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Comment by woodandsteel | Hacker News Reader

A nice thing about this trend is that it means if you buy an EV today and replace the battery in, say, five years, the new battery will probably cost much less and also have much greater range. So you will have a car that gets better as it gets older, at least in some important ways.

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Thats an interesting point, however that may not be how it actually plays out, at least from my somewhat relevant experience.

I had the misfortune of having my Honda hybrid's battery die, and if it weren't for CARB's extended emissions warranty for all HV car batteries, I would have been SOL paying 3-4K (or 2-3K for a refurb) for a tiny ~1kWh battery.

The new battery in my hybrid didn't go down in price significantly despite ~9 years of battery advancement, nor is it more powerful than the one it replaced.

I understand I'm comparing NiMH to Li-ion, but perhaps 5-10 years from now Li-ion will be superseded by a another chemistry, leaving today's electric car buyers with a similar experience.

I would hope this is just poor execution on the manufacturers behalf and will eventually realize that making the battery an upgradable module would be a great selling point. However, based on experience I don’t see manufactures wanting to sell better batteries when they can make it exclusive to newer models. I think after the proliferation of EV’s we will see a lot of aftermarket batteries with significantly better specs.

I would hope this is just poor execution on the manufacturers behalf and will eventually realize that making the battery an upgradable module

When does it ever work like this in the real world though? Planned obsolesce and all that. Even in this industry, replacement car parts cost far above the component price when the car was new.

Yes, it's against the interests of car manufacturers to do so. But i could see china encourage that open battery standard(among chinese companies only, behind closed doors) as a way to get market share of both cars and batteries.

Since Musk is not making electric cars just for the profits, maybe Tesla will produce replacement batteries with better specs at lower cost. Tesla cars are designed to have battery packs that can be easily replaced contra Apples recent devices. Tesla car batteries will be the first ones, at volume, that people with electric cars will want to replace. If Tesla sets the trend other car manufactures will be at a disadvantage if they don't follow.

One of the overlooked cool benefits of EVs imo, is that you can repurpose old batteries, even if they aren't suitable for the EV market. As a battery ages and loses capacity, say it goes down to only 50% of it's capacity when new, it may no longer be acceptable for use in a car but it could still be perfectly adequate as a back up power source in a house.

Right. So when you are calculating costs, you need to include how much you are going to get for your old battery at usedlionbatteries.com. Of course, the faster new batteries get cheaper and better, the less you old battery is going to be worth.

That's certainly true but I was mostly meaning to highlight the fact that as these batteries age, and may no longer be suitable for their original purpose, they could still be useful for a whole range of alternative purposes.

As the original battery owner I don't intend to get much for selling a used car battery, but it still seems quite cool to have it be repurposed for some other use.

A few manufacturers do already offer upgrades. E.g. BMW offer an upgrade for the i3 from the original 22kWh pack to their newer 33kWh pack.

Tesla for the very low production run of Roadsters as well. (~2500)

In theory, yes, but the replacement is incredibly expensive, I believe around $15k.

> I would hope this is just poor execution on the manufacturers behalf and will eventually realize that making the battery an upgradable module would be a great selling point.

Older phones, e.g. Nokias would commonly had standardised, replaceable batteries. Sadly, this trend has gone by the wayside. I can imagine EV makers going the non replaceable battery route. Maybe in the future we'll have some popular open source EV+standard spec battery pack, the "build your own computer" version of an EV.

Most of the battery advances have been inside the realm of lithium ion, so that's no surprise. These price drops are a specific stage in technology/manufacturing advances, not something that will continue indefinitely.

You can be confident that lithium ion won't be replaced on that short of a time scale. Nothing's ready to do so.

The important question is whether li-ion battery improvements will stop before EV's become decisively better than ICE.

Once there's a critical mass of EVs out there, I think we'll see a third-party industry cropping up doing battery pack replacements/rebuilds at competitive prices.

Third party pack upgrades already exist for some of the most popular EVs, like the Nissan Leaf.

Tesla will put an end to that, based on how protective they are about their cars.

They'll run into Magnuson-Moss if they try.

I tried to research this a bit. There have been a few models which have gotten an upgraded battery, so we should start seeing these options.

The new Nissan Leaf has a larger battery pack, but it's not backward compatible.

https://transportevolved.com/2015/09/11/confirmed-30-kwh-nis...

But they do have a batter replacement option which has better thermal management.

http://insideevs.com/breaking-nissan-prices-leaf-battery-rep...

I wasn't able to find out anything about the Renault Zoe, or Kia Soul (new model isn't out yet though).

But our dealership did tell us that he expects there to be battery upgrades available for the Kia Soul, and this also seems to reflect what others on the forums have heard. But he did say it might be 3rd party options. Supposedly you can upgrade individual cells.

So the picture isn't clear yet. But I think once the market reaches a certain size, there will at least be 3rd party options.

In the full McKinsey report they forecast less of a drop going forward, 16% over the next 3 years, 55% drop over the next 13 years. So 4-5% per year. That is a lot less then the depreciation of a new car. It's probably not going to be worth it to replace the battery.

The depreciation of a new car is, in large part, based on powertrain wear. If relatively inexpensive battery replacements/upgrades are available, that changes the value of a used car. It could reduce depreciation substantially.

I would be surprised if a well-maintained, crash-free electric vehicle in a climate without road salt wouldn't be worth battery replacement.

It's also not the correct economic consideration; you have to compare the value of a used EV vs. that same vehicle with a battery upgrade. If that value is greater than the cost of the battery, that's all you need. High depreciation of new cars makes the upgrade more attractive, actually, if you're considering resale value; upgrading an old car would allow you to avoid the 'off the lot' hit.

Completely anecdotally, almost all of my ongoing car maintenance costs for a 18 year old car I recently sold have been unrelated to the power train. Wheel bearings, steering bushings, brakes.

This is probably in part due to the UK annual inspection which checks all these things and forces you to fix them.

I agree though that pretty much all the catastrophic scrap-the-car failures are power train related. A lot of modern engines are really, really reliable though, so will happily go for hundreds of thousands of miles without issue.

Unless, of course, the car manufacturers get the bright idea to make EV batteries "irreplaceable", too - you know, for "better efficiency" or to make the cars "leaner" or whatever their excuse would be.

Or if they do the opposite (planned obsolescence).

They'll probably remove the headphone ports while they're at it.

Imagine thinner cars!

When a battery "can't" be replaced on a consumer device, that generally just means you need a soldering iron or to pry it open. Many car repairs are already vastly more difficult than that, so those barriers would be negligible. It's hard to think of an equivalent.

I can't imagine people would put up with that. People buy new smartphones every few years, but they expect their cars to last decades. The average age of cars on American roads is 11.5 years. If you try to convince people to accept a sharp reduction in car lifetime, it had better come with a sharp reduction in price, or people won't buy it.

As an aside (and not to hijack the thread..) but keep this in mind when some economists argue that inflation is good.

It is technological improvement leading to falling prices that is beneficial to society and to an economy.

Falling prices is deflation, not inflation.

That was my point. That deflation is good not inflation.

I'm sorry that you are being downvoted, it seems nobody on HN has any reading comprehension.

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