Lifetime vehicle? Bringing future tech (battery upgrade swap) to early adopters feasible?

[W in NC]

New battery technology would be certain to benefit everybody. CATL and many other battery suppliers are based overseas, tariffs and difficulty in raw material importation may limit innovation in this field.

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[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I don't swap batteries on laptops or phones. I just replace them.

This hurts me in my soul.

*Reaches under desk to current e-waste recycling box. Pulls out:

 

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

This thread, man.

*hits 'Show ignored content'*

Immediately regrets it.

 

[UnsungZero_OldTimeAdMan]

I think it's between "who knows" and "unlikely". R1 is not a global platform, so the numbers alone make it unlikely. And nothing happens unless there is a business case to justify someone, anyone, to get motivated enough to offer an aftermarket pack. How many gen 1 R1s have been delivered and not wrecked/written-off? and who will ever see a business opportunity? CATL is certainly not sending anything to the US this year or the next three.

 

[Ralph]

There are for sure 30 year old Toyotas with 500 miles still on the road...but you are definitely overestimating how many there are, the resources they've used over that lifespan and the pollution they put out.

And tens of thousands of those Tacomas will have their frames replaced. A problem not for just a few years but over a a 15-20 year period beginning in the late 1990s. I believe the problem is persisting to a lesser degree into their "3rd gen" version that began production in 2016.

 

[socaladam]

I suspect there will be a market in the future for replacement battery packs IF and WHEN battery technology makes a huge leap forward.

When the same size pack holds 5x more energy, and all the new cars get the new tech, someone will figure out how to profit from it on older EVs.

Otherwise, as another member said “it’s a laptop with wheels”, we’re going to see a lot of EVs sitting as junk electronics waiting to be recycled in China.

 

[Electrified Outdoors]

Here is my take on this. Battery subscription has to be a thing or maybe battery leasing. Vehicles have gone up so much in price in recent years and this would be a way to reduce vehicle cost, provide a consistent revenue stream, and take away one of the biggest fears around converting from ICE to EV (how long will the battery last?).

Also, we are being ripped off on battery replacements these days (for those out of warranty) When a pack is replaced it has some core value (100% of the cells are not defective) and when a battery needs replaced there should be an algorithm on which to base the core value of the existing back to reduce cost to the owner of pack replacement.

 

[theonetruestripes]

Has rivian made any comments on swapping packs in the future? If my battery in 10 years has degraded 20% and new batteries go 2x the distance in same size package and battery costs have dropped to $20/KWh seems like a new pack would make a lot more sense for me than a new truck.

Neither Rivian, nor any other US EV maker has made any comments on this sort of thing. I don’t follow EV makers in all other countries so when I say I haven’t heard of any in other countries either that statement isn’t all that useful.

One significant issue here is it would require future battery packs to share some design constraints with current battery packs, which may limit how useful they are to future vehicles. For example it would have to be comparable with the BMS in a 2022 R1T, granted if the only real change is “stop charging when the per cell charge hits 2.3V not 2.2V” that is a software change. One would assume some table somewhere defines a lot of the tunable parameters of a battery pack. On the other hand anything that is “the same” across all the existing packs may not be in that table, like temperatures to start the cooling loops. Also future battery packs may need very different cooling techniques, so today’s vehicles may not be compatible just because the future packs make more heat so they expect a larger radiator somewhere that the coolant needs to be pumped across so it can drain the heat away. Or maybe the future batteries end up with a different coolant chemistry that isn’t a good idea for current radiators but is fine with future radiators (solution: replace the radiator when you upgrade the battery pack). Or maybe the future packs are a physical different size because that is useful for the future vehicles. Like if the R1 sales drop to almost zero with the R2, R3, and R4 on the market so they end up with packs that are R2 sized, and don’t usefully fit in the R1.

Or future batteries end up being either lower or higher voltage for the pack.

Any of that is pretty easy to deal with when you are also redesigning the vehicle around the new pack, even if it is “take last years R1 and make it happy with the new battery packs”, but it can be non-trivial to make that battery pack with with an unmodified R1, or even a lightly modified R1.

I mean I absolutely get it, I wouldn’t want to pay $70+k to replace my R1S if I could pay $20k to double the battery as part of an upgrade (more then doubling the range if the old battery was worn down after say a few decades of use).

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