Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
Good design can mean long product cycles between a refresh,or body-in-white.All R&D is recovered,all tooling,factory is paid off.
|
There appears to be growing validity to this with the EV market directly. I found an article earlier today (don't recall where) saying that DHL has struck a deal with BMW to repackage their battery system for local delivery vehicles.
It is an interesting proposition if you are familiar with how their packs are constructed in the case of the i3, with 8 individual modules in series to make up the pack. It is a very adaptable system based upon Samsung prismatic cells which are themselves based on set design dimension. BMW did a bang up job with packaging that can relatively simply be scaled up or down as needed. Meanwhile, Samsung is continuing to increase Ah capacity of the cells themselves. So BMW isn't really having to devote massive resources to re-engineering the system as the cell tech changes.
Because of that, for the most part, an upgrade of the early 22kW capacity i3 to the new 44kW capacity is plug and play.