Any car tech has to pass what I call the “rusty pickup test.” It has to degrade gracefully and remain useful and safe enough for use.
Current EV tech passes that. I can totally picture a rusty old F-150 Lightning with aftermarket repairs.
Does it though? I heard exploding/self-burning batteries, which were a problem with some cellphones, were a much bigger problems with electric vehicles? I don't have data on how often it happens though, but that makes me skeptical.
Lithium batteries in consumer electronics are not really engineered for a ton of safety but for rapid time to market which is certainly not what I’d like to see for very long. And while shipping lithium batteries a warning label needs to be attached but shipping gasoline and lighter fluid requires special permits and must be transported isolated with certain guarantees by law.
In this respect our current market has deemed lithium batteries to be far safer than gasoline without much need for regulatory pressure to do so.
If you want to completely replace the batteries in a Tesla you can do so in less than an hour, if I recall correctly. It doesn’t require any special equipment either.
Do you have resources on this topic?
[0] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/balancing-the-batter...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Q0nNkQTC
Really about 5-6 min in.
Each module has six groups of cells in series, 74 in parallel in each group, giving a module voltage of 22.8 V.
See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Tesla-Model-S-74p6s-Batt...
As such their next gen pack is a single structural member of the car and likely will not be replaceable at all.
Tesla replaces battery packs and then sends the old one back to the factory to be refurbished, rather than junked.
As for future designs, a structural battery pack would still be replaceable. The difference is that the battery pack would supply a portion of the strength and rigidity of the frame. That doesn’t mean the car would fall apart if you removed it, however.