Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
Laptop batteries don’t weight hundreds of pounds.
The pack in my Spark is 475 lbs split into 5 modules. To make the modules swappable the power, battery management, and cooling would need to be plug and play. Then the owner has to crawl under the car and drop a 100 lb module.
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Without having given much thought to the engineering challenge; in principle it should be possible to design the vehicle in a modular way where certain battery bays in the floor or trunk would be accessible to the owner to drop in an extra battery or 3. Perhaps there would be a certain minimum capacity which is somewhat more permanently installed on the vehicle in a less accessible area, with some accessible battery bays available to the owner. Since the battery is the single largest cost of the vehicle, it makes sense to let people decide just how much range they wish to purchase.
Dreaming even bigger here, I'd like to see these modular batteries used in other applications such as lawn mowers, air compressors, and many other applications that typically have proprietary battery designs.
All that said, the fact that companies will be offering 2 or 3 battery sizes in their vehicles, and there are multiple EVs to choose from, there is a good selection for consumers to choose from.