Quote:
Originally Posted by jjackstone
I'm won't be talking about buying a new manufactured EV, but about buying that manufactured EV 10 years down the road with the battery going bad. So at 10% of the original cost,the purchase might cost as much as $3500 for the used vehicle. Let's say that ten years from now the battery can be replaced for 1/3 of the cost that it now costs. This is using high estimate according to all the battery gurus out there that keep telling us that that costs should be a tenth of the current costs within a few years. And it assumes the buyer does all his own work as you do. So i'm going estimate another $3000 for a new battery pack. Now I don't know the motor life expectation in EV's , but if they are well built AC motors I would expect them to last at least thirty years with no real issues. I would think the controllers would die first. So now we have $6500 into a ten year old car.
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Interesting point, but this is another example of why a conversion that uses universal components makes more sense. After that decade, when you go to replace the pack, you would be dealing with a lot of proprietary stuff that you may not have the tooling or software for. It would be challenging to upgrade an outdated component with something that makes more sense, and you might be limited to only replacing the battery. One might very well be able to simply replace the battery, assuming that a comparable one was available, but it may not be up to speed with what EVs are using in 10 years. The battery is only one of many systems on an EV, so we might want to look at what happens if a DC DC converter, or inverter, or something fails. On a conversion, it is not a big problem to update a BMS, or update to a more efficient or powerful controller, since we are talking about universal components. You could replace a pack on a 10 year old conversion with the latest technology, and maybe update the charger to something a little faster, without having to figure out how to integrate it with proprietary software. You could then take the older charger and hand it down to one of your kids cars.