Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
Jacking Up a Car Is Dangerous. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
I suppose jacking off a car is also dangerous.
Depends. Are you a dragon?
Wasnt there subreddits for that?
Not that I know of.
There is dragonsfuckingcars.
Eh. That’s not really comparable to lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are similar to bombs in that they’re highly dense stores of energy. If something goes wrong and that energy storage medium gets exposed to air, or there’s a failure in a charging safety mechanism, that’s a chemical fire at best, explosion at worse, but no matter what, it’s extremely toxic.
Lead-acid batteries also present a risk of explosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
That’s why you attach jumper cables to the dead battery first.
A car sitting 6 feet in the air is also a highly dense storage of energy that could be released at any moment. I do get your point, but there are ways to mitigate the dangers associated with working on a pack, and they’re not as volatile as you think. Being exposed to air isn’t going to cause a cell to explode as the lithium is mixed with other chemicals inside the cell to make it fairly inert. The danger comes from short circuits, whether it be a puncture or bridging contacts with something conductive.
Have you ever attached jumper cables to a dead lead-acid battery?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.
- Make all batteries use an easily swappable set of standard cell sizes.
- Make battery controllers standardised and swappable.
- …. Er… that’s it.
But that will never happen because the EV manufacturers couldn’t charge ridiculous amounts of money for proprietary batteries.
That why we need regulators. The market doesn’t magically deal with “Tragedy of the Commons”.
But you know gubmint regjuleshons are stifling innovation.
God forbid that they concentrate on the quality of the basic vehicle instead.
This was posted to one of the communities I sub to a day ago: https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-battery-2666672335
This would probably be the best option if it takes off.
I heard NIO has this technology already and are looking to standardise it.
Is it money? I bet it’s money
Mostly it’s money for the consumer. I have a Prius so it might be a little different. But when the hybrid battery goes out costs something like $7,000 to have it replaced. A mechanic in town will repair it for $1000.
Now my car isn’t worth $7000 so if I had to replace the battery then I would just get a new car and this one might end up in the scrap heap. In getting it repaired I have gotten something like 6 more years out of it, at least, and that’s a pretty significant environmental savings.
And that’s essentially what the article is saying.
So it is about money.
Manufacturers will keep making their cars hard to repair cos they want all the money of the customers in original replacement parts. Their cars are specially designed to only be repaired by their own technicians, they want the whole business you know.
Unless it’s a Nissan, then forget a repair – it’s an all out replacement every time. Don’t buy a Leaf.
ChrisFix did it on a Toyota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHaYXBFnJo
Danger, Danger, High Voltage!
Although it annoys me that mechanics consider even 400V “high” voltage. HV is supposed to be 1,000V, minimum.
400V is dangerous though. The traditional 12V is not.
Absolutely, but 400V isn’t as dangerous as 1,000V. IEC standards have already established all of this, above 1,000V is HV, below 50V is ELV and generally safe. Automotives have come in and labelled anything above like 24V as “HV”, which is just silly.
Because that’s literally a mechanic’s job.
I loved how Renault solved this for the Twizzy (and other cars). You bought the car. You leased the battery for something like 50 euros a month. (Probably more now).
Sure, that sounds expensive, but I suspect it worked out less than replacing the battery after a decade.
Suspect it also helped resale value. The most expensive repair to worry about for a second hand buyer, is the battery. Making that a lease removes that worry entirely. You know exactly how much it’s going to cost.
Of course, having to pay that monthly lease fee for the battery, does make it more obvious that electric cars aren’t necessarily that much cheaper to run than an ICE.
whatever happened to Teslas distributed powergrid? Now that was a game changer, offloading the cost of the battery entirely could have made EVs actually affordable.
Support right to repair. You wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.
