DrRocket said:
If battery technology improves to the point where the 100 mile Nissan battery could be replaced with a similar sized/weight 200 or 300 mile battery, how easily would the car upgrade be?
It looks like dropping the battery pack would be easy but what about the software and wires? Someone has already mentioned that the 6.6 charger upgrade wouldn't work because the wiring is too light in the car.
I think it would be easy to swap battery because it's located at the bottom and is designed to be easily replaced in case of warranty work anyway.
There's a company called Better Place that is trail blazing a battery swap use model called "Drive-Switch-Go" where instead of recharging, you simply drive into a swapping station and a robot will take out the old battery and put in a freshly charged battery within 3 minutes and you simply drive a way. Check out their website, http://www.betterplace.com. Of course you can also charge the battery at home or at public charging stations, too, if you want. The swapping station is just another option depending on whether you need the instant exchange or not.
That use model also will eliminate the need to own your battery. You'll instead be working out a leasing deal with a battery company or car company and basically only buy the car but lease the right to a swappable battery model through a contract. This allows several things to happen:
1. It lowers the cost of electric car purchase because you'll only be paying for the car and not the battery. It's just like buying an ice car with an empty tank of gas and you buy the gas yourself. When this happens, the price of EVs will be very competitive with ICE cars.
2. It frees you from being stuck with older battery technology. As battery technology matures and gets cheaper and more capacity in the same space (better energy density), you'll simply inherit the new technologies automatically by virtue of swapping to newer batteries that have the newer technologies.
3. It spreads out the cost of energy consumption, with the battery cost being part of the total energy cost, so that you don't have to pay for the battery cost up front and only pay for electricity cost afterward. This way, when battery technology enables it to be more cheaply built in the future, you can enjoy the new cost savings and not get stuck with the older but more expensive technology.
Maybe I'm going out of scope of your question here. But I think it's not too far out of scope. So the Leaf is not Drive-Switch-Go yet. But let's say you buy a Leaf today, and in 8 years or 100K miles you need a new battery. I'm sure Nissan can easily take your old battery out and simply put in a newer, possibly less expensive, longer range, longer life battery very easily. Not Drive-Switch-Go easy, but not any harder than if they had to swap your battery today for another one at the dealership due to a warranty issue. Not any different than taking your car in to have new tires put on when the old tires are worn out.
As for the issue with the smaller wiring to the 3.3kW charger limiting an easy swappable upgrade to the 6.6kW charger, that's an entirely separate issue because this is the wiring to the charger and not the wiring to the battery. If the current battery pack can accept CHAdeMO type current, that means the wiring to the battery is already beefy enough for fast charging. If the capacity of the battery were to be doubled in the future, the speed of charge will not have changed although the length of charge will also be doubled. Unless the speed of charge can be doubled to keep the length of charge the same. But that's still a charger capacity issue and not a battery capacity issue.