DaveinOlyWA
Well-known member
jimcmorr said:This sounds to me like what the original Prius plug in conversions did. I think they used contactors to parallel the additional battery pack to the Prius OEM battery. Or maybe they disconnected the OEM battery with one set of contactors and connected the conversion pack in its place with another set. Not sure, but it was something like that. I followed that stuff for a while, until I became convinced that pure electric was better.
yes and no.
1) the Prius battery pack and a lot of the charge monitoring and control systems were relatively easy to access. it was basically in the trunk. so it was easy to expand that since the battery sat at the bottom of the empty trunk area.
2) that additional battery pack brought the weight of the Prius up to the current weight of the Leaf. granted, not as balanced, etc. but definitely not several hundreds pounds heavier than the current Leaf.
3) the Prius pack is an add on itself. the Leaf is 100% EV so i believe integration would be tighter and therefore "shoehorning" something in there will not be as easy as it seems.
also the Prius was a bit "front heavy" to begin with, so adding a bit of weight in the back was ok. the Leaf is not which is why the placement of the current pack was probably VERY critical to the design of the Leaf.
i just dont see the gain of an additional 50 miles of range when its gonna cost that much money. is it really worth invalidating a warranty on an unproven car?
there is a million what ifs that are very possible here. this is a new product. the battery technology is on the move and the key thing here is that batteries too dead to run in a car still have a lot of value to them. this makes for a pretty powerful bargaining chip.
who is to say that Nissan will not offer a battery pack that is 25% more capacity at the SAME size and weight in a few years?
as far as the cost? well i would not buy a Tesla either, but many can and will.