Battery Upgrades are very possible

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Crosspost from the Fenix Systems battery thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/ck1zef/1st_successful_paid_customer_battery_change_from/

Looks like someone has actually put a 40kWh in a 24kWh car, with full instrumentation working. 180 miles in a 2011.
 
I'm guessing some one figured out how to teach a bms how to translate.
I wasn't expecting that for like another year.
 
This could be a game changer for folks with the older Leafs. There was a 2012 for sale nearby for $2500 recently. I thought about buying it just to use the batteries for solar backup but didn't since it will be years before I'm ready for that. However, buying the car and spending $7500 to put in a 40 kWh pack would yield a $10k 40kWh Leaf. Not a bad proposition if everything else was OK.
 
I follow this LEAF battery upgrage swap story out of interest but it is extremely unlikely to ever be an option for me, or for the lion's share of 24 kWh LEAF owners. Consider:

1. Nissan is not interested
2. A full fledged car garage is needed due to the equipment requirements, battery heft
3. LEAF expertise is needed
4. The LEAF does not travel
5. Battery shipping is *expensive*, and 40 kWh lightly used but in good condition packs are a rare bird indeed.

How many garages in your town fit the bill ?
How many 40 kWh packs that meet your requirements are available locally and are not prohibitively expensive to transfer ?
 
SageBrush said:
I follow this LEAF battery upgrage swap story out of interest but it is extremely unlikely to ever be an option for me, or for the lion's share of 24 kWh LEAF owners. Consider:

1. Nissan is not interested
2. A full fledged car garage is needed due to the equipment requirements, battery heft
3. LEAF expertise is needed
4. The LEAF does not travel
5. Battery shipping is *expensive*, and 40 kWh lightly used but in good condition packs are a rare bird indeed.

How many garages in your town fit the bill ?
How many 40 kWh packs that meet your requirements are available locally and are not prohibitively expensive to transfer ?



I went through the hassle of all of this to get myself a new 24kWh pack. I agree that its not for the majority... And it was a ton of work... But very worth it. I saved ~$4.5k on the battery.

If I could have done this instead, I would have gone for it in a heartbeat.

I am not normal. I am also not rich. For those of us that can't afford a Tesla or newer leaf, this is... amazing. :)
 
SageBrush said:
I follow this LEAF battery upgrage swap story out of interest but it is extremely unlikely to ever be an option for me, or for the lion's share of 24 kWh LEAF owners. Consider:

1. Nissan is not interested
2. A full fledged car garage is needed due to the equipment requirements, battery heft
3. LEAF expertise is needed
4. The LEAF does not travel
5. Battery shipping is *expensive*, and 40 kWh lightly used but in good condition packs are a rare bird indeed.

How many garages in your town fit the bill ?
How many 40 kWh packs that meet your requirements are available locally and are not prohibitively expensive to transfer ?

1. Nissan is not interested
Why is this even listed as an issue?
2. A full fledged car garage is needed due to the equipment requirements, battery heft
I got that
3. LEAF expertise is needed
I got that
4. The LEAF does not travel
Leafs can be shipped 1000km for 200€
5. Battery shipping is *expensive*, and 40 kWh lightly used but in good condition packs are a rare bird indeed.
I shipped a 40kWh battery for 260€ across three EU countries

What?!
 
Dala said:
-
1. Nissan is not interested
Why is this even listed as an issue?
-
No technical support
No warranty
No garage access

If a problem occurs after installation, where does the car owner go ?
 
I should easily be able to drop the battery using my pallet jack.
Probably do it outside so I can roll the battery inside the garage to take it apart.

In the US I have shipped several vehicle long distance over the years.
I had my leaf shipped from Chicago to new mexico, total cost to my door was about 50 cents a mile start to finish to have it carried by truck.

To have a leaf battery shipped across the US would run $250 to $500 and that's delivered to where I work where there are about 20 commercial loading docks and dozens of forklifts. Delivery to a truck loading dock just about cuts the price in half compared to home delivery.

Now let's see if some one does it with an e+ pack.
 
goldbrick said:
This could be a game changer for folks with the older Leafs. There was a 2012 for sale nearby for $2500 recently. I thought about buying it just to use the batteries for solar backup but didn't since it will be years before I'm ready for that. However, buying the car and spending $7500 to put in a 40 kWh pack would yield a $10k 40kWh Leaf. Not a bad proposition if everything else was OK.

$7500? Might get a salvage one for that price. You really think Nissan will sit on its hands if this guy's business takes off?

I would have preferred he put together his own pack. Might be a bit easier that way.
 
I didn't read the article in much detail but I have to imagine the pack was out of a wrecked Leaf and this will always be a cottage industry. That's fine with me and I doubt this would ever become a high volume business. Best case, it could get to the point of the Suburu engine into a Vanagon type business, which is fairly mature now and well supported with easily available parts for the swap, mechanics who have done multiple swaps, etc.
 
SageBrush said:
Dala said:
-
1. Nissan is not interested
Why is this even listed as an issue?
-
No technical support
No warranty
No garage access

If a problem occurs after installation, where does the car owner go ?

I offer 1year warranty, technical support if something goes wrong or question arises.

If problems arise later down the line, you can always go to an official Nissan dealership with it. It's still their battery! Or you can g back to the battery installer.

This will be done on cars that already have the OEM 5/8year warranty expired. I don't think people need another 8 year warranty on packs that are 1/2 the price of Nissan.
 
Dala said:
This will be done on cars that already have the OEM 5/8year warranty expired. I don't think people need another 8 year warranty on packs that are 1/2 the price of Nissan.



Fully agree. I would totally take you up on your service, Dala, if I lived nearby and had not just done it myself.
 
Update on instrumentation situation. The CAN bridge is having issues keeping up with the 2013-2017 VCM. Sometimes it takes too long for messages to be modified, causing random turtle mode from the VCM. The older 2011-2012 VCM does not have so tight tolerances, so it works fine there. Muxsan is investigating.

In the meantime, I've thrown together a quick custom screen for Leafspy (don't mind the shoddy formatting :D)
wDztQ9r.jpg


I really wish it would be possible to do mathematical operations on this screen! Right now this is just a lookup table, but it's better than driving blind!
 
Some negative news, the 30/24 pack gave me a scare yesterday.

I was chugging along the highway at 60mph (dash showed '--' miles remaining, '---' % SOC), and I estimated real SOC to be 25% left (3.5V min cell voltage). I tried to pass a car, and it triggered turtle! This should not have happened until 3.1V min cell voltage, but I guess momentarily at high amp draw the min voltage will go quite low.

So, I continued on the highway for 8 miles while in turtle. Not fun. So I guess this will be added on the to-do list. Maybe a restart of the car would have brought it out of turtle?

On a positive side, this explains some of the mails I've received. For instance, there was a guy in Poland whose company did a 40/24 bruteforce upgrade, and they got turtle after 140km traveled on the first testrun. They must have experienced the same thing, premature turtle due to voltage drop under high load, and they called the upgrade a failure. Except it's not a failure, it's just the way these batteries work with a 24 BMS...
 
After modifying the 0x5BC CAN message, and adding 70gids, the 24/30kWh bruteforce battery is atleast doing two things right now
u8k6Jpz.jpg


As you can see, it now reports remaining km even when all the bars have disappeared. Before it just went '---'! Also it doesn't trigger LBW anymore at 16%, it instead triggers close to actual LBW!

Now only two things left to fix, the dash SOC is still showing wrong % values. Also the chargebars disappear way too soon. But progress is progress! :D
 
For those interested in the 40kWh upgrades, I have just started trying to on-the-fly modify pretty much every CAN message put out by the 40kWh battery to try and make it work with a 2011 Leaf. There are surprisingly few differences, the main ones seem to be a few extra muxes making it confusing to the VCM what's happening, but the CAN datastream is mostly the same. I'll be sharing progress as I make meaningful steps.

Oh also, I wish I got a 2013+ Leaf, the connector is different under the first gen... Very annoying.
 
And it works. Getting a 40kWh battery to work on a 24kWh Leaf is not hard. Took me a day. I'll post more details later :)
 
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