Fenix Power: A new third party battery replacement?

[warrenc]

I saw this on my Facebook Seattle Nissan Leaf Owners site this morning. Anybody heard of these guys before? Seems like it could be a little pricey at $100 + per month, but it is an alternative. https://fenix.systems/leafbattery

[LeftieBiker]

It's extremely light on specs for a company that wants deposits now.

[cwerdna]

There's some ongoing discussion about this supposed pack from Fenix's CEO and founder at https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattle ... 1340863625.

[cwerdna]

I added some comments at http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.p ... 22#p537222.

I'm thinking this thread title should be changed to include Fenix Power. I'm not sure if the OP can do that or it'll take a moderator.

[DaveinOlyWA]

I saw this on my Facebook Seattle Nissan Leaf Owners site this morning. Anybody heard of these guys before? Seems like it could be a little pricey at $100 + per month, but it is an alternative. https://fenix.systems/leafbattery

Pricy? hmmm...how so? Cause it definitely isn't compared to alternative solutions all of which would be well over $20,000 unless of course you elect to go with the $8500 option which would be 7 years on your "pricy $100" a month statement.

But would a new pack last 85 months?? But then again, that is a rather easy question to answer since we know the current one didn't... by a long shot.

[warrenc]

I suppose pricey was a poor choice of words. I'd be hesitant to commit to a monthly fee for an unknown product from an unknown company with an unknown future.
Just a whole lot of questions would need to be answered for the average consumer to consider signing up, I think. I do applaud their willingness to break into this market, though. Nobody else has been stepping up, and I can understand that since it's a pretty narrow market. They obviously have bigger plans.

[DaveinOlyWA]

I am sure MUCH more details will be coming well before the product is actually launched.

[DarthPuppy]

That is very interesting. I hope it works out as planned.

[specialgreen]

The Zoe 40kwhr battery lease costs USD $143/month from Renault:

https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finan ... -hire.html

So $100-$200 isn't out of line from what Europeans are paying for a similar service. That said, if you assume that you will need to replace a Nissan pack every 8 years, for $8500, then you'd only be paying $88/month (and only on the back-end). I could see people choosing to pay $120/month for the privilege of making it "someone else's problem," but $143 is a tad high, and I would just choose to pay Nissan for new packs.

They talk about replacing any failed modules; but It seems like pack-wide degradation is a bigger problem than module failure. They need to define what amount of storage is considered an "OK working battery," similar to how Renault says they'll replace any pack that falls under 75% of new capacity.

The fact that we're even talking about this is kind-of a black-eye for Nissan. I would guess that many Leaf owners bought with the idea that the warranty was a back-stop, and not a prediction of failure. You'd only spend $100-$200/month if you expected recurring failures. That may be accurate, but it's not good.

[JohnBysinger]

I can address people's questions about this product, I'm the founder of Fenix, we've had a ton of questions about how our solution works and have updated our FAQ to address them. But that doesn't cover everything, so let me know if there's something else you'd like to know. https://fenix.systems/faq

But to address a couple from what I see above: We knew we were taking a bit of a risk announcing this early with fewer details than we intended. Our roadmap had us announcing this coming spring when we would have quite a bit more to share. But with Nissan raising their pricing, we had people who knew about us asking that we announce sooner so people would know there are options coming. This is also why we're including such a deep discount (90%) on the reservation/installation cost right now. The installation cost of $1,500 mostly goes towards freight, batteries are heavy. But for anyone willing to commit this early, we'll eat the majority of their install cost as a thank you for their willingness to sign up now. And of course, as we get closer to spring, if the details don't look good to you, the deposit is refundable.

As for the monthly pricing, the Leaf is just the first application of our solution, and we'll be building our service to scale to other solutions. So pricing will actually be on a capacity/storage basis and will be a few dollars per month per kWh. We're designing as much flexibility into our physical and service solutions to give customers as much flexibility as they want. And sure you can lease a Zoe pack, but will that pack improve over time? Ours will.

We're in this not just to help Leaf, but to completely change EV, we think that this common design of a monolithic, expensive battery that can only be replaced by the OEM manufacturer is an obstacle to greater adoption. It's time that batteries were made serviceable, and provide more flexibility for the owners, and we're going to show the world how that's done for both the Leaf, and in a "Halo" product in a Corvette C5 conversion.