a more expensive in between option.  You only ever need enough juice for your regular daily use so you can charge overnight, there is nothing gained by dragging around a battery that gives you say 3 days between charges....

I'm totally down with this.

As soon as it's viable, we want to get rid of our HiLux work ute and replace it with an EV ute. The work ute only gets used around town during business hours, so a short range isn't a problem. And on the off chance that the boss or myself need to drive it home, both of us live less than 10km from work.

We would be totally happy buying a cheaper vehicle with a smaller battery as if we ever needed to go on a roadt trip we'd probably take one of our petrol powered vehicles.

[sneakey pete]

I might have missed it earlier but how many KM's do you have on it now Duncan?

Another one of the issues is that battery life is related quite a bit to number of charging cycles, smaller batteries are obviously going to go through more cycles to do the same number of km's than bigger ones, or bigger ones might be able to stay out of the 0-20 and 80-100% charge range which is also less optimal for battery life in some cases.

I guess its too early to tell as we only really have 3 major production runs of vehicles at the moment that have had a few years out there (tesla, i3's and leaf), and they all use different cell chemistry and design philosophies (active cooling vs passive etc). There's reports of Tesla's with 5 years/300k km still being at 90% battery capacity, and then we have the opposite with 66% after 5 years with something like the Leaf so there certainly is a lot of variability in there people will be worried about. Some sort of battery specific warranty for long term use will probably be needed to convince people.

 

Obviously with all the fuss with the early leaf's nissan has made changes to the leaf's battery chemistry and management software so you would expect them to do better. I was thinking that a 30kwh one would suit work for my needs but now second guessing wondering if a 40kwh is more long term future proof in terms of battery degradation.

Its worth pointing out that the 30kwh ones use the same type of cells etc just with better energy density, ditto with the new leaf's 40kwh, however the 60kwh one they're supposed to release at the end of the year switches to a different cell/pack structure so will have different characteristics again (better or worse who knows)

 

 

[Hertz Donut]

I've seen reports of taxis in the UK doing some 200,000 miles but I don't know if they've had replacement batteries or not. I'd be surprised/delighted if they hadn't.