mmmike wrote:Go mux! Go mux! Great work and video! I plan to do a similar extender although I was thinking I will make my battery pack not permanent and charged off-board in my shop. I want to have the pack in a suitcase (or two) and only connect up in the trunk in the infrequent event when I need the extra range. But if your permanent install looks good maybe I will change my mind.
I'm seriously considering doing both. The permanent battery will increase my total useable capacity to around 35kWh, which is probably just a couple kWh shy of what we need to go on holiday and get there in one go. So for long trips, I think I'm going to try and package up these VW GTE batteries in some kind of easily removable container, cook up some safe high-current contacts behind one of the unexplained removable covers in the trunk and make a removable trunk battery. Those GTE batteries are 1.086kWh each at 12 series, so I need 8 of them to get to 96S, which is about 8.7kWh, a nice increment to the main battery.
Another option is to ALSO do a main battery swap with more modern cells. On a volume (85L) and weight (155kg) basis, you can fit about 40kWh inside the main battery shell if you use modern 18650s, or about 45kWh of 2170s. Well, a bit more because you can forego the compression stacks and use that volume for batteries. This, combined with the permanent extender, would make the 2011 Leaf a 60kWh car, without sacrificing trunk space. Certainly interesting, although I do NOT look forward to the labor involved in that. I think I'd only do that if I had a salvage pack available to me that I can just take my time swapping out the cells over the course of many weeks.
Regardless, the plans for everything will be published here, free of charge, for anyone to try out. If it all works out, I am pretty sure this is the way to go with Leaf extender batteries.