Jeffj
Well-known member
Just some idle musing as I wait for my car to make landfall next week.
The battery pack is 22.4 kWh, of which 18.8 is usable, I believe. So range is always calculated (and measured, I assume) from the 18.8 kWh. Does that mean if the pack could be increased to 30 kWh somehow (future upgrade, obviously, based on cell size reducing or energy density going up, or both or something else), that the effective range would be increased by 42%? That would significantly change the equation on this car, as the EPA numbers would go from 81 (for BEV) to 115 miles, and REx would go from 72 to 102 miles.
I think the psychological acceptance of this car with > 100 mile range would be pretty large.
I can't find any detailed info on the physical size of the battery pack, nor the cells within it. From watching the construction videos, everything is packed in pretty tightly, but I wonder about other physical configurations that were considered during design. For example, what if an extra layer of cells had been laid on top of the current configuration (which appear to be upright)? That would have made the pack thicker by a 3 or 4 inches, but probably could have accommodated the extra 8kWh. Cost, weight, performance, layout, etc. all come into play with this, and I imagine the engineering gets quite intense, but hitting the 100+ mile range would have been huge.
I'm hopeful that 3 or 4 years from now there will be an upgraded pack available that could literally be a plug-compatible replacement with a larger capacity.
The battery pack is 22.4 kWh, of which 18.8 is usable, I believe. So range is always calculated (and measured, I assume) from the 18.8 kWh. Does that mean if the pack could be increased to 30 kWh somehow (future upgrade, obviously, based on cell size reducing or energy density going up, or both or something else), that the effective range would be increased by 42%? That would significantly change the equation on this car, as the EPA numbers would go from 81 (for BEV) to 115 miles, and REx would go from 72 to 102 miles.
I think the psychological acceptance of this car with > 100 mile range would be pretty large.
I can't find any detailed info on the physical size of the battery pack, nor the cells within it. From watching the construction videos, everything is packed in pretty tightly, but I wonder about other physical configurations that were considered during design. For example, what if an extra layer of cells had been laid on top of the current configuration (which appear to be upright)? That would have made the pack thicker by a 3 or 4 inches, but probably could have accommodated the extra 8kWh. Cost, weight, performance, layout, etc. all come into play with this, and I imagine the engineering gets quite intense, but hitting the 100+ mile range would have been huge.
I'm hopeful that 3 or 4 years from now there will be an upgraded pack available that could literally be a plug-compatible replacement with a larger capacity.