Just bought a 13 Leaf SL ... Question

So.... I just bought a 2013 Leaf SL in All Black, Premium Package, shipped to me from the other side of the USA for around $14,000.00 all in. I have always thought EV's were cool but couldn't really justify the purchase before the recent fall in prices on the used market. Took some of the money I saved on the car and splurged on an Evatran Plugless wireless "charging" station.

I'll be waiting a few weeks for the car to arrive, electrician to wire the garage, and even more time for the induction charging pad to be installed on my Leaf. But, overall I'm very excited about this car. The test drives I took locally sold me on the smooth and quiet ride.

But, my engineering type mind wonders if it's possible to buy a second Leaf battery on eBay, remove the prismatic packs from the heavy enclosure (in other words, disassemble it into its component parts), and place them in a different enclosure in the back of the Leaf with some sort of switch to go between the internal battery pack on my Leaf to the second pack I'd be adding? Or, alternatively, simply use the secondary pack as a DC Fast Charger using some sophisticated as yet undiscovered DC-DC converter to raise the voltage to 480V?

Am I completely out of my mind here?

The deal is there's a campground and water park I LOVE to visit in the summer, but it's just too far away on a standard Leaf battery. I really need 125-150 mile range. In the summer this is tough under any circumstances. But, this range would be adequate to make my entire frequent camping trips possible in this vehicle. Otherwise, I have to drive my Honda Element or ditch the Leaf and consider an i3 instead. I'm disinclined to buy an i3/REX because of the substantial difference in cost. $14K vs $40K is huge. I'm sure I'd love the acceleration, REX, and auto cruise control, but the price probably isn't worth it.

Has anyone here attempted to install a spare 24kWh battery in their Leaf?

How did it go?

Thanks
Brian

There would be too many hurdles to overcome with the stock leaf system. I'm no expert on it but others have commented before that to install a new battery to a car you have to have it paired by Nissan at a dealer. To do what you want to do you would probably have to stop and re pair to the new battery each time you want to switch over. I'm not sure if you can even get your hands on one of these Nissan tools and if they would be portable.

I've though about a similar thing that would be relatively easy to do for a person with the right skills. You can buy new leaf surplus batteries from 2013 (probably the 2011/12 chemistry) for about $3k for the large 12kWh module. People have bought them and used them in DIY kit electric cars or conversions, you can easily wire this 12kWh module (which is about 200 lbs and will fit in the trunk) into a parallel 2 x 100 volt unit that is perfect for a small DC or AC motor that you could build in on a custom rear sub frame. You can get used forklift DC motors capable of adding 40 hp 60 lbft for a few hundred, there's an open source DC controller that will handle up to 144v for about $600. The only thing you'd need from the stock leaf systems is a 12v signal to turn it all on (easy) and a message to interpret from the accelerator pedal (TPS signal is stock OBDII so it should be there on the leaf).

Not only would this give you more range but it would give a good performance boost too and AWD.

If you wanted to put a battery in the back and use it to charge the main pack you'd be looking at a pretty high cost and still downtime to sit and let the main pack charge up. Not to mention a pretty serious weight hit. You'd never have double the range because of this (same applies to the AWD above, it won't give 50% more range).

For much less money, weight and space you could buy a generator.

Have you checked plugshare.com? Sign up and check private plugs. There may be a way for you to do it with a stop off.

The best solutions for you are to either plan on charging for a few hours on the way to the campground, drive more slowly to get there (actually the quickest, easiest, cheapest option) or get a generator. The last isn't as nice an option it may seem, because it's quite hard to get L-2 charging from a portable gen (there is a topic here on that), and L-1 charging only adds 5% charge per hour.

And last and least, the plural of "EV" is "EVs". You never make a plural with an apostrophe.